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The
Original Kings
(2000)
 The
world can be a pretty funny place in living color. Even
funnier, though, is black and white. ''The Original Kings of
Comedy,'' Spike Lee's high-flying concert film, reminds us
that for veteran comics Steve Harvey, D.L. Hughley, Cedric the
Entertainer, and Bernie Mac black comedy really means black
comedy, little dependent on whites, except to skewer a few
white hypocrisies about race. It's not that Harvey, Hughley,
Cedric, and Mac are Rodney Dangerfield in quadruplicate, not
getting any respect from a white-dominated media world. They
do get respect, and they earn it. All four accomplished pros
are known nationally from frequent TV exposure and, in Mac's
case, regular movie roles. For several years they have toured,
filling huge auditoriums with people who come to be
entertained by black humor to which whites are largely
oblivious. Lee's film connects us to it brilliantly.
Lee is too skilled a filmmaker to film a stage act flatly;
his fluid camerawork here adds to the way the evening crackles
with dynamism and life. As sure-handedly as Hughley, whose act
includes ad-libbed exchanges with audience members, Lee
incorporates the audience into the experience, making us feel
the tension that exists between any good performer and his
audience, making us equally aware of the audience's comfort
with the world of experience from which almost all of the
humor pushes off, whether earthy or simply an acutely nailed
piece of reportage, such as white men confirming what to black
eyes is irrationality when they rush toward danger - a luxury
not available to blacks.
Not long after settling in to watch ''The Original Kings of
Comedy,'' you relax, knowing that everybody involved - comics
and filmmakers - knows what he's doing. Time and again, we're
transported by the outpouring of liberating humor from four
men who know the territory. They never seem to be reaching for
their monologues, just selecting and shaping the vast amount
of raw material each draws upon. Harvey, that mainstay of TV's
Apollo theater series, alternates sly sendups of musical
styles, including hip-hop with riffs that allow him to plunge
into language less restricted than on TV. Hughley, more acute
in the areas of white privilege and black incredulity, blows
white self-indulgence out of the water, whether it takes the
form of anorexia or listening to the band playing as the
Titanic sank.
Rotund Cedric may look like a court jester, especially when
he's miming a street dude maximizing his coolness when
lighting up a cigarette, but he may cut deepest of all when he
catalogs the things that make a black man long for an excuse
to explode. Popeyed Mac puts a humanistic spin on family
confessional material, recalling his brother walking away when
their sister got in trouble with drugs, then generating a
hilarious routine from the experiences he and his wife, who
had thought themselves at an age beyond child-rearing, found
themselves facing when the incarcerated sister's kids moved in
with them. It would be redundant to state that all four are
sharp observers, especially after they make it abundantly
clear that the price of blackness is eternal vigilance. Not
since the glory days of Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy have we
had such a concert film.
''The Original Kings of Comedy'' is not only exhilarating
and cathartic. It's too funny to be ignored.
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