In a January ‘96 column for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert reflected on seeing one of that young year’s bigger hits, the Wayans comedy Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood, a few weeks earlier. The film was a spoof of the coming-of-age “hood film” cycle of the early ‘90s, most prominently those in the overloaded title – Boyz N the Hood, Menace II Society, Juice, and South Central – and while he admits to laughing, he “left feeling down-hearted”: “It ridicules such goals as education, employment, responsible parenthood, staying off drugs, and staying away from gangs. My thought was, do we need this movie at this time, when violent death by drugs or guns is the leading killer of young black men under 25?”
Here, Ebert applies a version of what Ben Schwartz, in a recent piece for the Baffler, calls the “punching-up rule,” which is the notion that comedy should ally with the marginalized. Two assumptions logically follow Ebert’s objection: 1) to find humor in a representation is to find humor in what it represents; and 2) to find humor in something is to mock it. It doesn’t take a grad student to see that these are risks, not certainties, and Ebert, striking a characteristic populist balance between libertarianism and moral rigor, calls in racist naïve spectators to lend urgency to his critique. Along the lines of the White mouth-breathers that made Chris Rock’s “Niggas vs. Black People” routine unsustainable, these imagined ticket-buyers would have their prejudices confirmed by film’s array of “inner city gang-bangers, unwed teenage parents, drug dealers, unemployment, winos, welfare cheats, and so on,” all given the blessing of Black filmmakers.
These are common themes of comedy criticism, often based on yet another bit of conventional wisdom, what Das Racist once pithily termed the “false dichotomy of jokes vs. serious shit.” Ebert, like today’s opponents of ironic racism and rape jokes, was always quick to deny that comedy and tragedy were mutually exclusive. The question is usually one of tone, and the Wayans’ in Don’t Be a Menace, according to Ebert, is too facetious to give these weighty concerns their due.
He’s not entirely wrong. The film is, at base, silver-screen clothesline to hang Shawn and Marlon Wayans’ broad double act shtick, TV-bred on In Living Color then The Wayans Bros, with Shawn playing the hood films’ smart, conflicted lead Ashtray (a play on Cuba Gooding Jr.’s Tre from Boyz N the Hood), and Marlon, in full manic mode, as his loose cannon counterpart Loc Dog (echoing Larenz Tate’s O-Dog from Menace II Society). Compared to the confident conviction of its targets, many of them the debuts of their young Black directors – John Singleton, the Hughes Brothers, Ernest Dickerson, Matty Rich – Don’t Be a Menace‘s slapdash flippancy plays like a bitter and petty attack on a more talented, thoughtful, and celebrated younger sibling. One running gag has Keenan Ivory Wayans, as the postman, yelling “Message!” after the principals summarize the themes of a given scene, dismissing widely lauded works of social realism as simplistic message movies.
In hindsight, the Wayans might have had a point. For all the hood films’ power – and the parodied films, save for the woefully dated South Central, remain genuinely pretty great – their tragic architecture of absent fathers, macho vanity, and casual murder lapses easily into repetitive sanctimoniousness. Twenty years later, these same tropes are the staples of a conservative punditry that sources African-American hardship in personal moral delinquency, especially in recent years, as the lives of Black men and women killed during encounters with law enforcement are publicly strip-mined for any telltale allegiances to “ghetto” culture that would, the logic goes, have consigned them to that fate. In their tales of young Black men done in by the illicit temptations and cycles of violence that thrive in their blighted communities, the hood films ultimately put hood values, rather than structural inequities, at the center of their critique. Hence the abbreviated didacticism of the title, Don’t Be a Menace. In the Wayans’ carnivalized South Central, moral discourse is either craven, predatory, or utterly incoherent, from the Afrocentric Preach (Chris Spencer) and his lust for White women, to the collection-plate shilling preacher (Lester Barrie), to the logorrheic Nation of Islam cellmate (David Alan Grier). Respectability is, in this world, always a dead end.
In this sense, the film’s Brueghelian South Central of semi-automatics, depleted Olde English, foulmouthed grannies and neglected cadavers doesn’t read as ridicule of real material conditions so much as an exaggeration of how those conditions are popularly imagined, fetishized, and feared. Even the most inflammatory gags – the pants sagged all the way to their wearers’ ankles, the unwed mother (Tracey Cherelle Jones) with seven children by seven fathers – seem, in the vein of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s famous defense of 2 Live Crew, grotesque overstatements of White America’s moral panic. If Don’t Be a Menace perpetuates this by putting it into play, then so do the hood films: as Allen Hughes once said of Menace II Society, “If you hate Blacks, this movie will make you hate them more.”
The Wayans’ weakness, lending credence to Ebert’s critique, is that they don’t offer much of a critical alternative. One of the film’s best and slyest gags finds Loc Dog taking a job as a crash test dummy, skewering the disposability of Black bodies under White capitalism. Otherwise, the jokes come fast and cheap, more focused thematically than their Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker forebears, but also not nearly as consistently funny. Famous lines and scenes are sent up with either easy misdirection or even easier hyperbolization. Many gags replicate scenes of Black macho posturing and subvert it, a Wayans brothers specialty. The best are usually comparatively subtle. (My favorite: a throwaway moment between two men who communicate over pager while standing next to each other.) Women are still mostly sidelined, but actually slightly less than in the films being spoofed – which Vivica A. Fox, in an opening cameo, comments upon.
It’s hard to argue for the film’s stealth wokeness when Loc Dog gives a desperate addict directions to Crenshaw in exchange for fellatio. Don’t Be a Menace is ultimately no more ambitious than laffaminit gross-out set to Lost Boyz, UGK, and Mobb Deep (its closest kinship to its targets, begat as they were during rap’s artistic peak). Still, the film has an argument, best distilled in its opening moments when multiple narrators are unceremoniously shot once they claim to tell “what it’s really like in the hood”: that, their prestige and seriousness of purpose notwithstanding, the hood films are just more simulations, sets of self-perpetuating types and tropes, selling short the complex reality of African-American life while claiming to expose it.
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