Coonery? Buffoonery?
A Class Divide Increases and a Bigger Issue Looms
2009-10-28
By Eric Easter

When Chris Rock, in the HBO stand-up that made him famous, suggested that there were Black people and there were “n*ggers” he opened up a wound that defined the growing divide of class in the Black community. In his latest salvo against Tyler Perry on 60 Minutes, Spike Lee tossed salt in another part of that wound – the divide over culture and taste. If you missed it, Perry was confronted with a quote from Lee calling Perry’s films “...coonery and buffoonery” and likened their impact to the default and definitive exhibition of coonery, “Amos and Andy”. By now, it’s an old debate, but the venue and the players are significant.

I’m no big fan of Perry’s work, but there are a couple of issues with Lee’s assessment. The first and most obvious is that name-calling should never be confused with effective and constructive criticism. If you’re trying to save someone from jumping over a cliff, “Don’t jump, you stupid idiot!” is probably not the best way.

The second is that the comparison doesn’t do justice to Amos & Andy. That show, at least when performed by Black actors, was far funnier and more well-acted than anything Tyler has put out. That’s not intended as a knock on Tyler, it’s just to say that in almost all cases the dividing line between what’s offensive and what’s not is how well the work is done. Go back and watch the show. I dare you not to laugh. The biggest issue with Amos & Andy was that it was the only thing going. More on that later.

The third is that the charge of coonery is something that should make us all wince. It suggests that, in these modern times, we are still overly and tragically concerned with how other people see us. And of course, if Spike Lee were so concerned about white people watching, “60 Minutes” of all places was certainly not the place to re-spark this debate.

I’ve made my peace with Tyler Perry. I have opened my mind and watched all of his movies and I profoundly dislike all of them, but I can see and appreciate their resonance with those who do enjoy them. Not my thing, but someone else’s and God loves us all.
Over time I’ve come to value and respect at the very least the prolific nature of people like Perry or writers like James Patterson, Dan Brown and John Grisham, among others. Cranking out any work of art consistently is no easy feat. Cranking out popular art that repeatedly sells in the millions is even more difficult. And having been a judge in both literary and film competitions, I am well aware that out there in Aspirationville the quality gets worse – much, much worse.

If there is any bottom line to the proliferation of media in so many forms today it is that audiences want the maximum amount of choices. For every mood and every taste, there should be a range of products. The arguments arise whenever the cultural scale gets unbalanced and mass appeal products greatly outweigh those of higher quality.

Perry and Lee are different artists with different approaches reaching different markets. Tyler Perry sees the world as a place of snobbish fine dining spots and he is McDonald’s – providing a cheap, tasty and popular meal, and every now and then slipping in a healthy package of apples to people who just want the fries. Spike Lee sees the world as a town in need of a great meal but all the fine dining joints are closing while McDonald’s expands to every corner. In some ways, they both are correct. But on this point, I have to give the nod to Lee.

The charge of coonery goes over the top, however. Perry’s characters characters are broad and one-dimensional but not necessarily hurtful or stereotypical. But the greater threat to Black culture in the long run is not coonery or buffoonery, it’s mediocrity.  Perry’s films aren’t “bad”, but they also just aren’t very good either.

The problem is that is not that white people are watching but that our children are watching. Those who might aspire to be filmmakers, writers or other creators of cultural expressions are watching. To the extent that mediocre work becomes the standard that gets celebrated, it becomes the standard that gets duplicated. This is worrisome.

Unfortunately we hear the impact of a lowered standard on Black radio everyday, we see it in a thousand bad paintings of Miles Davis at art fairs every weekend and we see it in the inventory of books at Borders that have somehow found their way onto the shelf next to Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston in the section that used to called “Black Literature”.

Art is deeply important. When all of us are dead and gone, our cultural expressions will be all that’s left. As ugly as the grudge match might be between Lee and Perry at the personal level, the argument –toned down a bit - is critically necessary if we want Black creativity to continue to stretch boundaries, be a source of pride and progress and open doors for us on a global scale. We need artists who challenge our thinking, change our view, expand our imagination and help us to see ourselves as part of the future, not just reflect what we already know. When we continue to question, we force ourselves to move forward.

As for Perry, my objective and constructive criticism is that he has not elegantly made the switch from theater to film. The broad characterizations, unsubtle language, oversized movements and staging that is required when an audience is way up there in the balcony is no longer necessary when the camera and the microphone are RIGHTHEREINYOURFACE.

Watch the early film and TV work of actors like Charles Dutton and Roger Guenvuer Smith, or the work of silent movie actors who tried to transition to sound and you will understand what I mean. Some of the best people in the business had trouble making this adjustment. Perry will work this out with more movies and more training. I hope that he never compromises his vision, but I also hope that he not be so defensive of his profits and his formula that he cuts himself off from the process of studying and mastering his craft.

Eric Easter is VP of Digital & Entertainment for Johnson Publishing, Co., Inc. He writes about politics, culture and technology for EbonyJet.com.