Where Are All the Black Teen Comedies?

this video is brought to you by mubi a curated streaming service showing exceptional films from around the globe get a whole month free at movie.com yara zade so this was initially a video for my patreon i posted it back in august august 25th to be exact and i asked my patrons are you guys gonna be okay if i decide to make a longer version of this and put it on my actual channel and they're really cool about it and i said i would do it in a month's time posted in august it is now november so i guess it is time when i posted a video on patreon there were things that i cut out of the original script that i would like to add here so there will be times throughout this video where i will cut in like this me the lumberjack just deposit some things that i didn't elaborate on that i would like to elaborate on now that this is going to be not just on patreon i can't wait to sit down and just watch some black teen comedies let's see what the tv has to offer tonight huh all right nope yeah that's sad on that one jesus is it just a marathon of dramatic black coming of age films what is the deal there are black teen comedies right jesus are there black teen comedies where are they have they gone missing hey aqua um i just want to call and check on something it's probably not sorry can i just stop you for a second i'm actually really glad you called i'm in a bit of a pickle here have you seen any black teen comedies lately i can't seem to find them i swear it's like they've just disappeared but they were here before though weren't they hello hello yep [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay obviously there are black teen comedies i'm not a idiot but there's not a whole lot of them it's like where are they even though when i say that i'm thinking specifically about black teen comedy movies it would be really stupid to ignore the golden age of black sitcoms some of which focused on kids and teenagers keenan and kell my cousin skeeter romeo just jordan milisha sister sister that's so raven the famous jet jackson god was i nuts about this one lee i miss you so much smart guy everybody hates chris and the groundbreaking what's happening with tv especially during the black golden age there are many teen sitcoms we can look to but when it comes to movies it's uh it's a little different 1975 was the year of coulee high the first black coming of age comedy this movie wound up being the inspiration behind what's happening the first black teen sitcom of its kind although the movie garnered a lot of critical acclaim for a long time coulee high remained the only film of its kind sure there were plenty of coming-of-age high school movies but they were usually about these kids not these kids or these kids or these kids or the you get what i'm saying well a few and i mean few very few black teen films were made and released during this time none of them are comedies another one of those wouldn't happen until 1989 with the film debut of hip hop duo kid in play house party while high may have been the first high school comedy about black kids it did end with a central character being killed it was inspired by something that the writer of the script experienced in real life the sudden and violent death of a good friend make no mistake eric monty's intent with high was to showcase the good things about living in that community in 2004 monty spoke with the la times and said he wrote kulihai to dispel myths about growing up in the projects i grew up in the cabrini green housing project and i had one of the best times of my life the most fun you can have while inhaling and exhaling the movie was after all based on his experiences in high school it would be disingenuous for him not to include death in the end house party on the other hand is completely fictional it simply follows two best friends played by kid and play who want to throw a new guested house party they have no business throwing a house party so they have to get it by without their parents knowing they also have love interests that they're trying to court hide may have been the first black high school comedy but house party was the first one where everything was completely immersed in birth it was really the first time black teenagers got to see themselves in a way that was very light-hearted and just a good time after that things were kind of looking up the 90s were filled with high school comedies that centered on black kids coming of age whether in the suburbs or the projects you got to see kids dealing with things like going to prom maybe failing a test brutality was never the focus of anything no my sarcasm isn't very good but i'm taking classes though the 90s were a really fantastic time for seeing a lot of black centered films and tv shows the 90s brought us living single and it brought us poetic justice it brought us militia and it brought us jason's lyric we saw love stories and action heroes and so many things that in previous decades were simply unheard of but those black teen comedies no that didn't really happen the most we got for a black high school movie was the you know white savior joe where the teacher comes into the hood and it's like i gotta get these kids to care about their lives because they don't give a but don't worry i'mma get to that another day it's kind of strange because black comedies aren't at all uncommon we literally have so many great ones but these are also typically about adults which is perfectly fine it's just a wonder why there's such a disconnect when it comes to comedies about black teenagers earlier this year i did i'm sick of the lumberjack look i did a video about rue and hunger games and racism and all the that happened with that way back when i had mentioned something about the adultification of black girls there's an actual study on it and that extends to black children regardless and i think that sort of plays a role into just the dearth of black teen comedies that we get on a regular basis there's also the prospect or the whole thing of like if you have a predominantly black cast people will want you to have a reason that you have a predominantly black cast as if you know black people need a reason to exist in movies they can't just be the characters they have to be black for a reason it