The New Yorker Radio Hour - Keith Knight of “Woke,” and Jia Tolentino Picks Three

Episode Date: September 29, 2020

“Woke,” a new comedy on Hulu, is inspired by the life of its creator, Keith Knight. The show, which blends reality and animated fantasy, follows Keef, a Black cartoonist who is on the cusp of mainstream success when an ugly incident with the police changes his life. Suddenly, Keef is learning about racism from a chatty trash can and other talking cartoon objects, and he experiences a belated political awakening. Knight describes his work to his fellow-cartoonist Emily Flake as “accessible yet subversive.” “Making people laugh and then punching them in the face with a serious issue is the way to work,” he says. Plus, at home with a newborn, the staff writer Jia Tolentino recommends a book, a record, and a reality show that have been entertaining her lately. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The TV series called Woke has an unusual premise. It's about a cartoonist who experiences a racial and political awakening after an episode of police violence. Don't move. Don't move. It's central. We need the suspect.

What's in the bag? We've got a weapon. No, no, no, no. Just the staple. No, no, no. You got the wrong guy. Stop resisting. Lamorne Morris plays Keith, who's based on the show's creator Keith Knight.

Knight draws the Kay Chronicles and other syndicated strips, and he's contributed to the New Yorker as well. Now, the world of cartooning, as you might imagine, is pretty small. So Emily Flake, a fellow cartoonist, wanted to talk with Keith Knight, about what it means to break into television. I haven't seen you since Moca maybe last year or the year before. Remember comics festivals?

I know. It's such a... And Moca was actually the first time where I got the idea that I had accomplished something with the show, which I had already shot the pilot. And there were so many cartoonists that came up to me and said, I can't believe you actually filmed a pilot.

That was the first time I was like, oh man, if all the big New Yorker cartoonists are telling me this, then we might be getting somewhere. Yeah. I do want to go back and get a basic overview of like the narrative of the show. So tell me the basics of the television show, woke. Okay. The gist is that Keith Knight, the character inspired by myself, is just about to make it. He's on the verge of making it big with a very innocuous.

Is it innocuous? Is that the right word? Like, just like a very milk-toast, mild comic strip called Toast and Butter. And but then he has a wake-up call where he gets profiled by the police in a very harsh way. And it triggers something in him. And we call it opening a third eye. And inanimate objects start to be animated. So we start seeing an anima.

objects and they're telling him about gentrification, about PTSD, and about, you know, poisoning the black community, like all these different things. None of this makes sense. Kvi K. Where you going? I know you hit me. Down here, my brother. That's right. I'm a talking trash can.

I got eyes. I got a news. I can smell things. I stink sometimes. I'm a trash can. But you ain't even close to normal, not anymore. Oh, this is, this is, come on, Keith, Keith, Keith, this is all wrong. I tell you what's wrong.

Those man born co-opting, ginger-fine devils. That ain't no barbershop in there. That's a Negro land section of some hibs to magical kingdom. Everybody's so fascinated with whiskey. Much left for a budding black man if we can't go to the barbershop. Deripin? You know we don't trust doctors? Spin glass.

We don't ride bicycles that don't go nowhere. So it's this guy's journey to sort of come to terms with what's going on with him. How was it weird to sort of like relinquish control over your world? Like if something is drawn so much from your own autobiographical experiences, I feel like it's a whole different level of personal to you than, you know, than a novel you wrote or something like that. It's just like the character is has your name. Yeah, yeah. In many ways it is. Like essentially what we're doing is taking 30, 35 years of my life and putting it in an eight episode season.

And no pressure. Yeah. And so everything is exaggerated or sort of, you know, dramatized. My incident that happened with the police was not as as hardcore as the incident in show, you know. You know, when I hung up... Do you want to talk about that incident at all? Oh, sure.

You know, I was hanging up posters for my band in the In Richmond District of San Francisco. And yeah, a cop car pulls up across Fulton Street, jumps out. What do you get, what are you doing? And I just turned around and said, I'm hanging up posters and I have a stapler and I'm going to put it down here. And, you know, he got on the radio and said, we have a little bit. the suspect and I said what suspect you know somebody's been reporting

somebody robbing houses in the neighborhood I said what's the description they said six foot tall black male and that was it nothing else and I had huge head of hair that like I looked like sideshow bob and it wasn't so much

as traumatizing for me as because they didn't throw me down they didn't have a gun to my head or anything but my white roommate was on a and he saw it from the bus. And he jumped off the bus and ran at the cops screaming and yelling going, get the F away from him, blah, blah, blah. And they were like, take it easy, bud, take it slow.

Right. Like they were treating him, I don't know, like he was the manager. And that to me was the most traumatizing thing, which was the cops are working for him. They are not working for me. I didn't do anything. I was just walking and then Gunther showed up and he took on the entire SFPD by himself. Yes, I did.

I was pissed, dude. You should have saw me. I was all up in this cop's face when I, like, grabbed his wrist. Yeah? Probably bruised it. They should have shot you. No, no.

