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Originally Posted by ThaVirus
Now y'all have me wondering which comedies would be considered more "black humor" or more mainstream.
Eddie Murphy's career is a weird one. I think Trading Places and Beverly Hills Cop are straight mainstream comedies, IMO. Coming to America and the Nutty Professor are mostly mainstream but lean a little more into the black humor. Life and Boomerang I'd say are definitely black comedies through and through.
Then the year 2000 hit and he switched gears to entirely family comedies.
Wild ride.
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Regarding Eddie Murphy, he's an interesting one. In Trading Places and Beverly Hills Cop, his being black is used as a device to play up how different he is relative to other characters, but the movie isn't about him being black. He's just different. You could have put a white actor in those movies without changing the basic plot. Maybe some of the jokes would need to change a bit, but it's hard to separate out Eddie being unabashedly black from Eddie just being hilarious. So I agree that those are mainstream comedies.
I would actually argue that Coming to America is mainstream as well. If you used all white actors and had them coming from Lithuania or Moldova, I think the movie still stands. It was enhanced a little by them being from Africa just because it reinforced how different America was for them, but Crocodile Dundee kind of pulled off the same trick. I think maybe there was some unique black humor in that preacher or huckster scene and the hair gel plot device, but those weren't really central to the movie. For the most part I would say that it was a mainstream movie that just happened to be all black. What would you say were some black humor elements?
I didn't see Boomerang. I've seen snippets of the Nutty Professor, which seemed mainstream, but I didn't see the whole movie to make a call.
I would conclude that Eddie mostly does mainstream movies, but he uses (at least before he went the family movie route) his being black as a comedic tool very effectively. I don't know if some people might find that exploitive, and some of his early SNL stuff probably doesn't age well, but overall in his classic movies, he's just a funny guy who happens to be black and it often makes him a fish out of water.
So if I conclude that Eddie is, and always has been a mainstream comedian, then what is a "black movie"? That's a really good question.
I don't like this answer, but on first blush I think it would have to be set in a venue that seems somewhat unique to black people, and/or the plot would have to center around being black, and/or it would have to have dialogue that's more around "black humor" or black-centric culture. I don't know how to identify black-centric culture other than to say I recognize it when I see it.
Friday may be an example. Again, I haven't seen it, but it looks like it's set in a large urban area and revolves around a drug deal and threats. I don't have a polite way to say this, and I'm sure most black people don't live in that setting, but I don't know any white people who live in that setting. It's hard to put myself in the character's world.
It's weird to think about, because if I can place myself in Luke Skywalker's shoes in Star Wars, then I should be able to place myself in a black character's shoes in a movie that's set in a black community with black-centric humor and dialogue. Why is that harder for me?
I wonder if in some way it's because Luke Skywalker is so different that I set aside everything, but in a "black movie" everything is close enough to my existence that any differences are magnified. It's like traveling overseas. I went to India and everything was so different that I just rolled with it, but when I went to Australia it was sometimes harder because things were really close but just slightly enough off that it would put me off balance - odd spices in the pizza sauce, and people who were 20 percent more extroverted than I'm used to.
It makes me wonder how deep a difference is in a "black movie" versus a "white movie". Presumably there's a theme and perhaps a bigger message in most movies, which should be universal. So is it just the window dressing that makes a movie "black" - how the dialogue is written and spoken, and where the movie is set? Does being black in America lead to different reactions or different thinking within a plot? I think it's deeper than that, but I wonder if it's not a lot deeper.