I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up (18 page)

I lost it, like for real. I didn’t just lose my temper; I lost my fucking mind. I jumped up and slapped that table. “Goddammit!” I screamed at him. “I’ma fuck you up!” I literally chased him out of the building. If I’d have caught him, I would have beat the shit out of him. Security had to get involved.

That was a bad day.

To George’s credit, he ended up apologizing. He said if he had to do it all over again, he would never have handled me that way. I can’t imagine what the look on my face was like when I was chasing after him, but let’s just say that I imagine it wasn’t very family-friendly.

But there’s no way a show like
The Hughleys
could be on network TV today. The culture won’t allow it. Before cable, some of the biggest TV stars were black. Emmanuel Lewis, Gary Coleman, and Redd Foxx were huge celebrities for
all
Americans. At one point, Sherman Helmsley was the highest-paid actor in television. Now
TV has become very divided and myopic. We don’t all watch the same type of shows, and we don’t all have the same popular culture. It’s more segregated than it’s ever been before, with very, very micro audiences. Those were probably more turbulent times politically and socially, but people were more accepting from an
entertainment
standpoint.

Nowadays, the black community can be our own worst enemy with regard to entertainment. The NAACP will declare something a “stereotypical” show, say that they don’t want to see those types of images—and basically get a whole crew of people fired. After two years on ABC,
The Hughleys
moved to UPN. UPN was in many ways a black network and part of the growing segregation of television. One show that the network had green-lit at the same time we were on was called
The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer
. The title character was a slave who was smarter than everybody in the room.
Nobody got the point
.

To produce a show that “makes light” of slavery was regarded as such a blunder that the series is held up to ridicule to this day. But if humor is based on the absurd, is there anything more absurd than the idea that one grown man can own another grown man? The very premise is preposterous. Though slavery has been over for more than a century, 1998 was apparently too soon to poke fun at it. Yet while Europe was still coming to terms with the Holocaust, Americans were laughing at the bumbling Nazis in
Hogan’s Heroes. Desmond Pfeiffer
was so controversial that it was taken off the air after less than a month. The network never let it breathe and never let it grow.

I had to deal with the same kinds of issues over the four-year run
of
The Hughleys
—as if there wasn’t enough to deal with from the studio. Every season, they would roll the show out and the media would come and ask us questions. They had these up-fronts in New York and in Los Angeles. Many times it was more like I was being interrogated and asked to defend myself. There was one particular black
Los Angeles Times
reporter who just didn’t like the way that I was portraying things, and we developed a very antagonistic relationship, arguing with each other. It was always “Why is
this
black?” and “Why is this
not
black?” with him.

It was the same thing with NAACP president (and former congressman) Kweisi Mfume. I got into it with him and with a lot of other civil rights people. Their position was that we had to “protect” what images people see on the screen in an entertainment. My position is that the NAACP should concentrate on making thing better through civil rights and not through what entertainment we see. I don’t know of any NAACP board members or civil rights leaders who ever wrote scripts. They have as much business telling me how to write a sitcom as I do telling Kweisi Mfume how to petition the government.

What do civil rights leaders have to do with art? What do they have to do with perception? Art
by definition
is supposed to make people uncomfortable. Art, true art, by definition is open to different interpretations. I remember when Gabriel Byrne played the devil in
End of Days
. If Denzel Washington had played the devil, there would have been mayhem. “Why a black man gotta be the devil?” Well, why can’t a black man be an
actor
? Or a writer, or an artist, or whatever? Why does Kweisi Mfume or
any
man get to decide what is “black” for somebody else?

If a producer hires an actor, that actor should be allowed to succeed or fail based on his own merit. Instead he’s set up to fail by his
so-called “brothers.” One thing activists do is they get
loud
. When you’re working on a show, it’s enough of a pain in the ass to get notes from the network. Now you’ve got to get notes from Kweisi Mfume? It’s no wonder why every single time there is a television show involving race, even a sitcom, there’s a level of controversy associated with it—which means some network president now has to explain himself. After a while, the executives get tired of it and it’s easier just to not have black actors there. When you look at why black people aren’t represented on television, civil rights leaders have a big hand in that. They are participating in our removal from television. We haven’t had a black drama in
decades
, if ever. It’s too serious and too touchy.
Roots
was the closest thing. They technically classified that as a miniseries, even though it sure as hell was a drama to
us
.

These leaders try to pretend that current crimes perpetrated by black people don’t exist
now
. If the only black images you see on TV are nice, professional, yuppie black people, that’s a false kind of racism. In real life, human beings see black people at their best and then black people at their worst. We’re Barack Obama
and
we’re Flavor Flav. Both are
real
. To claim that Flavor Flav or representations of his type shouldn’t be seen in media is to render a whole section of the black community invisible. That’s how our
opponents
wanted it, for decades.

To suppress harmful imagery in the media is straight propaganda. It was the case when President Bush stifled pictures of the body bags coming out of Iraq—and it’s the case when the NAACP stifles images of inner-city crime. If a person from a foreign land turned on our television, he would conclude that every white person had a black best friend … and every act of crime is committed by a poorly dressed WASP.

