Race Unwrapped Louisville Public Media

Hey y’all! Michelle Tyrene Johnson here. You usually hear from me in the summertime, but I’m popping in with “Gifting a Soulful Christmas,” an hour-long exploration of Black holiday music!
I spoke to music experts and music lovers to share what makes Black Christmas and holiday music pull a little extra in your soul this time of year. Our experts include Otis Junior and Destiny Carter from 91.9FM WFPK and Kiana Del from 90.5FM WUOL, some of your favorite Louisville Public Media hosts. Enjoy!

Black don’t crack, except when it comes to cracking jokes. And Keith McGill does it for a living. McGill is a Louisville native and class clown who took it to a microphone for the first time when he was in his 20s.
Since then he has used comedy to talk about a range of tough topics — some tougher than others, depending on the audience. Being Black, being gay, grieving his partner of over 30 years... He believes if you set it up right, you can use humor to talk about anything. In fact, sometimes humor is the only way to talk about what hurts us the most.

On this episode of Race Unwrapped, we meet Pooja Reddy, a comedian and writer whose family immigrated from Hyderabad in southern India to Glasgow, Kentucky. Her humor draws heavily from her childhood experiences — in one bit, she describes herself as “personally victimized by the location of [her] parents’ green card sponsor.”
Reddy unwraps how her childhood in rural Kentucky shaped her outlook and fuels her humor. And she talks about pivoting to comedy after leaving the straight-laced government job that made her family proud (I mean, she worked for the Obamas, but a government job is a government job).

In the early 1980s, a young Eddie Murphy stepped into the national comedy scene and revitalized a flaccid “Saturday Night Live.” His career since then has been a fascinating reflection of how white American audiences relate to Black comedy. He was the lone Black man in fish-out-of-water movies like “Beverly Hills Cop,” then pivoted to movies like “Harlem Nights” and “Coming to America” with largely Black casts, catering to Black audiences. And though his early works like “Eddie Murphy Raw” were famously edgy, it was later family-friendly stuff that brought his career back from a slump… and seemed to make him more palatable to white folks. On this episode, NPR’s TV critic and media analyst Eric Deggans joins host Michelle Tyrene Johnson to explore what Eddie Murphy’s career can teach us about how Black humor fits into American culture.

Sometimes people just know their stuff. And in the case of Anne Libera, her stuff is comedy and she knows it well. Libera is a professor of comedy at Columbia University in Chicago, and the director of comedy studies at Second City, and is a performance director there. This episode, we unwrap the anatomy of a comedy routine and how joking about serious topics has changed over time… and she pours a little bit of tea on some of her more famous students.

A Black Baptist minister, a Chinese Buddhist monk and a White Presbyterian walk into a bar… and for more than one reason, they may not all laugh at how the joke ends.
This season of Race Unwrapped we’re focused on the tie between race and humor. On this episode, I talk with Dr. Lawrence Edwin Williams about how humor connects us as humans, and how it can help us deal with difficult situations.
Williams teaches marketing at the University of Colorado and received his Ph. D. in Psychology at Yale. By studying with colleagues how people used humor to cope with Hurricane Sandy, he found that there is a certain degree of time that needs to pass before tragedy becomes comedy.
As a Black man himself, he has plenty of insight to share about how his findings apply to race, how people of color can use humor to connect with other people who have shared racial experiences, and how humor and time can soften tragedy and help you heal from it.