I was on one of my favorite message boards...and one of the posts was about a Spike Lee interview calling out Tyler Perry's shows for buffoonery... Which I can understand...I have been saying that about Tyler's plays for years. But then it occurred to me...What exactly qualifies as "coonery". I mean, for me if I see some shit that looks like it was straight plagiarized from a minstrel show (like say...the Chicken Noodle Soup dance) an alarm goes off in my head. But some stuff isn't that cut and dry.
Also, I have to say that we as a people have a very thin lane within the comedy structure. Like for instance if one of us tried to do a role that Jim Carrey would do... Black people would be pissed.
So what is okay and what isn't?
I think it is left up to people's interpretation.
ReplyDeleteSomeone said something very logical to me the other day about Tyler Perry's movies the other day...they said that everyone doesn't want to ingest the same type of entertainment and Tyler caters to that crowd. In my opinion, he dumbed down a lot of his writing because there was a market for it...as a result, look who is filthy stinking rich...Tyler Perry.
You can tell that he has better quality writing and visions in him because he comes out with stuff like The Family That Preys. It's in him to make films that aren't "stereotypical" but that wasn't necessarily going to make him rich in the beginning...and in the entertainment world, 9 times out of 10, it is about the money. Sucks but that's how it is more often than not...