The best books about I Love Lucy

The advent of the internet and the availability of social media and digital downloads have expanded the creation, distribution, and consumption of Black cultural production as never before. At the same time, a new generation of Black public intellectuals who speak to the relationship between race, politics, and popular culture has come into national prominence. The contributors to Are You Entertained? address these trends to consider what culture and blackness mean in the twenty-first century's digital consumer economy.

In this collection of essays, interviews, visual art, and an artist statement the contributors examine a range of topics and issues, from music, white consumerism, cartoons, and the rise of Black Twitter to the NBA's dress code, dance, and Moonlight. Analyzing the myriad ways in which people perform, avow, politicize, own, and love blackness, this volume charts the shifting debates in Black popular culture scholarship over the past quarter-century while offering new avenues for future scholarship.

As a society, we underestimate how television has influenced how we greet the world. The genre of situation comedy is given particularly short-shrift in this arena, people dismissing the shows we laugh at as lighthearted diversions. However, the TV programs that have had the greatest impact on shaping how we think as a society are the sitcoms tackling difficult issues through humor and making them more palatable and relatable.

Sitcommentary: Television Comedies That Changed America looks at 42 situation comedies, among them All in the Family, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Good Times, Maude, The Golden Girls, Will & Grace, and Black-Ish, and explores how they evolved our views on controversial topics such as race, gender, sexuality, politics, war, and aging.

As a society, we underestimate how television has influenced how we greet the world. The genre of situation comedy is given particularly short-shrift in this arena, people dismissing the shows we laugh at as lighthearted diversions. However, the TV programs that have had the greatest impact on shaping how we think as a society are the sitcoms tackling difficult issues through humor and making them more palatable and relatable.

Sitcommentary: Television Comedies That Changed America looks at 42 situation comedies, among them All in the Family, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Good Times, Maude, The Golden Girls, Will & Grace, and Black-Ish, and explores how they evolved our views on controversial topics such as race, gender, sexuality, politics, war, and aging.

Michael Duckett is fed up with his life. His job is a drag, and his best friend, Stephanie Dyer, only makes him more anxious with her lazy irresponsibility. Things get worse when they get evicted from their 5th-floor walk-up and find ads for their Detective Agency plastered all over the city. The only problem is: Michael and Stephanie don’t have one of those.

Despite their incompetence, Stephanie pursues this crazy scheme and they stumble upon a web of missing people linked by a sexually audacious theoretical physicist and his experiments with space-time. And unless Michael and Stephanie can put their personal issues aside and fix the hole they tore in the multi-verse, the concept of existence itself may, ironically, cease to exist.

A story of musicians, writers, painters, and alcoholics. Set in New York City, Henry, and Charlotte—two twentysomethings who never thought they’d see each other again—reunite for three short weeks filled with liquor, strange acquaintances, and good music, causing them to rethink their relationships, their pasts, and their futures. Told from both Henry and Charlotte’s perspectives, Triceratops is a darkly comic adventure about being lost in a world of nostalgia, sitcoms, and antidepressants.

After her divorce from her thrice-married embezzler husband, Trinidad Jones is ready for a fresh start. So when she's left one of her ex's businesses in Upper Sprocket, Oregon, she decides to pack up her dog, cash in her settlement, and open her dream business: the Shimmy and Shake Shop, introducing the world to her monster milkshakes. And even with a couple of sticky situations underway, namely that the other two ex-wives also call Sprocket home, Trinidad's life is churning along smoothly…until she discovers her neighbor, the Popcorn King, head down in his giant popcorn kettle. When one of Trinidad's fellow ex-wives is accused of the murder and Upper Sprocket descends into mayhem, it's going to take a supersized scoop of courage to flush out the killer.