Didn't have to do that. Well, they would have. You know, if he was black. Houston, we have a problem. This woke. And I had been doing stuff about, you know, police brutality and racism, you know, long before that. But it made me double and tripled down on the stuff that I was doing after at that point. I was going to say, let's talk about your sensibility for listeners who might not be familiar with your work or with the comic that the show is based on.

What would you say is like the, actually, I'm just going to let you talk about your sensibility for a second with asking a leading question. well you know i'll say it in the way it's been described it's accessible yet subversive um so you know it's very approachable but there's uh definitely a sort of indie f you type of attitude which i totally see in your work which is like you have this particular art style and it's very approachable but i really like how you know, you'll throw an F you in there. So, yeah, it's like taking a light approach to heavy subjects. One of my favorite strips of yours is this recent one, Keep Calm and Karen on.

Your character is just sitting hanging outside next to his mailbox, and this white lady busybody comes up and starts giving you trouble. Now, obviously, this is alluding to so much unpleasantness, But it has a, the drawing has kind of the visual sensibility more of like a fun Sunday cartoon that makes you sort of lulls you into thinking that, you know, it's just going to be funny. And then you realize it's talking about something very serious. I always just found that like, you know, making people laugh and then punching them in the face with like a serious issue is the way is the way to work. And so I just approached these particular issues through humans. I think accessible yet subversive is the best thing you could possibly put on a business card.

Yeah, I know. I wish we had juices for business cards. Right. Seriously. And you know, you and I both come, you know, we're both Gen Xers. We both come from, like, the All-Weakly world. I feel like coming from All-Weakley's, like there was a freedom that came with that just because of the nature of Alt-Weakleys. And I guess to back up, in case there are any young people listening, alt-weeklies being alternative news weeklies that circulated in major cities because I am an old person. They were absolutely crucial to my life in the 90s.

Yeah, Village Voice, Austin Phoenix, San Francisco Bay Guardian. I think, you know, when I got out of college, I just thought that being a cartoonist meant you got a daily comic strip in the daily newspaper. And it wasn't until I moved. to San Francisco and I discovered all these, you know, undergrounds and indie publications and they had all these different formats. And I was like, oh, wow, I can talk about this and I can use profanity

and I can talk about it. So it was very freeing. And so in some ways, I feel like you you straddle a lot of different genres, like in terms of autobio, it's a political strip, et cetera, et cetera. Like, Do you think it's possible to have an autobiographical cartoon as a black person in America without it being political? Yeah, that's interesting. I think he makes the point in the show that why can't, as an artist of color, why can't I do comics just that aren't political? Like, why can't I just do stuff about? And in many ways that's a burden because that is the dilemma of an artist that is a person of color, which is do you do work exclusively for the cause or do you create escapist work?

So like, you know, this is happening all the time. So why not create something to take your mind away from it, to take your mind off of it? But yeah, I've always considered cartoonists to be the modern day court jesters. And I would like to thank CNN for transcribing that term modern day court jesters. They put Marvin Gay court jester. We are the Marvin Gay court jesters. But yeah, I mean, we speak truth to power. and we use humor to do that.

And I just see that the TV show as an extension of that. I want people to laugh more than anything, but then I want people to think too. And hopefully, hopefully call stuff out, you know. Watching the show, I felt like there is an optimism in the show that already kind of felt like a before times luxury in some ways. Does that resonate with you at all?

Yeah, I mean, definitely. And the show was written with the idea of that people are not paying attention to police brutality enough and not doing. So the fact that all this stuff happened over the summer, I remember just sending out a note to everybody going, we're going to watch the whole season play out before our very eyes, like right now. Frankly, when people say, oh, how did you time it like this? And it's just like, you know what? This took place to me 20 years ago. Racism and police brutality are evergreen.

I just wanted to make sure that the show didn't close the door. Like right now is a moment for black creators. And also it's a moment for, I think, cartoonists too, because everyone's looking for IP. Hollywood's looking for IP. I just didn't want to be one of the projects that closes the door on that opportunity, which is like, I think it takes too flop. So hopefully, hopefully the door is still open for everybody else to get in and develop their stuff. Absolutely. Keith, it is such a pleasure to talk to you always. And thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for having me on. Keith Knight.

He's the creator of Woke, a new series on Hulu, and he spoke with cartoonist Emily Flake of The New Yorker. Now, before we go, I want to check in on a friend I haven't seen it a long while. Staff writer Gia Tolentino. There she is. Gia. I'm alive. I'm alive.

Now, it's nice to see you, but do we get a little display here or what? She's asleep in this, like, magical robot crib. that I have. Oh, man. Oh, man. Adorable. That crib looks like a flying saucer of some kind. It's amazing.

