“Well, right now we’re going to review this next movie, the new movie by Dirty Larry.” We have two Black men seated in a theater, poised as critics vis-à-vis Siskel and Ebert (here, Speed and Tyrone). They’ve gone through the first two movies, “a classical movie called Amadeus Meets Salieri, about two classical fuckers really into music” (they didn’t like it, you can’t take a date to a movie called that). The second movie was Chicago Jones: Temple of Doom — one of them feels it’s too unrealistic with Chicago Jones jumping off mountains and not getting hurt. The other says, a dude could jump off a mountain and not hurt himself if he “knew about the levels of gravitivity and polarity.” Then comes the pièce de résistance, as they review the next movie, by Dirty Larry. There’s a hostage situation and when we cut to a clip, we get one of the greatest line-readings ever, “What you say, honky sucker pig-head jive-turkey fool?” followed by their brilliant review bit, “Make my day? Do fifty bullets in yo’ ass make yo’ day?”
This bit from Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle (1987) is a prelude to the following generations of Black comedy. Townsend made the movie off of his own credit cards and despite making one of our greatest statements about race, dissecting the systems of Hollywood and how they have routed Black artists and entertainment into small categories deemed acceptable — the studios wanted “Eddie Murphy types” — and through cutting, hilarious satire shows us a history of how Black people have been mistreated on-screen and through the genius film-criticism sketch, paints a portrait of the spaces not occupied by Black entertainers, that they couldn’t make authentic works that related to the community and were so often warned, “not to bring too much of themselves to the table.”
In another ingenious sketch, Townsend portrays a Black Acting School, led by White Men who try and teach Black actors how to talk like Black men. The movie, likewise, uses this piece to dissect how Black men are proffered ugly stereotypes for roles and cannot break through the system, without the system itself changing. Hollywood Shuffle, in a just world, would have been such a sea change, but it only broke down the walls and set the scene for the kind of change that followed. This is a film concerned with perception, linguistics, and the Black experience of Hollywood, that addresses head-on the lack of Black opportunities on-screen, “The only role they gonna let us do is a slave, a butler, or some street hood or something.”
The history of Black-made satires, of course, cannot end there: thirteen years later the great Spike Lee made one of the definitive statements in Bamboozled (2000) — at the turn of the century, reflecting the broad history of minstrelsy at the movies. Here’s a movie that bombed and then subsequently found not only an audience but induction into the Library of Congress. It’s plain to tell why, as Bamboozled is one of the most outspoken takedowns of minstrelsy in the art form, with Black actors in blackface, showing the history of bad treatment in the industry. Before Bamboozled we had In Living Color (1990 – 1994) and after we had Chapelle’s Show (2003 – 2006), two essential pieces to the puzzle of Black-created entertainment that interrogates the history of Black performance on-screen.
More recently, Boots Riley has made two stunning satires on the subject: Sorry to Bother You (2018) and I’m a Virgo from earlier this year. These are new, essential pieces of satirical comedy about the Black experience, not directly riffing on the history of Black entertainment, but by creating social commentary out of the discomfort of Black men entering the world of telemarketing or simply existing as a supersized giant, showcasing what it feels the world sees about your Blackness, but also so much more about perspective, and politics.
This brings us to Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, adapted from Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure”. What happens in American Fiction is that Jeffery Wright’s character writes a book that is so pointedly, stereotypically Black, that it is embraced by a broad multicultural audience as the definitive example of what a Black book can be. Here, director Jefferson sets his sights on the American publishing industry in particular, but by extension, this is also a satirical takedown of the history of the Black experience in the media.
Much like the Black Acting School in Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle, the publishing industry here latches onto all the stereotypical qualities of what it means to talk like a Black man. When Wright’s Thelonious ‘Monk’ Ellison calls the publisher and suggests naming his book “Fuck,” they agree with glee, thinking that they are now publishing something authentic and from a different perspective than all their other authors.
American Fiction achieves the same high standard its predecessors have, of creating a rich new lens for the Black experience in the entertainment industry, utilizing the great Jeffery Wright, who also had the best standalone moment of the year in Asteroid City, to tremendous effect yet again, with a stellar supporting cast around him. This is another entry in the history of cutting commentary that flies in the face of those in control of these industries and a rousing right kind of awards bait, by having one of the great centering performances of the year.
We’d like to think of Speed and Tyrone, still in a theater somewhere talking to some audience on local access television, and finally, they have found a movie worthy of their criteria. Finally, they would not have to be sardonic about it. Here we have a great American film about the history of the Black experience, just as Hollywood Shuffle was, just as Bamboozled was, just as the Wayans and the Chapelles of the world brought to television. And finally, it feels like we’re all ready to listen. So let’s go back. Let’s listen to Townsend again. Let’s hear again what Spike Lee had to say and what Boots Riley is still saying. And then let’s come back here, as we have built a new monument to this history of the Black satire, that is called American Fiction.