Why not just laugh? Making fun of ourselves on television - portrayals of African Americans in situation comedies

Making Fun of Ourselves on Television

Should we be laughing at the roles of blacks on television situation comedies? Why even ask the question? Why not just laugh? Because there may be more at stake than aching sides. A veteran television writer, Ralph Farquhar, describes the bad news and the worse news we all must face. "The bad news is, if these shows fail, next year the networks are not going to do any more. The worse news is, if they all make it, next year the networks are going to say, |We made it. We don't need black people to create it. People love these images we're putting out, so we're going to do more.'"

With the surge of black sitcoms on the air, we're seeing a lot of black faces on our television screens, which could lead us to believe that the people in power behind the cameras are the same color. Most of those sitcoms, however, were created by white writer-producers, who develop a show's, philosophy, determine its direction and thereafter hire black writers to carry out their overall plans. Writers are not necessarily hired to be creative; ideas are put before them and they become "problem solvers," according to Eunetta Boone, who writes for Roc, Writers are presented with a situation and must answer the question, "How do we get from point A to point B and make it funny?" she says.

To learn more about, the creative energy behind black sitcoms and the role of black writers in Hollywood, let's go to "the table." That's where a show's writers - who range from executive producer, co-executive producer and supervising producer on down to story editors, staff writers and trainees - work together. In television writing, everything happens at the table. Story ideas are pitched, scripts are read, notes are made, rewrites take place. Sitcom writers get to know one another intimately. "There's a lot of instantaneous bonding because you spend so much time in the room, and writers are always, consciously or unconsciously, making jokes to prove that they're funny or to keep the muscle going," says Thad Mumford, a writer-producer at Paramount Pictures.

Mumford is an anomaly in the business of television writing. Before landing the position of staff writer on the Electric Company in 1971, he worked as a page on the Tonight Show. His biggest credit came after a short stint as story editor for Maude. He was the executive story editor/producer for M*A*S*H for four years. Since then, he has worked on A Different World and Coach. He believes his success "has to do with just dumb luck and the world being different when I started out." Maybe because there were no blacks to help him along, he now reaches out to aspiring black writers.

When Rob Edwards, the co-executive producer of Out All Night, graduated from Syracuse University in 1985, he was told not to even consider moving to California, because black people don't work behind the scenes in Hollywood. "That's when I found Thad Mumford," he says. "I wrote him a letter and said, |What's the deal? How does this thing work?' And he told me.

Edwards has gone from being a production assistant on Mary to a story editor on Full House and A Different World. He admits he's more at ease writing in black rhythms. "I would get into trouble a lot of times on white shows because "I would start pitching stuff from a specifically black childhood, like parents combing your hair. You can't pitch a nap joke on Full House." In seven years, Edwards has worked on six successful shows. He, too, considers himself an anomaly, but he qualifies the statement: "I don't want to come off like I'm the big cheese, but it always seemed to me that there are so many black shows on TV, I just assumed that there were a lot of black writers."

Wrong. There is a shortage of black writers. The handful of experienced black television writers are at work on current series, so that when a new show is created, it's hard to find blacks with producer credits. Ehrich Van Lowe is in demand because he has those credentials. He was wrapping up a season's worth of his new sitcom, Where I Live, when he was yanked into the position of executive director of Roc. Van Lowe has been in the business for nearly 10 years and did his growing up working on such diverse shows as Knight Rider, Charles in Charge and The Cosby Show. "In this industry, it seemed if you were a black writer like myself, who clicked, then you were just shot up to the top, and all the other people in the middle seemed to be falling out."

Bennie Richburg reached "the top" in just three years. He started as a trainee on Fresh Prince of Bel Air and is now the co-producer of the hit Martin. "The type of writing that I do is very hot right now," he explains, "which has enabled me to move up as fast as I am."

"I was kind of a Cinderella story," says Michael Moye, the co-creator of Married With Children. He got into the business in an unusual way - he entered a playwrighting competition and won the Norman Lear Comedy Playwrighting Award in 1977. He left behind a budding career in marine biology to write for Good Times. Then he wrote for The Jeffersons for five years, during which time he reached the position of executive producer. Haunted by the taunt, "Yeah, but can he write white?" Moye co-created what he considered the whitest show, Silver Spoons, in 1982. For the last seven years, he has written for and produced Married With Children. "There's not too many of me, unfortunately," he says.