I know more cats who are hustling out there, trying to do whatever they can to get by, than I do people with MBAs. I probably know more dope dealers than I do doctors. Mind you, both of them do well and both serve a purpose. Just because an image of a black dope dealer or a black doctor is on TV doesn’t mean the show’s creators are supporting it or endorsing it. It just kind of
is
.

When Jamie Foxx did
Booty Call
, everybody talked about how stereotypical the movie was. People forget his silly Wanda character from
In Living Color
. Yet that was part of his journey on the way to doing
Ray
. If he had stopped with
Booty Call
, it would have cut his career short. His path almost exactly parallels Tom Hanks’s. Hanks got his start doing drag nonsense on
Bosom Buddies
. Now he’s a multiple Oscar winner. The stupid stuff paves the way for the great stuff. You can’t eat fancy food all the time; sometimes you just want a burger and fries, and it’s perfectly okay. There is a lack of consistency between how black actors are treated compared to white actors, by the very people who supposedly care for them. This schizophrenic approach even fights against itself. When
The Color Purple
came out, it was extremely controversial. Nine months later, activists were just as angry that it didn’t win any Oscars.

When I had my CNN show, one of the skits I did was about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and how they were pimping us. The reaction was extreme and immediate. It’s gotten to the point that you have to be so literal that you can’t even tell a joke that’s nuanced. It’s like how McDonald’s coffee has to have a warning label that lets you know that the hot coffee is hot, and that hot liquid and your bare skin are not friends. We’re coming to a point where every joke has to have a disclaimer on the screen that announces, “By the way, I’m joking!” That’s even more insulting than telling an offensive joke. I was on Facebook during Hurricane Irene, and I
was talking about how the authorities were having problems with evacuations. People were refusing to leave, thinking nothing bad was going to happen to them. Well, I posted, that’s because Irene is not a threatening name. My favorite aunt is named Irene. They should have called it Hurricane Mohammed and watched the people flee.

The comments came immediately: “That’s not funny!” “Being black, you should understand that that’s hurtful.” Well, something can be hurtful
and
it can still be funny. Laughter is involuntary, just like tears. When you see someone fall, one of the first things you do is turn around and cover your mouth, because you don’t want to laugh right then and there. That laughter just snatches itself from your mouth involuntarily.

My father got hit by a train when I was a teenager. He was on his way to work at Crenshaw and 120th.
Somehow
the train came behind the factory, he went across, and the gate didn’t go up. Whatever it was, it was a perfect storm of bullshit. I came home and my father was in bed all bruised up, with a sling on. “While you was out fucking around,” he told me, “I got hit by a train.” I couldn’t stop laughing. I didn’t know if he had internal bleeding, or a broken leg, but I knew this motherfucker got hit by a train. He gets mad at me to this day because of that reaction, but it wasn’t like I did it
intentionally
. It wasn’t like I
wanted
my father to get hit by a train—not that night, at least. It was just a reaction. We’re not that delicate as a society that jokes are going to do us in. I’ve never thought black people were that delicate as a community. We survived beatings, discrimination, and lynchings. We’re not going to be done in by
punch lines
and
pictures
.

There most definitely is a role for civil rights leaders in our society. They should do what they do best, which is making the world
better for whoever is getting discriminated against at work. If someone tries to introduce a rebel flag somewhere, they should be on the scene like the motherfucking fire department. That’s their bailiwick. But in terms of trying to force perceptions on TV and film that they believe to be redemptive, it’s impossible. It’s like grabbing smoke. Who the fuck can do that? My community suffers far out of proportion to any other American community. We need help. But leadership is a function of the times. FDR, Lincoln, and Washington would not have been as great as they were if they didn’t have these profound crises to navigate us through.

It’s the same thing with civil rights figures. America as a nation has gotten slower, stupider, and softer. We’ve regressed—and the people representing our civil rights leadership have necessarily regressed too. Their causes are not clear-cut, and their goals are not as transparent. This brings me to my next point: the moral decline of black leaders in America.

G
REAT
men are a function of great moments in time—and no one doubts that Martin Luther King was the greatest of our civil rights leaders. His greatness was a function of his era. Imagine being surrounded by all those transformative, historical figures: Earl Warren, Thurgood Marshall, the Kennedys, J. Edgar Hoover. All these people were
transcendent. Everything
was in flux. It was the fork in the road for this country. America was choosing whether it was going to be what it said it was. One way or another, we were
having it out. It was the battle for the soul of our country. King was the right guy at the right time in the right situation.

I think that he understood the importance of his moment, and it overwhelmed him. He felt called to duty by the times because he knew that he could actually pull it off. But he also saw the flipside of the situation. Generally, people who change the world and make it better for all mankind don’t live to be ninety-something years old. Look at how messed up Chairman Mao, Pinochet, Mubarak, and all these people are. They live a
long
time. They live longer than the average black male lives in the United States. When you’re changing the status quo and bucking the trend, you’re doing something different. And if you try to make things different, there are going to be people who like the way things are just fine. They’re going to make sure things happen to you—and often, those things have the most dire consequences possible.