Then, if you're not already ahead of me, it becomes the great popular hit. Studio audiences, white and black, show up in blackface. Delacroix gets raises, chokes down his conscience. And so on, until the predictable explosion when conscience and practicality clash. First, and probably second and third as well, is that it is not at all funny.
Nothing is funny.
No funny jokes, no witty performances, no possibility of seeing through the very visible and symbolic rape of black culture that is a minstrel show and into something, anything, worthwhile. Even Savion Glover, the greatest tap dancer of our age, does slow, offhand steps that go nowhere and leave us cold. And Damon Wayans, a brilliant comic, has chosen or been given a disastrous, fake, embarrassingly bad pseudo-Harvard accent that no one in the real world has ever heard, much less spoken, before. All of which makes for an atrociously bad film. But we must remember that it was made by perhaps our greatest American filmmaker, Spike Lee, and so it is bad in ways that only a great filmmaker can fail.