creates this environment where executives in these board rooms making the big decisions look at it as it needs to be a message movie there needs to be something that they learn i kind of picture in these board rooms the people who give the green light to some of these projects as like a bunch of ms morello's we have an uneven number of boys and girls so i thought i'd make you a single father i know it's something you can relate to with your childhood and all i have a father i know chris if only your mom knew his name they have this perception of black youth and of black life that is very one-dimensional and that's what leads to all of these movies being made about this traumatic black experience that isn't every black person's experience and also doesn't provide um any levity and if it's just black people having a good time they're like oh well there there can't be a message in that because they need a reason to be black i think all that stuff sort of contributes to it uh sorry i didn't say it eloquently but um you know it's monday so outside of the sitcoms there wasn't another high school comedy about black kids until 1999 with trippin oh look at that forgot to mention class act don't know why i don't know how but i did and i'm sorry and then the 2000s came and while the 2000s weren't necessarily a golden age for black tv it was pretty good for the black teen comedy in comparison to earlier years these movies weren't always gems but it was nice to see a story about black kids that didn't end with one of them being killed love don't cost the thing the updated remake of can't buy me love was also a box office failure but it's one of those things like pre dc journey small it and len whitefield that's black famous we know it not everybody else does see the 2000s it's kind of significant to me this is when i was growing up and a lot of the movies from this era were family favorites i have fond memories of all of us sitting around the living room glued to the screen while we watched robots and johnson family vacation and like mike and we were a bow wow family roll bounce and atl were the quintessential skate movies atl was more of a drama with a lot of really funny moments and i think i can look back on it rather fondly despite ti's presence because no one died in the end when i say like that out loud that roll bounce or atl or love don't cost a thing are kind of important to me because none of them ended with a black kid getting killed or incarcerated i feel kind of stupid not stupid because it's an unreasonable thing to consider but stupid because i can't really say that's a huge problem in other more popular teen comedies i mean you can't really say that one of the reasons ferris bueller is so popular is because no one dies in the end i think it's wild and sad that something so rare in most teen movies is overwhelmingly present in black teen movies to the point that not seeing it makes me excited that early to mid 2000s era with teen comedies quickly vanished though the truth is that dramatic movies about black people especially black teenagers are often preferred over the comedies movies that showcased how difficult it was to be black and to live in the projects have been pretty popular since the black exploitation era in the 1970s but it was during the 1990s that this type of film really started to boom and why was that don't fret young viewer this is not john singleton's fault so what he made a good movie and everyone decided to copy it i don't want to sound at all like i'm dismissing the importance of boys in the hood or the impact it had on films or the work of john singleton you know it is an important film to me and i think it's wonderfully made it's not the movie's fault that it became so successful that it spawned an entire genre of so-called hood movies the hood movies while popular with black audiences started to become more popular with white liberals as well whether they were audience members or directors who decided telling a hood movie might be a good way for them to get their name on the map like it did for bozia king when he directed fresh in 1994. as the years have gone on white interest in these exploitative trauma slash poverty porn films about black life has quadrupled and when these movies come out quickly followed by reviews you see a lot of quote we need the story right now for awareness and stuff so when you're black you're kind of like yeah i'm pretty aware i remember when them premiered i didn't want to watch it because i had heard from a friend that it was pretty brutal this friend warned me because they knew how much trouble i had watching black people being brutalized so i avoided it my closest relationship with the show is through reviews and things friends have told me i remember very shortly after it premiered a review was published on the guardian i read it and all the praises of the film feeling kind of puzzled i thought surely brutality without substance was going to lead to a critical pant but then i realized the writer was lucy megan lock reviewers like angelica jade bastian whose work i admire so much called them bile i couldn't help but think about the material effect on black folks of watching such violence in life and on screen when we're being confronted by news stories like that of the killing by police of 20 year old father dante wright in minnesota watching them feels like compounded trauma it doesn't induce empathy or the desire for abolition in white folks doesn't force others to consider the anti-blackness they perpetuate if anything it lets modern white people off the hook providing extremes with which they can distance themselves from their own racism and for buzzfeed michael blackman wrote them is a bloated series that repackages some of the worst evils ever committed to black people in the united states for entertainment and it does so with little to no depth about their implications an approach that seems to be part of an unfortunate growing trend in hollywood because the series features a black cast as its focal point it was going to be viewed through a specific lens no matter what but in attempting to combine real historical trauma with a metaphysical component them ultimately dilutes itself relying too heavily on real world issues that never authentically gel with a story