It senses your baby crying, and when it cries, it shakes a little faster. So it puts the best to sleep. No. As soon as we got the thing shift, I was like, I want one of these for me. Like, I'm a lifetime. Where is my thing that will sense my late-night anxiety when I read Jeffrey Trubin's article about all of the way of the election? Exactly. Which I did at 4.30 a.m. this morning. Gia writes for the New Yorker about many things. The internet, feminism,

culture in almost any form. And I always love getting her recommendations. So you gave birth in early August. I gave birth in early August. And we're now in late September. I mean, how much cultural consumption can you have been doing in those two months? Well, I've used this opportunity of nursing a small baby. Like I got off Twitter. I've been reading a lot of novels. And the first book I read after she was born was how much of these hills is gold by C. Pam Zhang. And I read it like with her on my chest. And it's this kind of unbelievable Western survival story. It's set during the gold rush, but it's about a Chinese American family.

And it's sort of falken area. And it starts with a dead body that needs to be buried. And it's switching perspectives. And it's, you know, this really like near gothic, really brutal, really tender story about parents. failing to take care of their children and children having to take care of themselves. And it was an extremely intense thing to read, you know, start reading six hours after a child physically came out of me. But in a way, it kind of felt perfect. Like it kind of made me think about the rawness of what it meant to just have a human being that I, you know, want to

take care of and create some softness for in this increasingly harsh world and how kind of bittersweet and monstrous and strange that is. But, you know, the book is really about, you know, it's a Western, starring a Chinese family, and it's really about, it feels like a surreal, reinvented history, but it's actually, you know, it's a real one, right? It's about this enormous Chinese population that helped build the West and then was erased from the story. And so, and it was a really good, really intense book to read with a, you know, 24-hour old

infant on my chest. And what else has been in your life these past weeks? You know, I feel like when you're up all night breastfeeding, you have to watch trash. You know, you have to watch. So I am not a reality TV show person. I, despite having been on a reality TV show myself, like I never watch it. Like I've never seen the Kardashians, never seen Real Housewives. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

You've never seen the Kardashians. No, have you? Not even the epical episode. Of course. Really? Oh, when Kim is thrown into the water and loses her earring and it's like a nuclear... Aren't there like 47 seasons of it, though? Well, I didn't say I watched every episode, but, you know, the important ones. Well, you know, maybe, depending on how long this baby thing lasts, maybe all the time.

But, you know, I guess I never... Having a baby is the first time that I've been watching TV kind of just to pass the time. And it turns out the perfect show for that is the show alone on the history channel. Nobody knows what's like here, except there's 10 guys out here doing it. I'm going to get shelter. There's nobody here but me. So hard doing this. So the premise is they drop off 10 people in the middle of the wilderness, like they're separate from each other.

They have like 10 items that they can use to survive. And they just have to live off the land for as long as they can. And the last person remaining gets half a million dollars or something. But the thing that I think is interesting about the show. I mean, the show is really it's about who can build a canoe and who who, who can, you know, make a fire in a hunt from nothing without burning, you know, the whole place down, and who can dodge the cougars in Vancouver, right? But it's really about who has the inner psychological resources to last through such, you know, punishing solitude.

My favorite contestant on season one was this guy named Alan, who is a bit of a philosopher maniac. And Alan, as I think you can see in this clip, really can keep it going for himself. It's funny how time works here. I don't think about clocks or the hour of day, but I look out at the ocean and the tide now has become my clock. So I'm starting to get into a rhythm. The first couple days has been challenging, trying to find my groove out here and get in it

and just fit into the flow of nature. Kind of a good pandemic lesson. You know, we all got to keep ourselves amused. in our solitude. What else have you had time for? Well, you know, one of my favorite albums that's come out this year, it was what I was listening to when she was born early in the morning, 15 minutes after I had woken up from a nap, and the doctor came in and was like, all right, we're having this baby.

And I was like, what? I'm still asleep. And then the baby was born, and it was crazy. But have you listened to the Moses Sumney album, Gray? I have. I love that album. And I think he's just, I think he's just a genius. think as soon as I listened to his first album, A-Romanticism, I was like, okay, this is an artist

who I'll be listening to for decades. I mean, he reminds me of Bjork sometimes and Nina Simone or Joanna Newsom, Sufionn Stevens, and then, you know, you've listened to the album. There's this really sort of muscular, cerebral, like, incredibly charismatic thing to his music and funny, too. And it's kind of my first memory, really, of her after, like, after that first incredibly shocking moment where suddenly there's, you know, there's a baby. It's this like astonishing moment of revelation. But then when they were weighing her in the hospital, you know, she was next to me and me and my boyfriend were just staring at her and it was a little bit quiet in the room for the first time in a while and we could hear this song, me in 20 years playing and, you know, and Andrew was just sobbing and I was

just like, man, I was just astonished at, you know, what it is to be alive. Gia, it's so wonderful to talk with you and to, and even by Zoom, to see the baby who's just, you know, beyond beyond. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. I'll see you soon. I hope so. Take care, Gia Tolentini. For all you new parents out there, she's recommending the recent record by Moses Sumney, the History Channel show Alone, and the novel, How Much of These Hills is Gold.

I'm David Remnick, and thanks for listening today. on us next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Trurina Endowment Fund.