Paint it black

In Tropic Thunder, Robert Downey Jr plays a white movie star playing a black soldier. John Patterson explains why racial comedy is a grey area
Robert Downey Jr in Tropic Thunder
'Ebonics vocal training' ... Robert Downey Jr in Tropic Thunder

Even before its release in the US the other week there was a stampede to denounce Ben Stiller's $90m action-comedy Tropic Thunder, a brutal satire of Hollywood egomania, star-fits, venal agents and producers and, um, Apocalypse Now.

  1. Tropic Thunder
  2. Production year: 2008
  3. Country: USA
  4. Cert (UK): 15
  5. Runtime: 106 mins
  6. Directors: Ben Stiller
  7. Cast: Ben Stiller, Brandon Jackson, Brandon Soo Hoo, Brandon T Jackson, Danny McBride, Jack Black, Nick Nolte, Robert Downey Jr., Steve Coogan
  8. More on this film

And no wonder. It's hard to know which aggrieved group is the most upset. First, there's the overweight, who were up in arms about the movie's references to a fictional, Eddie Murphy's Klumps-style "Fatties" comedy-flick franchise, while the organisers of the paralympics, no less, called for a boycott of the movie, on the grounds of its frequent use of the word "retard".

But, surprisingly the group complaining the least - well, so far - is the one the American media apparently wishes would march on cinemas with torches and pitchforks: African-Americans. Because the touchiest aspect of the movie's 360-degree willingness to offend is its decision to paint Robert Downey Jr in blackface makeup. Downey plays a self-important, humourless Australian method actor named Kirk Lazarus who immerses himself so thoroughly in his role as a gung-ho black sergeant that he undergoes what the script calls a "controversial procedure" involving pigmentation alteration, puts on an Afro wig and undergoes "Ebonics vocal training" to become more convincing in his movie-within-the-movie role.

It's a good thing they cast someone as intelligent and instinctively brilliant as Downey, though the actor was rightly nervous about grasping the nettle of American racism so tightly. As he told Entertainment Weekly, he even felt there was a chance his reputation might be "destroyed". "That was my fear," he revealed.

Downey's role is hedged in all around with caveats that make it abundantly clear that the joke is on Kirk Lazarus alone. First up, there's a real African-American character, named Alpa Chino and played by Brandon T Jackson, who's ready to call Lazarus on his method bullshit. Offscreen, Jackson also nixed the script's lone use of the N-word, a change Downey thoroughly endorsed.

Now, just because it's loud and clear that the joke is all on Kirk Lazarus and not on African-Americans, this is still incredibly edgy material in a country whose history of slavery and racism still reverberates to the present day. After all, it's only four and a half decades since America's blacks were guaranteed the right to vote.

We may have a black man running for the presidency, but we also have a broad resurgence of racially-based humour in stand-up comedy - one thinks of the tightrope delicately (and not so delicately) trodden by such comics as Sarah Silverman, Jim Norton and Nick DiPaolo - and across the media, while right-wing radio hosts make more of perceived "black racism" and "special pleading" than they do of naked or coded white bigotry. McCain's team accusing Obama of "playing the race card from the bottom of the deck" - that indelible phrase, uttered by a white man to describe the OJ Simpson defence team's strategy - is a classic recent use of dog-whistle racism. We shall discover on election day just how racially divided America remains, and many are not optimistic about what November 4 may tell us.

That's the increasingly toxic racial atmosphere into which Tropic Thunder was released. But equally important is the centuries-old genre of "blackface" or "minstrelsy" from which the Kirk Lazarus conceit ultimately derives. Blackface is as old as, and perhaps even older than, Othello, but its American version, poisoned by the nightmarish experience of slavery, began even before the civil war, as a weird conduit through which aspects of the African-American experience were transmitted to a white audience. The semi-official Southern anthem Dixie came from the blackface tradition (original phonetic lyrics: "I wish I was in de land ob cotton/ Old times dar am not forgotten/ Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land"), and the pervasive Jim Crow laws enacted during the post-civil war reconstruction era were named for an 1828 minstrel song called Jump Jim Crow by white minstrel TD "Daddy" Rice. It was all self-evidently racist - but such ugliness will always have unintended consequences.

