Part of what makes Rock so interesting as a hip hop comedian is his measured perspective of the culture. In an interview with Nelson George on the Bring The Pain DVD, Rock insists that his 'Niggas Vs Balck People' calling card merely traveses ground already covered by Ice Cube, Chuck D and KRS-One and cites his exposure to NWA's 'Straight Outta Compton' as a life-changing moment which taught him that "you can say anything.
.. and get paid for it.
"
Yet despite the reverence for hip hop culture, Rock refuses to deify it or excuse its more questionable moments. In his 1999 follow-up Bigger And Blacker, Rock ridicules the way the deaths of Biggie and Tupac were described as assassinations: "Martin Luther King was assassinated," says Rock, "Malcolm X was assassinated. John F Kennedy was assassinated.
Them two niggas got shot!" For some it's a harsh assessment, but then it's kicked with that "say anything" conviction that's well, intrinsically hip hop.
The same perspective continues in 2004's Never Scared, where Rock explains how he loves hip hop but finds it increasingly hard to defend, particularly in light of guilty pleasures like the sweaty-balled narratives of Lil Jon.
Of course, Rock isn't the first comic to wring laughs from the King of Crunk. It's not a stretch to say that the biggest current success story in American comedy is Dave Chappelle, the stand-up whose raucous impression of the dreadlocked hit-maker is just part of the mayhem on Comedy Central's wildly popular Chapelle's Show. As with Rock, it does Chappelle something of a disservice to label him a hip hop comic - his humour goes way beyond rap spoofery - yet his affinity for the culture is evident even beyond the show's hip hop cameos and parodies.
While Chappelle deftly straddles the lines between smart and silly, not all of hip hop's court jesters have managed the balancing act. Back in 1989 it would have been hard to imagine the proudly Afrocentric Queen Latifah ever being accused of minstrelsy, but her broad, bug-eyed role in 2003's Bringing Down The House saw here and the film-makers criticised (not least in ) for pedalling 'Aunt Jemima' sterotypes. Mind you, this was a warm reception compared to that which greeted Soul Plane, with Spike Lee (one of many who expressed outrage) describing the airborne antics of Snoop, Meth and co as "coonery and buffonery".
Similar accusations were levelled at Method Red, the short-lived sitcom in which the Blackout Brothers added an extra dose of ghetto to the Fresh Prince formula. Even Barbershop, a comedy at times almost quaint in its endorsement of good old fashioned community values, ruffled feathers with a quip about OutKast's old friend Rosa Parks.
But is such criticism fair?
Ultimately, caricature and exaggeration are the stock currencies of comedy, so any comdey delivered from a hip hop perspective (and let's be honest, it's not always the most elevated of vantage points) will inevitably involve some negotiation of African-American stereotypes.
Perhaps the issue is one of balance. Nobody ever accused, say, Dumb Dumber of stereotyping white people as idiots, yet for every 'white' film of this nature there's a Woody Allen comedy, a drama or a romance.
Just as the record industry pumps the glossiest and often crudest rap music, so Hollywood greenlights a disproportionate amount of low brow comedies starring rappers in the quest for box office receipts. Getting the Wu-Tang Clan to film a series of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads monologues or hearing Lil' Kim recite the witticisms of 'Jazzy' Joyce Grenfell would surely be steps in the right direction (as if).
In the meantime, hip hop comedy will continue to boom, not least because, like the music that inspired it, it has long since escaped niche boundaries.
Just about every white comic of note has embraced hip hop to some extent: Ben Stiller played an irate neighbour in P Diddy's 'Bad Boy For Life' video, Adam Sandler (slap, slap, slap) clowned around with Snoop Dogg at the 2003 MTV Music Video Awards and Will Ferell lent some silliness to Mr Complex's 'Twisted Mister' album.
More importantly, when 'white' comics do touch on hip hop, they increasingly do so with either empathy, edginess, or both. It's a welcome relief from the days when mainstream comedy simplistically portrayed hip hop as a culture of ludicrously dressed nitwits with a quirky use of English.
