Spike Lee has just made the most successful film of his career. It doesn’t feature one of Denzel Washington’s seemingly effortless portrayals of a complex, troubled man, or references to the work of Lee’s heroes Wilder, Godard, Scorsese or Kazan.
This time round, all Lee did was point a cheap video camera at a stage and record four guys talking. But if you look at the figures on a per cinema basis, Original Kings of Comedy has outperformed most of the big summer hits.
Maybe that isn’t a surprise. After all the confused signals Hollywood has been picking up this summer – Are stars in or out? Are historical epics worth it (Gladiator) or possibly not (The Patriot) – one thing seems clear:
black men being funny works. Big Momma’s House featuring Martin Lawrence and Scary Movie, which starred and was written by Shawn and Marlon Wayans, have been unexpected blockbusters. What’s going on?
Perhaps the best place to begin is Eddie Murphy’s latest hit star vehicle, The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps. Not because the film has that much going for it: it’s the usual mix of gooey good-heartedness and gross-out comedy, with the obesity of the Klump family (almost all played by Murphy) as the starting point for most of the jokes. But long before he re-emerged as a movie star with Nutty Professor, Murphy was a vital figure in the evolution of black comedy.
Before Murphy, of course, there were Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor. Cosby was the original. In the early Sixties he was the first black stand-up to cross over to a mainstream (that’s to say mainly white) audience.Inspired by him, Pryor started off with a similar vein of amiable humour. But he was a different kind of man, scarred by a horrendous childhood (he grew up in a brothel). Liberated by the influence of Malcolm X and Lenny Bruce, he became an incendiary performer, brilliant but openly self-loathing. “Pryor started everything,” says Scary Movie director Keenan Ivory Wayans.
That Pryor became seen as the anti-Cosby doesn’t mean there was antagonism between the two: when they appeared together in California Suite (1978), Pryor insisted Cosby get paid equally with him. But while Cosby rarely ruffled his audiences, here’s a Pryor joke at the expense of Martin Luther King: “I have been to the mountain top too and what did I see? More white people with guns.”
But with a few exceptions – Blue Collar, Uptown Saturday Night, the script for Blazing Saddles – Pryor’s film career never did justice to his talent. Yet despite massive drug abuse, he was hugely successful in the late Seventies.
In those days Hollywood was willing to accommodate one famous funny black at a time (just as even today, executives are unsure that there is room for both Jennifer Lopez and Salma Hayek). So as Pryor stalled, Murphy rose. It’s worth remembering just how big Murphy was at his peak. He was as central to the feel of the mid-Eighties as Madonna or Prince or Miami Vice.
His stage act, packed with four-letter words and a rather insistent homophobia, was clearly influenced by Pryor, but coming from a stable middle-class background, he lacked the same inner rage. “I’ve only been called ‘nigger’ once in my life. There is very little anger in my humour,” he admitted. Murphy’s hero, his obsession, turned out to be Elvis. But despite steering clear of drink and drugs, Murphy too found his career dipping violently in the late Eighties, mostly caused by an inability to chose decent films.
In the short term the vacuum wasn’t filled. But Murphy’s Eighties superstardom, plus the memory of Pryor at his best, had inspired ambitious young black men to try comedy. And it is that generation who are just reaching their peak now. Various Wayans brothers could be seen on In Living Color in the early Nineties. Most of the rest – including Chris Tucker and Martin Lawrence – appeared on Def Comedy Jam, which ran from 1993 to 1996.
Many of them, including Lawrence, went down the sitcom route, but Tucker – a stand-up with a helium voice and a knack for physical comedy – was determined not to get stuck doing TV. The movies, he reasoned, were where the real stars were. He got his break when he starred with Ice Cube in the laidback ‘hood comedy Friday. The film did OK in the cinemas but was hugely successful on video. Soon he was appearing in Luc Besson’s deranged The Fifth Element and Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, and co-starring with Charlie Sheen in Money Talks and Jackie Chan in Rush Hour.
It was Rush Hour that made him a real star, one who can command the same kind of money that Murphy can.
So when he decided he wanted to make a film where he plays the first black president, Bill Clinton let him tag along for a few days. Which meant it was no surprise that Tucker gently declined Ice Cube’s request that he appear in the sequel to Friday. Playing a neighbourhood slacker with a huge marijuana habit was no longer part of the plan (the film, incidentally, was a hit without him).
Tucker talks about Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks as his inspirations. And why not? He doesn’t come from the bullet-strewn streets of the South Bronx: he’s from a middle-class suburb of Atlanta. “I always have thought in terms of the largest possible audience,” he says. “I want everyone to relate to what I am doing. And that’s been easy, because in my career I haven’t experienced any racism.”
You can hear the echoes of Murphy there. It is tempting to see traces of the Cosby/Pryor divide in the contrast between Chris Tucker and Chris Rock, not least because people often confuse the two.
ock is the opposite of Tucker in many ways: he’s working class from Brooklyn, his comedy is entirely verbal, he likes working on TV, being a stand-up is more central to his career and he doesn’t see the world in colour-blind terms: his most recent TV special was called Bigger and Blacker. But, equally, Rock has pointed out that since only around 12% of Americans are black, anyone who keeps it too “real” is going to have a very limited career. His comedy idols included Woody Allen and Jerry Seinfeld as well as the inevitable Pryor, and his last two films have been for loquacious white directors Kevin Smith (Dogma) and Neil LaBute (Nurse Betty).
But while Pryor and Cosby were effectively unchallenged, Rock and Tucker are far from alone. Big Momma’s House was one of the most surprising successes of the summer. The star, Lawrence, shared equal billing with Will Smith (1993’s Bad Boys) and Eddie Murphy (last year’s Life). But only now has he reached the A-list.
Big Momma’s House is a terrible film, but like The Nutty Professor II, it uses the conceit of having a young-ish man play a fat, elderly woman. And that seems to go down endlessly well with the US public: Big Momma’s House has picked up $119-million, turning a tidy profit on its $30-million budget.
Some black commentators have worried that this film, and The Klumps, exploit fried chicken-chomping stereotypes. Spike Lee’s next film, Bamboozled, attacks US television’s predilection for lowbrow black comedy shows. But at the current level of success, Hollywood couldn’t care less.
There is a mystery underlying all this: comedy on American TV remains stubbornly segregated. Blacks won’t watch Friends or Frasier, whites refused to watch Murphy’s animated show The PJs. Lawrence’s sitcom Martin ran for four years without ever being a true mainstream success, while the Wayans brothers’ TV show was cancelled not long before Scary Movie took off.
The acts in Original Kings of Comedy are also TV regulars. Is it that white America is happy to watch blacks on the big screen but not at home? It seems unlikely, considering Will Smith’s The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and The Cosby Show.
No one has figured that out yet. But what is certain is that whether they blandly insist that “funny is funny” like Tucker, or extract comedy from the difference between blacks and whites like the guys in Original Kings of Comedy, the film industry is finally ready to accept more than one funny black guy at a time.