Featuring: Steve Harvey, D.L. Hughley, Cedric the Entertainer, Bernie Mac
Director: Spike Lee
Producers: David Gale, Walter Latham, Spike Lee
Cinematography: Malik Sayeed
U.S. Distributor: Paramount Pictures
The Original Kings of Comedy is Spike Lee's latest documentary filmmaking venture (a genre he broke into with 4 Little Girls), and represents a cinematic record of a stop on the cross-country comedy concert tour of The Kings of Comedy. The tour, which has been playing to packed houses since it began its run in 1997, has become the most attended comedy tour in history, with ticket sales exceeding $50 million. Filmed over two nights (February 26 & 27, 2000) in the Charlotte (North Carolina) Coliseum, The Original Kings of Comedy is a relatively straightforward presentation of a concert. With the exception of a few short, banal interludes, Lee remains focused on the stage show, allowing the comic momentum to ebb and flow naturally. It quickly becomes apparent that his intention is to document the event, not to force it into a mold that fits a vision other than that of the stars.
Concert films, regardless of whether they're music shows or comedy acts, run the gamut from excellent (Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense, featuring the Talking Heads) to unwatchable (Jim Jarmusch's Year of the Horse, featuring Neil Young). The key to such a movie's success is its ability to capture the "you are there" feeling - a task that The Original Kings of Comedy is largely effective at. Admittedly, there's no way that sitting in a motion picture auditorium can duplicate the experience of being live, but, by using digital sound, uncomplicated shots that don't call attention to the camerawork, and simple editing techniques, Lee draws the viewer in.
The Kings of Comedy road tour showcased the talents of four of black America's hottest male comedians: Steve Harvey (the host of It's Showtime at the Apollo and the star of TV's The Steve Harvey Show), D.L. Hughley (of TV's The Hughleys), Cedric the Entertainer (also of The Steve Harvey Show), and Bernie Mac (of TV's Moesha). During the course of the movie/show, each has approximately 30 minutes of stage time, and, while their styles are different, there's enough synergy between them to make the program seem like a cohesive whole rather than a series of unrelated segments (a frequent drawback to many comedy club shows). The four men complement each other, and each seems to have just about the right amount of time to forward his comic cause.
The material is frequently ribald, often racy, and always laced with profanity. Those who are offended by the use of four-letter words in comedy concert movies (such as Richard Pryor's Live On the Sunset Strip, Eddie Murphy's Raw, and Martin Lawrence's You So Crazy) will be openly horrified by what transpires here. No apologies are offered or needed, however (in fact, Bernie Mac does a skit centered around the use of the word "motherfucker" in black culture), because the movie is consistently funny - often side-splittingly so. The Original Kings of Comedy only features a few dead patches, none of which last very long. And, while I found certain of the entertainers to be more enjoyable than others (Hughley being the most consistently humorous and Harvey getting the biggest laugh with his rap sketch), none of them are duds.
Even though the primary purpose of the show is to garner laughs, there is a social subtext to the comedy. Through their jokes, the four men examine a wide variety of culturally relevant topics, including racism (which is touched upon frequently), the generation and gender gaps, and the roles of stereotypes in modern America. Considering that the audience is about 95% black, it should come as no surprise that the comedy is primed for African Americans, but there's nothing here to keep it inaccessible to white viewers. I'm sure I missed a lot of the subtleties, but that didn't prevent me from being entertained. Admittedly, it helps to see this film in a packed theater. An enthusiastic crowd can blur the lines between film and reality, making it difficult to determine where the laughing and clapping on-screen begins and ends.
The stage personalities of Harvey, Hughley, Cedric, and Mac come across unfettered and bigger-than-life. Lee's three or four attempts to take us backstage slow things down for a few minutes, but they aren't long enough to kill the momentum. During the actual show, his approach to filming is deliberately low-key, although there is one instance (during a moment parodying The Matrix) when he can't resist a little post-production tinkering. Overall, however, Lee takes a step back, allowing The Original Kings of Comedy to be about the Kings, not the filmmaker - and that's the way it should be, because these men are more than capable of holding anyone's attention for the nearly two-hour running length.
© 2000 James Berardinelli