DJ with a dirty mouth

TIM Meadows, a black American comic with an Afro like an ant hill, a dirt-track act and a motor foul-mouth to go with it, plays a shock- jock and relic from the Seventies with a late-night radio show who hands out obscene advice to female lonelyhearts. "Take yo panties off and hang out at the bus station," is his counsel to one caller who's shy about dating.

He gets fired, does a leering stint on the Praise Jesus Together station, mocking a middle-aged nun who has accepted a missionary position abroad, then finds a lynch mob of cuckolded husbands, nearly all of them white, pursuing his tattooed tail and bearing cable cutters for use on the other side of him.

I've long ceased to be shocked at the

misogyny and obscenities sprayed at their fellow blacks by some US entertainers.

So, apparently, have our censors, but perhaps out of wariness, rather than weariness. The British Board of Film Classification's current report carries this revealing bit of casuistry: "The Spike Lee film, The Original Kings of Comedy, which was liberally sprinkled with the coarser swear words, was given a 15 rather than an 18 rating because the language was mitigated by its context of working black American comedians."

It would be hard to find a more racially condescending excuse for passing a film that continually demeaned women and degraded language.

Obscenities spewed out by such "working" comedians, including Tim Meadows, help establish a grossly repugnant view of minority groups, not merely African-Americans, through the recidivist image they present of black men as overendowed sexoholics, abusive misogynists and compulsive users of obscene expletives.

The trend is probably irreversible; but if any other minority group, such as Jews, was presented so disreputably, whether or not in the permissive "context" of comics earning their keep by mimicking their own kind, I don't think many film distributors here or in the US would care to touch the product.

The Ladies Man is like a slow crawl through a pig pen, on the way, no doubt, to the video bin.

Copyright 2001
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