There's not too many of Susan Fales, the executive director of A Different World, either. "While there are a lot of young men who are in positions similar to mine," she explains, "it's rare for a young woman, particularly a young African-American woman, to be in this position." Two weeks after graduating from Harvard University in 1985, Fales began as a trainee on The Cosby Show, working her way up to the position of staff writer. In 1987, she was transferred to A Different World, where she moved up from story editor to co-producer to supervising producer to executive producer in five years' time.

Six writers, six anomalies. "Everybody thinks they're out there on their own, huh?" asks Ralph Farquhar, who left an acting career in 1981 to pursue a writing career in television. He started as a staff writer on Happy Days and reached the supervising producer level on Married With Children in 1990. Now he's a writer-producer at 20th Century Fox Television.

His good-news-bad-news prepossession is not unfounded fear. Black shows seem to go in and out of vogue. But whether or not the way today's sitcoms portray African Americans affects the shows' popularity, Farquhar feels a responsibility to the self-esteem of an entire race of people. "We're all in this game together," he says. "It's unconscionable that we're still repeating the same patterns and images that were started even before Birth of a Nation."

Ehrich Van Lowe agrees. "At the beginning of the season, I was surprised because I felt that many of the shows I saw were not fresh; they seemed to be a throwback to the same old type of black sitcom."

Thad Mumford describes today's black sitcoms as "horrible, all of them." But he has been around, and he understands the trap. "I don't blame the black writers," he says. "I blame the networks for their limited view of how they see blacks on television. On every black show there's a lingering patina of stereotype - the characters are very familiar TV archetypal characters."

Many African-American writers are pleased with the number of black sitcoms on the air, and they want to laugh, but the caricatures get in the way. "NBC put on a bunch of shows last year, all horrible," Farquhar says. "None of them had any black creative talent that was the real power behind them. They were all variations of the same show. Even the one Bill Cosby put on: here's Malcolm Jamal Warner, and there's the idiot, the sidekick. Out All Night: there's Morris Chestnut and there's the idiot, the sidekick. You can go right down the line."

Rob Edwards, one of Out All Night's co-creators, believes that in the last couple of years it has become more difficult to write black shows, due to the emphasis on positive black role models. Nevertheless, he defends the portrayal of his main character's "sidekick," Vidal, a man who's all fun and no drive: "I know tons of Vidals." He also defends Out All Night. "The show is about so many great, positive things," he says. "It's about bettering your lot in life, getting yours and getting older. Chelsea is an entrepreneur who owns an apartment building and a successful club. She's trying to bring along Jeff very much like Thad [Mumford] brought me along."

On Martin, the main character is played by Martin Lawrence, who for certain skits dresses up as Sheneneh, a gaudy, outspoken, flirtatious female who lives across the hall. Martin is his own sidekick, and the show's skits are funny, but, as Farquhar hastens to point out, "So was Amos 'n' Andy."

"I don't think we do stereotypes," Bennie Richburg asserts. "We come up with funny characters that aren't necessarily negative. I compare Martin to Sanford & Son. We do real characters, both good and bad. What makes Martin so funny is his character. That's the part of the show where we go out on the edge on the skit side."

Karen Raper, a story editor on Roc, rallies to Richburg's side, saying, "Flip Wilson put on a dress. Geraldine - remember that? Why lambaste Martin for putting one on? Milton Berle put on a dress. Should we forget that? We have to learn to laugh at ourselves."

"I don't mind some of the clowny things they do on a show like Martin," Van Lowe says. "Fortunately, it's offset by a show like Roc, where we're trying to say, |This is us. You've seen white people's portrayal of us; this is our portrayal of ourselves.' I think we all have to police our image."

Edwards expresses pride in the fact that, of the six new black sitcoms on in the 1992-93 season, Out All Night is the only one with a black creator and a black co-executive producer. That's important because "there's a big difference between the way we tell our stories and the way people outside our community tell our stories. You look at the white books on Malcolm X - they're very different from the black books on Malcolm X. People see different sides. The same basic things happen in TV. A good white writer can make a good approximation of what black writers write. But they're guessing."

