Nineteen years after Sidney Poitier taught a decrepit Spencer Tracy (what? he was old) to accept interracial relationships based on the power of love and nineteen years before Ashton Kutcher taught Bernie Mac the same thing through a sing along and by ripping off Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Mark Pelfrey Watson taught all of us uptight white people a thing or two about race relations taught in the 1986 dual identity comedy classic Soul Man.
Background: Watson (C. Thomas Howell) is a rich white kid accepted to Harvard Law School but his rich whiteparents won’t help him pay his way. He can’t get loans or financial aid so he applies for the Henry Q. Bouchard Memorial Scholarship, which gives the best black Harvard law student from Los Angeles a full ride. But he’s not black?! What’s a plucky young go-getter to do? Watson takes some experimental tanning pills to change his skin color (which makes him look more grey-ish than black), dons a jheri curl (kind of) and during one semester (give or take) ends up learning a very important lesson about race and racial equality.
(about 37 seconds in)
While there were many classic characters in the movie- Ayre Gross’ sidekick/best-friend-to-Watson character Gordon Bloomfield, James Earl Jones’ James Earl Jones-ian Professor Banks, Melora Hardin’s trying-to-sleep-with-every-race-she-can Whitney Dunbar- the two stand-outs were fellow classmates Barky Brewer (Wallace Langham, later of Larry Sanders and CSI fame) and Booey Fraser (Eric Schiff, of Soul Man fame). From the first time Watson arrives on campus to the end of the first semester when grades are finally revealed (the end of the movie), every time we see Brewer and Fraser they are telling racist jokes. We see them several times and it’s always the same thing: they say pretty old, standard, vaudevillian even racist jokes (e.g. “There’s one thousand black guys and one white guy- what do you call the white guy? The warden!”), the supposedly black Watson overhears them, they see Watson and say “no offense.”
What makes them so fascinating is that the racist jokes are seemingly all they talk about; it might be the only thing they do. Several possibilities account for for this. One is that Watson just happens to walk by them at the worst possible moment. Another is that they’re just saying these jokes to screw with the kind of douchey Watson. Or, what we’re probably supposed to think, it actually is all that they talk about.
(used to illustrate a point, not to identify myself with Brewer and Fraser)
We all have a stock knowledge of off color jokes. If you say you don’t, you’re lying. You might not say them in pleasant company, you might not laugh at them, but you at least know some. That’s all I want you to admit. But can you imagine having a three month stable of old racial jokes? It’s not like the two law students are evolving the art of the joke, updating them to the new decade. We don’t see them making fun of any other minorities (to the best of my recollection). They’re not adding anything new to the black joke arsenal. The stamina required to repeatedly do zingers for even a couple of days is impressive by itself (you’d expect to be worn out after a few hours) but they do it for months. They must have put incredible amounts of research into pre-Civil War jokes books for material.
And for their bizarre obsession that was already years out of place in the mid-eighties, The Racist Joke Guys in Soul Man are Forgotten But Great movie characters.
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