Racialism and the Media. Venise T. Berry
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and The Real Husbands of Hollywood (2013) have grossed millions and his stand-up comedy fills huge stadiums like the Staples Center in Los Angeles and Madison Square Garden in New York (Box Office Mojo, 2018).
Many of the characters played by Kevin Hart fall easily into the category of contemporary Zip Coon. For example, Ride Along and Ride Along 2 introduce Ben as a high school security guard who eventually becomes a police cadet. James, played by Ice Cube, is not happy about Ben marrying his sister so he proposes a ride along for Ben. Ben agrees in order to win James’s blessing for the wedding while James makes the offer to prove Ben does not deserve his sister. In both movies critics call Ben a clown, a man Smurf and Sir Scream-a-lot. He uses many tired Zip Coon tropes like talking loud, acting stupid, and dressing in bright, colorful, distracting clothes. At different times in the film Hart even imitates an ignorant street hoodlum and an outlandish African Prince.
Get Hard (2015) presents a number of the stereotypical traits related to black men in general and Hart specifically. James, a white, hedge fund manager played by Will Ferrell, is found guilty of embezzlement and sentenced to jail at San Quentin. Although Darnell, Kevin Hart’s character, has never been incarcerated he agrees to teach James how to survive in prison. Throughout the film examples of problematic ethnic humor are inserted linking Hart to the Zip Coon including encounters with gangs, prison sex, and urban violence.
A number of roles in Tyler Perry’s movies and television shows depict stereotypical characters, but none more obviously than Zip Coon Mr. Leroy Brown played by actor David Mann. In the movie (2008) and television show (2009–2012), both titled Meet the Browns this character is as close to the original Zip Coon stereotype as you can get today.
Mr. Brown dresses ridiculously, wearing striped shirts with flowered pants in bright, lively colors like red, blue and yellow. He is portrayed as very stupid with a poor understanding of the English language and he talks constantly about nothing. Mr. Brown’s acting efforts are usually over the top including lots of eye popping and hand waving, not to mention his high-pitched whiny voice.
He is the constant butt of the joke. In one television episode, Mr. Brown eats drugged-up brownies and flashes back to the 1970s where he dresses and talks like a stereotypical pimp during the Blaxploitation period. In other episodes, his character continuously offers insults, pranks, and exaggerated movements in response to intense situations. As a matter of fact, in some episodes his degrading ←18 | 19→ethnic humor gets very extreme. For example, Mr. Brown wets himself, eats rotten food willingly, and even jokes about performing a vasectomy on himself. Svetkey, Watson, and Wheat (2009) express concerned that there is power beyond images in Perry’s depictions of black life, so even though Perry believes his characters are simply tools to make people laugh, such comedy mixed with such stereotypes deems black disparity as palatable.
Chris Tucker tends to be a Zip Coon stereotype in most of his movies. In the Fifth Element (1997) he is a transgendered Zip Coon, in the Friday (1995) movie series he is a pothead Zip Coon and in the Rush Hour series (1998, 2001, 2007) he is a crime fighting Zip Coon. Tucker uses all of the conventional Zip Coon elements like bugging his eyes, loud talking, head rolling, misunderstanding and mispronouncing certain words, and displaying an obvious ignorance. Leslie (2001) describes Tucker’s character in the Rush Hour series a one-dimensional role.
he’s the sidekick, he’s the frightened, yet funny dim-witted buddy. It’s a role filled with all the standard black stereotypes: he’s loud, child-like, dishonest and unable to restrain his emotions when faced with sex and money.
For example, Tucker spends most of his time in The Fifth Element screaming in an irritating, high-pitched voice and bugging his eyes. He is dressed in a tight leopard-skin outfit wearing afro puffs or a large white bun. His comedic debut as Smokey in Friday focused on how lazy and unreliable his character was. Smokey smoked weed constantly rather than selling it, whipped his neck when he spoke for more emphasis, and jumped around on numerous occasions almost monkey-like.
When Dave Chappelle walked away from a fifty-million dollar contract for his show on Comedy Central everyone thought he had lost his mind, but instead he had actually found it. Several years later, Chappelle explained in various interviews that he realized his racial humor was not changing problematic societal perceptions but rather reinforcing them (Cosgrove-Mather, 2006).
Discussing Chappelle’s revelation, Bostick (2010) clarified how the context of a joke must be understood in order for someone to actually get it. She says many people do not understand or appreciate black culture enough to make the necessary connections so they laugh at the joke based on face value rather than registering the hypocrisy, sarcasm or satire.
While jokes about black people by black people may not seem inappropriate; they advance bias depictions of African American traditions, behaviors and cultural norms while offering white people a license to laugh at those stereotypical images. (p. 276)
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In their research on Rush Hour 2, Park, Gabbadon, and Chernin (2006) found that comedy encourages audiences to naturalize racial differences rather than challenge racial stereotypes. Their findings suggested that many black and white viewers who actively consume comedy derive pleasure from racial jokes.
Racial stereotypes in comedy are problematic because they help validate racial differences through humor, thus rendering them natural and unchallengeable. Because racial stereotypes in comedy rarely offend the audiences and are presented in an enjoyable way, audiences are able to naturalize specific knowledge about racial minorities without resistance. (p. 173)
So, it is possible that the white crew member who made Dave Chappelle uncomfortable when he laughed at the sketch about “Black Pixies” (Farley, 2005) was not necessarily a racist, but he simply enjoyed a certain comfort level because of the way stereotypes have been naturalized in our society. It is possible with racial images and messages consistently perpetuated by the media and accepted in society a person does not have to be a racist to laugh at racial ideas or create racial content.
Hinton (2000) maintains that stereotypes reflect faulty thinking about a group or culture, and some people may not be aware because of the prominence and consistency of the humorously focused images and messages. This means that the active monitoring of our own cognitive process is necessary to create oppositional or counter-stereotypical strategies for the elimination of such stereotypes (Fiske, 1984).
As Entman (1992) discussed in his article on news, modern racism and cultural change it is easy for people to fall into stereotypical thinking, especially when normalized stereotypes are promoted consistently and intertextually.
Because old-fashioned racist images are socially undesirable, stereotypes are now more subtle and stereotyped thinking is reinforced at levels likely to remain below conscious awareness. Rather than the grossly demeaning distortions of yesterday, stereotyping of blacks now allows abstraction from and denial of the racial component. (p. 345)
Humor, fuels conversations,