In addition to featuring a recurring role for self-professed Wu-Tang Clan nut Wanda Sykes, Curb Your Enthusiasm produced a classic hip hop character in Krazy-Eyes Killa, a highly strung emcee who forms an unlikely bond with Larry ("You my nigga?!" asks the rapper.
"And you're my Caucasian!" responds a typically gauche Larry). Likewise Mr Show - another HBO offering - presented 'The White People Co-Opting Black Culture Network', a fictional cable channel on which disgruntled white rappers lament that, as white performers imitating black performers, they're unfairly targeted by the police.
As for the future, yeah, there's probably a lot of dross in the pipeline. But when Master P and Lil' Romeo remake Vice Versa OR 8 Ball MJG give Laurel Hardy a hip hop makeover, you can bet there'll be a number of hilarious hip hop voices standing by to thoroughly take the piss. Just the way it should be.
props to
ps:
people can you stream music from the flash player (top right)? drop a comment if you are having difficulties using the player. or don't like the playlist lol.
thx.
1
I
may have proclaimed himself no joke, but hip hop as a whole has proven itself to have a pretty decent sense of humour. From 's crackpot clowning to 's pitch-black punch lines via the leftfield lunacy of those groundbreaking / skits, no other musical genre has so consistently brought the laughs alongside the drama. Throw in Foxy Brown's career and that fact becomes indisputable, so it was inevitable that hip hop would cross over into the world of comedy.
Even so, in 2005 the results are nothing to be laughed at.
Arguably, nothing illustrates the stranglehold hip hop now exerts on popular culture as effectively as the rise of hip hop humour. Throughout hip hop's commercial ascent it has essentially remained an outsider culture, with white mainstream audiences often drawn to it through something approaching voyeurism.
Doubtless, many of those who bought CDs and flocked to see Boy N' The Hood back in '91 did so with the air of intrepid explorers observing from a safe distance a new an alien world.
Comedy, on the other hand, generally requires some sort of familiarity and inclusiveness for the audience to fell 'in' on the joke, making O'Shea Jackson's subsequent emergence as a cuddly comedy star a startling indicator of hip hop's acceptance by the wider world. Who knew that the snarling Nigga Ya Love To Hate would topline two successful comedy franchises (the Friday and Barbershop movies) before prat-falling his way through Are We There Yet?
, a schmaltzy, slapstick kiddie-com?
And it's not just a case of rappers swapping their gats for gags, as hip hop comedy leaves its Timbo print in the most unlikely of venues. LA's Dorothy Chandler Pavilion got a touch of hip hop this year as Chris Rock hosted the Oscars and fellow hip hop funny man Jamie Foxx wins Best Actor for .
Meanwhile, although hardly a household name, cartoonist Aaron McGruder has taken hip hop humour into millions of US households with his newspaper stip the letting readers peep the adventures of pint-sized, hedge-haired militant Huey and his thugged out lil' bro Riley over their cornflakes.
But it's not a one way process. Today's Black American comedy may reverberate with the rhythms and themes of hip hop, but equally the music itself owes a debt to pioneering African-American joke-spitters.
Just look at the , a homage to the classic '70s black comedy series , or consider that was finding his voice during the years of hip hop's infancy - it's not hard to see how his combustible mix of the political, the personal and the profane is mirrored in much of the best rap music.
Less well known but even more influential is fellow '70s trailblazer Rudy Ray Moore, who kicked his foul-mouthed comedy in a trademark rhyming style and, like many a rapper or mixtape deejay since, found great success by marketing his raunchy party albums to the streets. Best known for his bombastic character, Moore carved out a career in blaxploitation movies before later returning to collect hip hop props via cameos with the likes of Snoop, Eazy-E and .
Nonetheless, when in 1990 Dolemite went head to head with Kane on the latter's 'A Taste Of Chocolate' LP, it was but a footnote in the year that hip hop bum-rushed the comedy show. In the '80s, black American comedy had been dominated by two hugely successful but very different personalities. The veteran comic ruled television with The Cosby Show, a squeaky clean portrayal of an affluent black family in Brooklyn, while a potty-mouthed young upstart named had rescued the ailing Saturday Night Live en route to becoming a box office giant in movies like Beverly Hills Cop.
