African Humor

After spending better than two decades working in call centers, I cannot help but notice the glaring similarities shared by call centers in North Texas. The pay is rarely close to the industry standard for the frontline call-taker. Most of the call centers I hired into operated like poorly run daycare centers. Those individuals who were well-liked by management rarely found themselves targets of bathroom break micromanagement and the questionable practices and tactics which made Tina Faye's "Mean Girls" so infamously popular.

Mitchell Pierce is a well-off New York ad executive whose marriage is falling apart. He no longer feels any passion for his pregnant wife, Tam, and even feels estranged from his toddler son, Jake. Mitchell is trapped in an unrewarding and loveless life, and though domestic violence isn't in his character, it is never very far away, either. Mitchell's life will irrevocably change one day, though, when a young man appears at his apartment door to pick up the family's black maid, Opal, for a date. Cooley it turns out is not a stranger to the household.

When Debare Balogun, a Nigerian businessman, is approached by a mysterious agent in a nightclub in the baddest area in Lagos, the last thing he expects is to be blackmailed. MI6 has been watching over his shady business deals for years and has more than enough evidence to implicate him and put him away forever. But MI6 has an offer for the Nigerian: To win his freedom and clear his name, he must go to Russia as an asylum seeker and spy on an organized crime network connected to the KGB and Russian Parliament.

Within these pages are the musings, the revelations, the ruminations, and the reflections of the incomparable Larry Wilmore. Here, collected for the first time, all in one place, are his Black Thoughts. From why black weathermen make him feel happy (or sad) and why brothas don't see UFOs to his search for Black Jesus or his quest to replace "African-American" with "chocolate," Wilmore has finally relented, agreeing to share his unique (black) perspective.

The author of Articles of a Witch Goddess, T. J. Phull, brings to reality a sexy and erotic commentary of games of lust and love. Based on real experiences on dating, the author exposes certain explosive behaviors that start as mischief and ends in betrayal, adultery, and abandonment.

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.