LGM Film Club, Part 488: The Original Kings of Comedy
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One way to deal with the return of Trump is more film.
I don’t know when the last time was that I watched Spike Lee’s 2000 film The Original Kings of Comedy, documenting the comedy tour hosted by Steve Harvey and including D.L. Hughley, Cedric the Entertainer, and Bernie Mac. But I thought, hey, why not.
Comedy doesn’t really age well most of the time so it was more interesting at this point as a sociological document than as comedy. The guys are of course tremendously funny and I still laughed a lot, especially when Harvey and Hughley went after audience members in the classic Rickles style. Then there’s the sports references–Harvey starts the whole thing with a long and really great bit about Rae Carruth, the Carolina Panthers receiver who had his girlfriend killed and then was caught in Nashville hiding in the trunk of a car. There are Anthony Mason fight references! Cedric the Entertainer does a good Avery Johnson impersonation and then Bernie does a great Phil Jackson one!
Obviously the race comedy is the key here–the audience is large majority but not exclusively Black and the comedians all have fun with this and making fun of white people generally. There’s a lot of great material here–Hughley noting that bungee jumping was way too much like lynching for Black folks is a great bit. So is Bernie’s bit on the word “motherfucker.”
The hardest bit to watch today was probably the biggest hit in the film–which was Bernie’s performance. He was a great comedian no doubt. But basically the whole bit is a combination of hitting kids and gay jokes. Now, he does say that he is just saying what everyone is thinking. And you know–he’s probably right. Also, there’s a whole tradition of Black childraising that makes white liberals distinctly uncomfortable when they see it. Moreover, this bit about the kids was the basis for The Bernie Mac Show. But all of this was basically banned from comedy in the “punching down” era, which Americans have distinctly ended. So I wonder comedy will go in the future.
Anyway, again, it’s worth watching as a film still more or less, but it’s super fascinating as a historical/sociological document of 2000.
Here’s Bernie Mac’s whole bit, which is probably the most famous of all of them.