Minstrelsy - which at first involved whites blacking themselves up with burnt cork and performing pseudo-black acts - was surpisingly enduring, its popularity lasting from about 1830 to around 1930. Somewhere in this period blacks themselves got into the act, to the extent that they too had to wear blackface, cartoonish Afro wigs and obscenely overdone red-and-white mouth make-up, a tradition carried on by black comics like "Pigmeat" Markham deep into the latter half of the 20th century. Black people dressing up as racist stereotypes of themselves? There's a reason Greil Marcus called this period "The Old, Weird America".

The black version of blackface was inevitably more "authentic", the music was probably a lot better, and even the great black reformer Frederick Douglass felt moved in 1849 to say of the phenomenon, "It is something to be gained when the coloured man in any form can appear before a white audience" (which only proves how awful things were). In the 20th century, radio comedy The Amos'n'Andy Show, starring white comedians performing a sort of "aural blackface", was one of the most popular and (in formal terms) most influential and innovative programmes of the 1930s, with its short-lived TV spin-off still being syndicated in 1966.

Nick Tosches has also made bold claims for blackface in his book Where Dead Voices Gather, a profile of Emmett Miller, an obscure (white) blackface performer whose (largely non-racist) songs have been covered by Hank Williams, Merle Haggard and - ye gods! - David Lee Roth. The absorption of black styles into white music started a long time before rock'n'roll blew up, and much of it happened as an unexpected by-product of minstrelsy.

The list of famous artists who have performed in blackface at one time or another is simply staggering: Fred Astaire, Shirley Temple, Judy Garland, Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Milton Berle, Joan Crawford, Doris Day, Bing Crosby, both Frank Sinatra and Dino in the original Ocean's 11, and more recently, Dan Aykroyd in Trading Places, C Thomas Howell in Soul Man, and Ed Harris in Masked And Anonymous. Let's not forget, either, that the BBC's Black And White Minstrel Show ran until 1978.

By the 1960s, minstrelsy and blackface inevitably attracted black satirists. Comedian Godfrey Cambridge made Watermelon Man, playing a suburban white bigot who wakes up black one morning. But bear in mind the studio originally wanted the role played - in blackface, natch - by Alan Arkin or Jack Lemmon. In 1970. Since then we have seen multiple Eddie Murphys in "whiteface", as well as Dave Chappelle, and the Wayans brothers in White Chicks. But perhaps the most blistering take on the phenomenon was Spike Lee's scathing satire Bamboozled, in which a horribly racist blackface TV pitch, designed to get its creator fired, becomes a massive hit in white America. It ends with a montage of grotesque, depressing racist imagery from American movies and TV shows, many still very familiar to us.

Barack Obama may be running as a "post-racial" candidate, but America is not yet a post-racial society (something it has in common with many others, let it be stressed). And however much America deludes itself that it has transcended race, the old deformities, absurdities and animosities still linger in new forms: idiot fratboys blacking up for Halloween parties; the suburban wigga; the modern right's cynical co-opting of the politics of historical grievance for its own ends ("He called me whitey! Wah!"). In comedy, race is the final frontier, and sharper comedians will always be tempted to lambast the mentality of denial that's discernible in a neutered public culture of white liberal guilt, as Stiller and Downey do in Tropic Thunder. Those with poor judgment can sail off the edge of the world: just ask Seinfeld's Michael Richards.

No matter how much things improve, race always finds new ways to make us crazy. One line from Tropic Thunder sums up the whole demented parallel-universe of blackface: "I know who I am!" says Lazarus. "I'm a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude!"

He has no idea.

· Tropic Thunder is released on Sep 19

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