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Really? I've heard Roger Ebert say time and again about some craptacular Hollywood gross-out comedy or sex comedy or slasher flick something along the lines of "There are movies that remind me that being a film critic is a JOB, and this is one of those movies." He and the non-Siskel couldn't agree on which movie was the worst movie of the year and which was the second-worst movie of the year -- "Deuce Bigalow, European Gigolo," or "The Dukes of Hazzard" -- and somehow it's a problem that Ebert hated "Diary"? Point being -- critics generally don't like obvious, broad comedy, and "Diary" is part of that genre. Luckily for Perry, moviegoers like obvious, broad comedy, so he's made a lot of money and made a lot of people laugh, and he seems to love what he's doing. To that I say, good for him. But it's silly to expect critics to like his movies if they're not the kinds of movies critics like, just like it's silly to expect TV critics to like broad, stereotype-oriented comedy shows like the always-panned "Blue Collar Comedy." Just like for Tyler Perry, that Larry the Cable Guy dude is lucky that audiences love the stuff at which critics shake their heads.
What I find bizarre is the intersection of race and drag. There really hasn't been a white man doing a drag character since Milton Berle. Sure, the man-in-drag angle has been used in a lot of white movies, but the drag was a plot device, a means to an end -- being in an all-girl band in "Some Like it Hot," getting an acting job in "Tootsie," visiting a girlfriend in "Private School," hitting on chicks in "Sorority Boys," etc. It's been used in black movies, too, of course, with "Juwanna Mann," "Big Momma's House" and "White Chicks" being other uses of drag to get the male character somewhere he couldn't get otherwise. Madea, though, is the queen of her own universe, not a device that some male character has to undertake. That makes "her" much more like Geraldine, the Flip Wilson character that furthered his comedy icon status, or RuPaul, the character that made the then-unknown Rupaul Andre Charles into a household name in the 90s. I don't know what it means, if anything, but given the intersections of race and sex and power in our culture, I feel like it has to mean something that black men can so much better reach the mass market if they dress like women.
I had noticed news stories about Perry's success when "Diary" first came out, and I had really thought that it was more about the marketing to a religious community than it had been a question of race or gender. But not too long ago when Dave Chappelle was on Oprah talking about the self-destruction of his eponymous show, he talked about how, in making a movie with Martin Lawrence, the writers kept wanting Dave to wear a dress, because, you know, it's funny. Then he casually observed that white writers always want to put black men in dresses. Since then, all I keep seeing are ads for "Family Reunion." What does it mean that Madea is played by a man and not a "real woman" of the kind we really never see -- i.e., a heavy, older woman? What are the ricochets of social meaning when you have an older, black woman who is really a man and is an agent of moral change who is an authority figure that carries a gun and smokes dope? Never mind whether his work has uber-serious, artistic merit -- why can't we take the messages he's trying to send without him wearing a dress to do it?
