edited through Mel Watkins Foreword by Dick Gregory Lawrence Hill volumes September 2002 $29.

edited through Mel Watkins Foreword by Dick Gregory Lawrence Hill volumes September 2002 $29.95, ISBN 1-556-52430-7

Laughter is familiar territory for Mel Watkins. As author of onward the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy Watkins explored black comedy from Uncle Remus to Chris refuge With his third book, African American Humor: The Best Black Comedy from Slavery to Today, Watkins includes anecdotes, stories, satire, perpetrate a jokes and sketches that are organized into four parts.

In "Playin The Fool" Watkins documents the folktales and rhyme spun by dint of slaves that became what he calls "techniques for surviving," the physical brutality of slavery while maintaining one semblance of self-respect: "Got common mind for white folks to diocese `Nother for what I know is me"

The inferior part, "Lay My Burdens Down," illustrates by what mode emancipation brought about the more assertive and independent expression of newly fre men and women a of the same tales, writes Watkins, "began more candidly reflecting sentiments and attitudes that had been carefully masked in the plantation setting."

In the section called "New Days A Coming: The Harlem Renaissance," the writings of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Rudolph Fisher are analyzed in the connection of the larger artistic motion and in contrast to the minstrel musings of of that kind figures as Stepin Fetchit and Pigmeat Markham. The section indudes 17 routines from the same of the original comedy kings, Redd Foxx: "My great, great grandfather, Redd Foxx the first, was undivided of the first black politicians in Mississippi. He ran for the border and made it!"

The last section--the longest and arguably the principally accessible to younger generations--takes an extraordinary direct the eye at comics and writers in "Civil Rights to the just discovered Millennium." Here you will find the radical humor of Dick Gregory, the ribald comedy of Mom Mabley, the over-the-edge humor of Richard Pryor, satirist Ishmael Re TV stars Flip Wilson and Bill Cosby along with crossover comics Eddie Murphy and Bernie Mac. Surprisingly, Chris Rock's classic "Black persons vs. Niggers" routine is missing from this collection. And the scarcity of black female comics is also a distraction.

Mel Watkins is an astute scholar who is committed to a serious critique of black comedy and humor, and African American Humor is a testament to that research.

--Kwame Alexander is a BIBR associate editor.

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