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A “PAUSE” FOR THE CAUSE: MCGRUDER VS. PERRY

This week’s episode of The Boondocks is what you call “must see TV”, my friends. In “Pause” (CLICK HERE TO WATCH). McGruder takes on both Tyler Perry and the “pause”/”no homo” phenomenon in one fell swoop. Brilliant. Hilarious. And, most of all, courageous. The writer isn’t hardly the first one to criticize Mr. Perry’s work publicly; Spike Lee has done it and lesser known writers go at him all the time. But McGruder goes in quite differently than anything I’ve seen or read thus far.

The plot: Granddad decides to audition for a “Winston Jerome” play. We learn through Huey’s narration that Jerome’s plays typically feature an educated, successful and virtuous Black woman trapped in an unhappy marriage to an abusive dark complexioned man, until she is saved by Jesus and the love of a light-skinned blue collar man.  Granddad is chosen as the “light-skinned, good haired” leading man in “Ma’ Finds Herself A Man” because he’s Jerome’s type. He then finds himself forced to join the playwright’s “homo-erotic Christian theatre cult” (I TOLD YOU HE WENT IN!) and temporarily abandons his family for the chance at stardom.

McGruder nails the likely reason a lot of actors reduce themselves to the Perry factory via a brief appearance by Kadeem Hardison as himself. Sitting next to Grandpa at the audition, he quips “What, I’m supposed to wait for the next Akeelah And The Bee to pay my mortgage?” He also lampoons the way in which Perry seems to use his relationship with Jesus as his line of defense for any criticism of his work:” …(I) would never ever kiss a man. That would be homosexual and against my Christian faith. But Jesus wants us to be actors first and heterosexuals second…but when I go on stage, Jesus wants me to become (Ma’Dukes)…“, quoth Jerome in his attempt to convince Grandpa to kiss him on stage.

Mark Anthony Neal, one of my favorite writers, wasn’t so impressed with the episode. He found there to be a strain of homophobia running through McGruder’s depiction of Perry, who he paints as an impossibly effeminate tyrant who finally confesses at the end that he “made up the cross dressing Christian cult” to sleep with men. I disagree. I didn’t see it as “look at this silly gay man” so much as “look at the irony of this *allegedly* gay and somewhat effeminate man, dressing up as a woman and telling the world that Jesus wants him to help women by dressing up as one“. Now, I do acknowledge that by taking Tyler’s mannerisms and cross-dressing as evidence that he’s gay is an act of heteronormalizing, which is counterproductive to fighting homophobia. But I don’t see hateful homophobia in McGruder ‘s “it looks like a duck, talks like a duck, the blogs say they’ve seen him out with other ducks…it’s a duck” presumptions about Perry’s sexuality. Furthermore, I abandon any sympathy I would have held for Perry in wake of McGruder loudly rapping on his closet door due to the awkward gay jokes and a big homophobic OMG moment in WDIGM2.

Was the gay thing a cheap shot? Perhaps. Mean-spirited? Quite possibly. But when you have a figure as ridiculous as Perry is in the eyes of those who aren’t drinking his “Kool-Aid”, it’s not hardly surprising that someone like McGruder (the counter-cultural militant Afro-nerd) took it there. He doesn’t need a few phone calls from Perry’s people to get him on any blacklist. The domination of Perry is an automatic roadblock for someone making the sort of snarky, intelligent work that is the McGruder brand. And while Perry himself is not to blame as much as his millions of loyal consumers, I don’t see the problem in the comic tossing a few sharp rocks at the figurehead that represents all that he hates.

I will agree to some extent that the more important criticism regarding Tyler Perry’s work is that which engages Tyler Perry’s audience. For all the times we’ve tossed around the words “cooning” and “low-brow” in regards to his brand, he does have a large number of class mobile, educated Black patrons .  I think that by skwereing Perry’s constant assertation that he has Jesus ‘on the mainline’ (literally: in the episode, we see a number of “phone conversations” between Jerome and Christ), he identifies one of the biggest reasons that Perry fans are so loyal and so willing to overlook inadequacies in scriptwriting, plot, direction, etc. There is also the demand from many Black audience members for “positive” entertainment, which McGruder subtly nods to this via local buppie Tom DuBois’ gushing over Ma’Dukes plays for not using the N-word.  The irony in that is that Perry’s reliance on hackneyed stereotypes and his troubling portrayal of gender dynamics aren’t “positive” at all. They aren’t innoctuous, either. For all the protheltyizing and self-agrandization in regards to his calling to tell Black (women’s) stories, Perry’s work reinforces a lot of complete BS about Black folks.

McGruder didn’t explore or engage the Perry audience on any truly in-depth level, but I definitely found it to be “meaningful cultural criticism”. By pointing out some of the glaring absurdities of that which “Tyler Perry Presents”, he has given the audience the option to examine think criticially about these ‘positive’ works of art media. As far as Perry criticism goes, if Hilton Als’ “Mama’s Gun” is the honors thesis, then “Pause” is the snarky video the kids in the A/V club. The cartoon medium frees McGruder up to be more silly and sardonic and it doesn’t quite lend itself to the sort of dissection Als’ was able to accomplish in print. Both are valid and worthy of the conversation about this man and his homo-erotic Christian empire. This is the Aaron McGruder I grew to love in print and I hope that he either changes his mind about ending the series or chooses a new method for getting his biting criticism to the masses.

This essay orignally appeared in its entirety at The Beautiful Struggler.

DROPPED BY SisterToldja

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