being told the show is definitely horror but the only viewers who may be scared possibly even traumatized or black people for npr aisha harris wrote them suffers from the same predicament that has arisen in the wake of black people becoming hashtags in death the public knows far more about their last moments on earth than all the moments that made up their life before viewers who make it through all 10 episodes will know plenty about how the emories have suffered and been traumatized but they won't come away with much else i'm not trying to say that movies like boys in the hood or minister society are unpopular in black communities or that it's just trauma porn because that would be a lie they're very popular and they're very good they have more substance in that but it's more that there's a reason all the boys in the hood copycats would and could be so easily financed by major studios all throughout the 90s and the 2000s because white people kind of like it in may of 2020 sharonda j brown penned the piece about sean king and all of his it's a very engaging and insightful read and it's going to be linked in the description please read it if you don't know who sean king is or as we all know him talking next talcumx is a professional grifter who loves to use his social media to bombard unsuspecting people with graphic pictures and videos of black people being maimed and or murdered sean king is not popular with black twitter and not that popular with the black community outside of twitter and yet he stays relevant and afloat because his fans who are as brown describes overwhelmingly white liberals are extremely supportive of him of his popularity in spite of the allegations against him and his suspicious behavior sharonda j brown wrote what we need to understand about sean king's platform is that black people are not his intended audience or his concern it's white liberals the one who damned near salivate over imagery of black trauma and death black drama has been a growing topic and a growing debate in the twitter sphere on one hand some films that fall under the black trauma umbrella from biopics to documentaries are informative and necessary in teaching younger generations about their history on the other hand so many of the films we see finance today that have exclusively black cast tend to be the ones that are harder to watch sure not all of them are violent or show black people being killed some of them are quieter with their violence stories about youths who end up incarcerated over something they didn't do like in monster but even without revelling in buckets of blood and acts of pure anguish violence is still violence and anything that exists solely for the purpose of putting the spotlight on black trauma is frankly exhausting is this obsession with black pain that feels beleaguering and insulting black people have inherited along with soul and seasoning skills a lot of trauma we have a lot of pain we know all of this hurt and we also know that we have to just keep going what a lot of people tend to forget especially the people who cannot seem to look past the struggles we have experienced and continue to experience is that along with pain we also inherited joy we also inherited the ability to laugh the ability to sing and to dance and to celebrate life returning to the words aisha harris wrote in their review of them them suffers from the same predicament that has arisen in the wake of black people becoming hashtags and death the public knows far more about their last moments on earth than all the moments that made up their life before by focusing too much on black pain we forget to celebrate black joy in a video i did on my patreon i talked about seeing black girl hood on screen and how most of these films that focus on black girls coming of age are kind of sad even if they end on a hopeful note we never really see a story about black girls growing up that isn't tragic in some way they're scarcely any levity when's the last time you saw a high school comedy starring a black girl who just like wants to find the right dress for prom there's always this focus on everything that is hurtful and everything that is wrong and tragic and with the few black teen comedies that we do have you see a whole lot of colorism it's not obviously um exclusive to just these black led films are these black produced films because you see it all the time in white produce films i mean colorism is just rampant but i have noticed that in the few black teen comedies that do exist there is a focus on light-skinned black girls like only light-skinned black girls can be the romantic leads only like-skinned black girls can take precedent in the story so even when you do have these movies that have exclusively black cast where there is an opportunity for black girls to be a part of something that is light-hearted and has levity you will find more often than not dark-skinned black girls are excluded from this but joy is an act of resistance daring to be happy in a world that is systematically designed to leave you at a disadvantage is a revolutionary act in itself in the words of cleaver crews amplifying black joy is not about dismissing or creating an alternative black narrative that ignores the reality of our collective pain rather it is about holding the pain and injustice as we experience as black folks around the world in tension with the joy we experience in pain's midst it's about using that joy as an entry into understanding the oppressive forces we navigate through as a means to imagine and create a world free of them i think focusing so much on tragedy really shapes a young person's perspective on what they can aspire to be i recall this moment when i was really young where i was watching some show with a friend i don't remember what the show was just that the main character was going to a school dance and had this beautiful dress on the friend i was watching it with said she wanted to dress like that and i ignorant and informed by the fact that most of the black characters i had seen in movies never got to experience that kind of joy said can black people go to prom i was a stupid kid what are you gonna do there's a danger in spending too much time in the macabre black teens deserve to see stories that star people who look like them