African American Humor

When The Flip Wilson Show debuted in 1970, Black faces were still rare on television, Black hosts nonexistent. So how did Clerow “Flip” Wilson go from Jersey City grade-school dropout to national celebrity, heralded on the cover of Time as “TV’s first black superstar”? Flip is a candid, entertaining biography of a consummate comedian who changed the face of American popular culture.

Reverend Goodlove III wasn't always the God-fearing man of the cloth he is today. Before the calling he was anything but. Take a glimpse of the pastor who turned religion into a moneymaking machine like no other. Back in the day Ethan Ezeekel Goodlove was known for his after-hours speakeasy clubs where any and everything was available for the asking. In this e-quickie we travel back in time when the jive turkeys looking for a good time knew just the man to call. Back then, Goodlove was synonymous with the kind of good times that had nothing to do with the Holy Ghost!

William Melvin Kelley's final work, a Joycean, Rabelaisian romp in which he brings back some of his most memorable characters in a novel of three intertwining stories.

Wanderlust has taken Jimmy Jay Leander Johnson on numerous adventures, from Mississippi to Washington D.C., Vietnam, London and eventually to Africa, to the fictitious Independent People’s Democratic Republic of Guanaya, where the young musician hopes to “find himself.” But this small sliver of a country in West Africa, recently freed from British colonial rule, is thrown into turmoil with the discovery of cobanium—a radioactive mineral 500 times more powerful than uranium, making it irresistible for greedy speculators, grifters, and charlatans.

12 women. 24 hours. 100 bands. Mema's in the hospital, and that money would pay her mounting medical bills. Can Trequan sling enough stick, so his grandma ain't sick? Follow Tre on this comedic debaucherous adventure from the salacious mind of Otis Twinkles.

Framed as a reference work of humorous “entries” that offer trenchant social commentary, Everything Abridged presages a dark vision of the near future but tells jokes in the face of it: An intelligence agency operative uncovers a conspiracy to generate conspiracies and realizes his participation in the scheme. A Caribbean monarch meets four decades of American presidents and adjusts his country’s foreign policy accordingly. Experiment participants are asked to bring back a gun as quickly as possible.

After fourteen years in prison, Gerald “Stew Pot” Reeves, age thirty-one, returns home to live with his mom in Parkland, a black middle-class neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. The residents are in a tailspin, dreading the arrival of the man they remember as a frightening delinquent. The anxiety only grows when Stew Pot announces that he experienced a religious awakening in prison.