I think all of us remember when we read something by an author who we think, Oh, my God, I’m going to read everything this person writes. And for me, it was a short story called ‘The Care of the Self,’” host John Freeman said of a story that Danzy Senna wrote. He called her novel Colored Television, the California Book Club’s September selection, an unequivocal triumph, her best novel yet. When Senna joined the evening’s conversation, Freeman asked her, “What do you find funny, and what have you consistently found funny over life?”
Senna responded, “I think all of my work has a lot of comedy in it, but I think in this book, I allowed myself to really claim it or lean into it. It feels like a really transgressive tone at this moment.” She explained that she thinks that we’ve been besieged by earnestness. She said, “For me, I’m the first butt of every joke I make, and the world that I live in and inhabit is always sort of the thing I’m most making fun of.” Senna, who grew up biracial in Boston in the 1970s, in the first generation in which marriage between white and Black people was no longer against the law, commented that comedy had always been a part of her family. There were a lot of ways she felt outside the mainstream and it was easy to feel “other”—like an other among others. Her father, she said, “modeled humor as a way of attacking without attacking, a way of defending and surviving things that are hard to get through if you don’t have that space to laugh.”
Freeman noted that in the funniest things, there’s an edge. Senna said, “There are so many lies embedded in earnestness—it’s a dishonest position. Humor is the emotion and the state that I feel holds all the other feelings—rage, criticism, anxiety.... I think humor is mean when it’s at its best, but also usually that’s when it’s almost mean to the person who’s speaking it. It’s not punching up. It’s not punching down. It’s punching oneself in the face.” She wanted to create a manic tone in her work that would reveal the hypocrisies of every different world she was looking at.
Freeman commented that there are a lot of hypocrisies on display here, but especially in Jane, the protagonist, a novelist with a long-overdue novel who lies a lot. Senna commented that lies are a persistent theme in narratives of American culture. “Everything I love has a lie at the center.” She went on, “It keeps things dangerous, really.” It was only when Senna made Jane as shady as a producer she meets “that it felt like the story found its pulse.”
Special guest Porochista Khakpour joined and explained that she’d first met Senna, who became a friend, in 1999, when Senna came to do a guest-professor stint at Sarah Lawrence, the college Khakpour went to, the year after Senna’s debut came out. Khakpour and her fellow students were excited. They knew that Senna was only a bit older, and they wanted to be her. Khakpour said, “I think everybody who’s around you can’t help but kind of want to be a bad kid with you, which is the delight of reading your works too.”
Senna said she’d just given a reading with someone, and they said, “You seem really wicked, like you’re a wicked person,” and she noted that she’s a nice person, but in her work, “the knives come out.” She elaborated, “Fiction has always had that function to allow us to be brutally honest because we’re wearing a veil…and that’s why it’s so freeing to me, and that’s why it’s my favorite form to write in—is that it allows all of these conflicting truths to play out on the page too.”
Khakpour asked how Senna composed the book and in what period. Senna said, “I like writing that feels very simple, but there’s intricate workings underneath it.” She started it before the pandemic, when she and her family were living in a nursing home; she thought the place would be a funny place to bring the character of Jane, but two weeks after she started it, the pandemic began, and she put the manuscript away because it felt to her like the world was ending. She said, “When I finally sent my kids back to school, I pulled it out of a drawer and I felt such relief to be back in this space of manic joy and deviousness.... The world felt a lot sadder and diminished, but that felt like even more of an appropriate world to write satire into.”
“For so many people, there’s a novelty in women of color writing satire, which is such a weird concept. Why is it a novelty? Every woman of color I’ve known is extremely funny, is extremely witty,” Khakpour commented. She asked what being a writer of satire brings up for Senna.
“You’re from L.A., and so you know, in a way, this isn’t satire. This is straight up L.A.,” Senna said. “But I think comedy is about knowing where to put the white space, knowing where to end the sentence. It’s not so much that you’re exaggerating, but you’re just leaving out the boring bits and highlighting something absurd.” She noted that she likes “satire that has a human being in it” and comedy that has a friction with sadness or rage.
She continued, “I think there’s no contradiction between being a woman and a woman of color and writing comedy, because you’re constantly reminded of the absurdity of your position in the culture, and if you don’t find a place to point that out and to laugh at it, it can destroy you.”•
Join us on October 17 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Tobias Wolff will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss This Boy’s Life. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