Farquhar once pitched an episode where black characters were playing cards, and his assumption was that they were playing bid whist. "A white producer will look at you and say, |What is bid whist? And why is it important for them to be playing that?'"

"There are things that we feel are issues that whites may not feel are issues because they are only issues to us," adds Van Lowe. "When a white head writer is sitting there holding the pencil, he is not prone to acknowledge my saying, |I don't think black people would do it that way.'" Black writers nod their heads in agreement at this point, as Van Lowe tells his classic "Thanksgiving story." For a particular episode of a black sitcom, one of the white writers asked him what blacks serve for Thanksgiving dinner. "I said, |We all eat turkey, but we like macaroni and cheese.' He couldn't believe it, so it never went in."

Eunetta Boone and her partner, Karen Raper, are fortunate to write for Van Lowe, who was brought onto Roc because the show needed a black person to ensure an honest portrayal of African Americans.

"With a black executive producer, the obvious you don't need to fight for," Boone says.

Raper adds, "We no longer have to go into lengthy explanations of black life."

Another case in point is Fresh Prince of Bel Air, which is the creation of a white husband-and-wife team. Anyone who has watched the show on a regular basis surely noticed a significant improvement in June 1991, when Winifred Hervey-Stallworth became the executive producer of the show. "Suddenly that show went from being a black caricature of a white caricature to actually being justifiable as a black family. That was because Winifred Hervey is a black woman," says Farquhar.

Hervey-Stallworth, who is resolute about being the person behind the camera, believes that all writers have to write to universal themes. Though her credits include Laverne and Shirley, Mork and Mindy and the Golden Girls, she takes to Fresh Prince her blackness, which she defines as "cultural differences or things that may be funnier to a black audience but can also be funny to everybody."

These days, what is funny to everybody? There has been a lot of healthy discourse regarding today's black sitcoms. Some observers align themselves with Bill Cosby, who sees nothing but shallow stereotypes in the current crop of sitcoms. Others, like Michael Moye, Susan Fales and Karen Raper, regret that we've lost the ability to laugh at ourselves. "We've gotten so politically correct now that the only fair game left is Republicans," Moye says. "I'd like to tell people to chill just a little."

It took Fales a bit longer to reach that conclusion. "I used to be very uptight in terms of the way we were represented," she says. "I felt we should just put the talented tenth forward. But now I realize there's room for everything. I think it's OK to laugh."

Now that the discussion of black TV images has been elevated to the point where Cosby is using his induction into the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame to lash out at the industry, and the networks are publicly fielding questions from African-American producers regarding their representation of blacks, writers for the black sitcoms are feeling the pressure. Many of them consider it a burden to try to be responsible for an entire race of people and how they're portrayed, especially when people are so diverse. "We look at one show, and that's supposed to represent everything about us," Hervey-Stallworth says. "It's just an impossibility."

Boone laments that more often than not, what is appropriate wins over what is funny. Her partner at Roc, however, doesn't see a problem. "It's only restrictive for people who aren't creative," says Raper. "The field is open. Creativity is open."

Creativity, surely, is open; but the doors to the representation on TV of the full spectrum of African-American life are not. Fales strikes a nerve when she says, "Like the buffoons in Shakespeare, we are not regarded as interesting enough for drama." If only there were a wide range of black shows on the air - lowbrow comedies, highbrow sitcoms and dramas - there would be less cause for complaint. As it stands, all we have are situation comedies that are relegated to the one-hour time slot beginning at 8 p.m.

"At 8:59 you say goodbye to the black shows, and then the street-lights come on," Rob Edwards says with a sigh.

The fact that we don't see a cross section of African-American life on TV is not the fault of the sitcoms; sitcoms are supposed to make fun of unwilling suspects. But perhaps the current discourse will lead studios to care more about black television shows and call upon black talent to create and produce those shows. "Let black writers have the guiding hand," pleads Ralph Farquhar. "That's what Fox did with Keenen Ivory Wayans. In Living Color is one of the more liberating comedies to come around in a long time because it pokes fun at everybody and doesn't apologize for it, which is a freedom, a talent we as black creators have not had ever before because there's this overwhelming feeling we can't make fun of ourselves. Well, we can."

COPYRIGHT 1993 Heritage Information Holdings, Inc.
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