Stop seeing things in black and white
I despise black comedies. No, I don’t mean dark humour – I quite like that. That bit in Pulp Fiction where John Travolta’s character accidently shot someone in the face had me in such hysterics that, had I not been alone, I might now have a reputation for being a bit of a psychopath. No, what I’m referring to is comedy films which work around the entire premise that their characters are black and black people are *gasp* not white people. Particularly irksome are the comparisons, where you’ve got a white guy and you’ve got a black guy and their differences are being ‘explored’ for the amusement of the viewer.
Only, one is not amused. One is greatly wearied. Every joke seems to relate back to fact that “he’s white and he’s black”. This seems a tad immature, as if our protagonists are children fighting because one prefers chocolate and the other vanilla, so they can’t be friends anymore. I suppose it’s off-putting for me because I would like to think that the world isn’t really like that. Indeed, I do believe that among the passably intelligent masses, such things are considered irrelevant and not worthy of such repetitive and overenthusiastic media coverage.
Dramas are a different story. Dramas about racial differences, particularly in impoverished areas, can be done very well indeed and when they are done well, they really are something else. They can be powerful and historically important. They can teach you something worth knowing. Period dramas such as Resting Place, social dramas such as Boyz n the Hood and courtroom dramas like A Time to Kill all explore the issues surrounding inequality and prejudice sensitively and (for the most part) realistically. Such dramas can have comedic elements that don’t distract from the heart of the film. This can make them charming, touching and generally more well-rounded with less melodrama. So you see, there are a lot of complicated elements in play here to pull off a sensitive drama relating to race.
The problem with their comedic counterpart is that they are a bungled, clichéd mess – let’s face it, we’ve heard all those race jokes before about a million times and more often than not, they couldn’t be any more witless. So much so, I’m not even going to repeat any racial gags back to you (and I never miss an opportunity to lower the tone of my own articles with gratuitous crassness). There’s no new material and no new direction. It’s just static and stale. The characters come across as shallow and one-dimensional; not remotely worth empathising with. For me, the real mystery is the thinking that goes behind it, or lack thereof: ‘Let’s make insulting generalisations about a minority and counteract it by having the minority do the exact same thing back!” you can hear them saying in your mind’s ear. How drastically ill-conceived. The reason it doesn’t work better when you reverse the roles so that the white person is the underdog or on the receiving end of racial prejudice is because it is still racial prejudice and thusly unfunny. It shouldn’t make a difference who is on the receiving end; it’s all born out of the same small-minded, backward thinking that has no place in a decent comedy. It doesn’t add anything; it doesn’t teach you anything or make you think. If there is a moral message, you can bet your left arsecheek that it’ll be something condescendingly simple and blindingly obvious, essentially: ‘Don’t be a racist. Racism is bad.’
I can just imagine one of my more irritating friends telling me that “it’s fine as long as it’s satirical”. But I ask you this: what difference does it make if it’s a satire or not when even in its most extreme from, satire can easily be mistaken for a genuine opinion? It amounts to the same thing; if it is annoying to hear as a real life point of view, it is annoying to hear as a fictional one as well. Personally I’m just reminded of how many ignorant people really do exist in the world. That’s not what I want when I’m watching a comedy.
Recall Die Hard, Die Hard 2 and Die Hard: With a Vengeance. Those were decent enough thrillers in their own right; they had a formula and a style. Samuel L. Jackson’s addition to the third instalment should have been a cause for celebration, seeing as he is a fine actor who has - coincidently - been in two of the films I’ve already mentioned. Disappointingly, Die Hard: With a Vengeance is kind of a buddy movie – you know, those films where a mismatched pair work out their differences and become friends, usually whilst confined to a speeding car. Now, I’m not saying that all buddy movies are a big pile of excrement. I’m just saying I’ve yet to discover the exception. The tedium of the buddy movie is exacerbated no end by the fact that largely, the main rift between our two leads is caused by the most shallow and ordinary of things; one’s black, one’s white. Usually, the white one’s the privileged one and the black one is not, but even if you turned it on its head, the idea is the same and the comic value is the same; i.e., just not really there. Die Hard, you’re a hard film! The clue is in the title! There was never any reason for you to try and boost your coolness level by jumping on the already overstuffed bandwagon. Now when it finally flips over and crashes, you’ll capsize with it and land on the hard, cold ground, weeping because you thought you had nice friends who wouldn’t lead you astray.
That’s racial humour, for you. It’s old and cranky and reminds you of Bernard Manning and Chris Rock, neither of whom seem to have been able to form a sentence that didn’t start with the words “If a black man does / doesn’t do X…” Interesting, when you think about the fact that they came from completely opposite standpoints, yet it all ends the same way with the same joke being used over and over again. Does it really deserve a laugh? Next time, we should flatly refuse to crack a smile and just look coldly and blankly at the television screen until our collective murderous gaze kills all lasting vestiges of race-based humour, the stink of which still floats malevolently over the most decent of comedies and thrillers.
Do you want to read a really goofy bad race joke?
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