The Original Kings of Comedy

"The Original Kings of Comedy," Spike Lee's newest joint, documents a recent stop by the eponymous funnyman tour in Charlotte, N.C. The tour stars Steve Harvey, D.L. Hughley, Cedric the Entertainer and Bernie Mac, and it makes a good subject for a movie. After all, TOKOC is the highest-grossing comedy tour in history with box office receipts over over $37 million, but it remains unknown to most Americans, no doubt because it is very much a black thing.

Lee's direction and montage convey a sense of occasion. He sets the actual comedic performances amid short scenes of the Kings hyping their upcoming performance on the radio, relaxing before the show, and talking trash on the basketball court, giving a welcome human dimension to these energetic, dedicated men. He also mixes in a generous assortment of crowd shots, showing a huge and predominantly African-American audience dressed (mostly) to the nines and having the time of its life from the look of it. Lee has done a nice job of translating the whole comedic event, not just the performance, to the screen.

It's too bad the actual comedy isn't funnier. It is pretty damn funny, of course; only someone lacking even a vestigal sense of humor could fail to bust a gut while watching Cedric the Entertainer's hilarious pantomime of parallel parking, or Steve Harvey's discussion of the entertainment value of profane old church ladies. Cedric and Steve in particular provide wall-to-wall laughter, but Hughley and Bernie Mac are by no means lacking in comedic talent.

Yet there is a corrosive vibe here which will leave all but the most dedicated viewer exhausted at the film's end. For one thing, profanity, even profanity as blistering as the profanity delivered by all four comedians here, has a limited comic value; once used, it cannot be used again to the same effect. Thus, when Harvey exhausts the very depths of the English language in the first five minutes, it's a long slow slide into ineffectuality for even our nastiest curses, which even a long, forceful riff on everyone's favorite twelve-letter expletive by Bernie Mac cannot reverse. Since profanity forms such a large part of each comedian's stock-in-trade, this is a serious flaw.

Yet there are more demerits which must be handed out. Thematic similarity between comedians must be expected, even if it could be handled more subtly than everyone introducing the "black people and white people are different" segment by simply saying that sentence. But there is actual topical similarity, too: black people never die in large groups like white people do, the absence of Big Mama (the intimidating grandmother) is changing black families, today's music is inadequate because it cannot express love. Cedric's set is refreshing simply for the unique topics he addresses, from black space shuttles to black hockey players to the abovementioned parallel parking riff. In a two-hour comedy concert film, simply repetition of topics connotes laziness more than anything else, and the laughter suffers. (It's interesting to speculate as to whether Lee edited it this way, as the present film was taken from two performances.)

The problem with topic takes a nasty turn during Bernie Mac's peformance. No matter how many times he claims he's "saying what you can't say," it seems doubtful at best that anyone really wants him call his sister's six-year-old son a "faggot" or tell us that he will "[expletive] your kid up." The first couple times, these locutions are edgily funny; the next sixty times, they become reprehensible, as the suspicion arises that he really, really means it. The film ends with his performance, as the concert undoubtedly did, and it's a downer.

Finally, the endless parroting of stereotypes for comic effect by the performers will make many people uncomfortable. Black people, according to these performers, go to church all the time, slack off at work, drive beat-up cars and play music overloudly in them, look for fights, and leave debts willfully unpaid--and this makes them different from whites. While the possibility exists that there was some subtlety that bypassed me, as a white person I felt uncomfortable being expected to laugh at an image of black people as shiftless and argumentative when I know so many white people who fit this stereotype much better than most black people I know.

"The Original Kings of Comedy" movie was a good idea, and there is a whole lot of satisfying laughter in this movie; one cannot overstate how good Harvey and Cedric prove themselves to be in this film. But even with Lee's adept direction and the sometimes-hilarious contributions of the cast, at the end of this film you'll feel you've gotten less than the royal treatment.

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