where there's a lot of laughs and a lot of romance and no one dies or gets sent to prison is that too much to ask for in the 90s when the violent hood movies became popular friday was kind of revolutionary because it was one of the first of its kind to be a story that took place in the projects but that was still comedic ice cube who co-starred in poison hood basically said we get all these stories about how horrible the hood is can we get one where we acknowledge some of the funny that happens the people we know the people we love can we be happy man i got mind control over deebo he'd be like shut the up i'll be quiet but when he leave i be talking again i want to see black boys in a story where they are joyful and having fun i also want to see black girls in a story where they're joyful and having fun we get stories with black women as the main characters and young black girls as the main characters but there's a huge gap when it comes to black girls who are teenagers and when we do get those stories where black girls are the leads it's almost always about them being brutalized in some way how damaging is that while there are movies that do exist of this sort from jump in to let it shine which is honestly a really good adaptation of serano they're so rare and understand that it actually gets kind of annoying movies about black teenagers coming of age in general tend to fall under the radar no matter what but i've noticed that when these stories are painful and or traumatic or include the topic of police brutality they get a lot more attention and a lot more critical acclaim the celebration it receives is put under the guise of this story is important right now and what we end up getting is a lot of people banking on black trauma to get attention and an oscar that's right two distant strangers i'm calling you out in your if no one is brutalized in the story the movie may get a lot of positive critical attention fight concrete cowboy for example but it might also slip into relative obscurity when it comes to people who actually watch it when i mention fruitvale station or 12 years of slave to people they always know what i'm talking about but if i mention say kirkland sometimes it takes a little while for them to remember the movie if they know it at all movies that see black people being brutalized seem to be the more popular choice among the general audience it seems almost like a spectacle for non-black people who feel like they learn more or improve by watching that trauma is turned into a teaching moment for non-black audiences especially white liberals it's talcomax saying i'm retweeting this image or this video because it educates people and this goes back to what bastian was saying in her review of them that the brutality is empty it does nothing for black audiences and it doesn't even educate white audiences it's just there for entertainment just as i was finishing editing this video yahya abdulmatin had an interview in the guardian and he said something that i knew i just had to include here and i think it's the perfect end to this video drama has been obviously a very very real visceral part of the black experience in america but we are so much more than our trauma what about joy and love what about magic and hopefulness and possibility and the everyday mundane those are equally the stories i care about bringing into the world and that i plan to produce and develop so where are all the black teen comedies there's no straight answer nothing cut and clear but i know those stories exist they're out there living in the minds of people who haven't had the chance to tell those stories because as it seems in the real world and on the internet and in the movies black pain is just the more popular choice the end of our lives is more important than the content of our lives our tears are more valuable than our laughter and that and this is an official sociological term by the way sucks that's why no matter how silly a movie like jump in or a college road trip may be on the surface no matter how poorly they're reviewed no matter if i like them or hate them it's kind of amazing that they exist at all they may be silly sometimes straight up bad but they dare to prioritize black joy in a media landscape that was and continues to be obsessed with black pain now go forth and make that unfriendly black hotties movie i asked you to make last year mubi is a curated streaming service a place to watch beautiful interesting incredible cinema every day movie premieres a new film from iconic directors to emerging auteurs there is always something new to discover with mubi each and every film is hand selected it's like your own personal film festival streaming anytime anywhere now usually at this point i recommend a couple of movies and usually they are feature-length films but i felt some of the subject matter in this video coincided beautifully with a short film from director mitch kalisa play it safe follows jonathan a drama school student who has been pigeonholed into playing a hoodlum the stereotypical character designated for all black actors at one point in their careers to use movies eloquent description it covers unconscious racism in seemingly liberal spaces and for my feature film recommendation today i want to recommend the terrorizers by edward yang edward gang is one of my all-time favorite directors i think he was brilliant and magnificent and just so far ahead of its time that it's kind of bizarre his films are incredibly meditative and quiet but they pack a knockout punch everything from taipei's story to a confusion confusion yee oh my god we all love that one but the first one of his that i ever saw was the terrorizers and so naturally i have a very soft spot for it and if you've never been introduced to his filmography if you haven't taken a chance on it yet the terrorizers is an excellent place to start and it is on movie so please go watch it you can try movie free for 30 days at movie.com yara's aid that is m-u-b-i dot com slash yara's aid for a whole month of great cinema for free [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Yhara zayd

Views: 54,199

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Id: 0e56BTIxdBo

Length: 26min 10sec (1570 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 10 2021