Their different approaches to comedy were made clear when, in his 1987 concert movie Raw, Murphy savaged Cosby for admonishing his R-rated act in a phone call. Yet the unstoppable rise of hip hop saw both Cosby's family fare and Murphy's glitzy rock star preening give way to something more exciting as the new decade dawned.
At the vanguard of this movement was the hip hop flavoured sketch show , which debuted in 1990 on the nascent Fox network.
The brainchild of Keenan Ivory Wayans - then hot off blaxploitation spoof I'm Gonna Git You Sucka - In Living Color showcased not just Wayans' sizable family, but also future Hollywood heavyweights Jim Carrey, Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Lopez, who shook her soon to be famous as one of the show's sexy dance troupe The Fly Girls. Still, the influence of hip hop reached beyond the slick moves, urban stage decor and Heavy D theme song, with the show's gleeful irreverence and scattershot attacks on pop culture icons of all races drawing heavily from the vigour and fearlessness of the culture.
Like many of the golden age musical acts who dropped by - , and to name but three - In Living Color has dated only superficially.
The bygone cultural references and garish gear betray the show's vintage, but don't tarnish its freshness or mask its innovation. Carrey's freakish parody, for example, still remains hilarious.
1990 was also the year when Hollywood opened its eyes to the commercial potential of some of hip hop's more humorous characters.
Kid-N-Play were never rap's heaviest hitters, yet they hit pay dirt on the big screen when the Hudlin brothers' hugely profitable exploited their likeable double act to the full and positioned Christopher Reid and Martin as hip hop's Abbott Costello. A brace of shoddy sequels (and the shoddy almost sequel Class Act) later and the duo were looking more like hip hop's Trevor Simon, although that hasn't stopped Kid eking out a modest career in stand-up.
Interestingly, House Party was first conceived as a vehicle for another light-hearted hip hop duo, DJ Jazzy Jeff The Fresh Prince, but instead Will Smith fronted The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air, a sitcom which added a b-boy out of water twist to the family values of The Cosby Show.
Of course, unlike Kid-N-Play, Smith went on to achieve lasting success on the big screen, and it spoke volumes about the rise of hip hop comedy (and, by extension hip hop itself) that by the mid '90s, he and In Living Color graduate Jim Carrey were Hollywood's two hottest stars.
But while Big Willie went on to repeatedly save the planet, The Fresh Price Of Bel Air left behind a dubious legacy that includes LL Cool J's In The House and, more recently, Eve's eponymous sitcom. Ruff Ryder's first lady is no Lucille Ball, although for UK viewers there's a certain amount of surreal comedy to be derived from seeing her share the screen with former Grange Hill scamp/teen pop no-mark Sean Maguire.
However, back when the idea of teaming Tegs Ratcliffe with The Pitbull in a Skirt was just a twinkle in a Hollywood big shot's eyes - 1992, to be exact - one of hip hop's biggest brand names was entering the the comedy fray. Strip-mining a seam of crude, below-the belt humour, HBO's Def Comedy Jam catapulted the likes of Martin Lawrence, Chris Tucker and Bernie Mac into the big leagues while taking flak from the likes of (yes!
) Bill Cosby for its vulgarity. Still, while the Def Jam comics weren't subtle, even the weakest of them knew how to rock a mic, and with the baying, over-excited crowds demanding belly laughs, the average turn now evokes an 8 Mile battle scene, albeit with less witty punch lines.
HBO would later have its hand in a far more revered moment in black comedy, namely 's 1996 stand-up special Bring The Pain.
Something of a comic journeyman at the time, Rock had spent the first part of the '90s treading water on Saturday Night Live before departing for the blacker environs on In Living Color, which folded a few episodes after his arrival. In-between, he'd found only minor success on the big screen with the affectionate hip hop spoof CB4. It was, then, a rejuvenated Rock who in Bring The Pain prowled around the stage delivering inspired material like his much quoted ' ' routine and in doing so winning over both black and white audiences.
(props to )
extra read:
News RSS