THE MOST OFFENSIVE SITCOM OF THE PAST FIVE DECADES: MyNetwork's UNDER ONE ROOF

How does one reconcile the simultaneous feelings of being appalled and fascinated? I honestly do not know, and thanks to an accident of channel-surfing I must now ponder that question.

Have any of you you out there heard of the new sitcom UNDER ONE ROOF? I hadn't heard word one about it, but I came across it while flipping around the channels last night and was horrified by what I witnessed. At first it looked like just another of the terrible "black" shows vomited onto the airwaves by the MyNetwork — formerly the UPN, so that should give you a clue as to what kind of programming I'm bitching about — but as I watched, a mind-altering tableux unfolded within the stale framework of a "fish out of water" comedy along the lines of WHO'S THE BOSS?, THE FRESH PRINCE OF BEL-AIRE or THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES. In the space of one half hour I beheld a parade of ethnic stereotypes so egregious that it made me wonder if I'd fallen into an alternate universe where they still allowed this kind of pre-1960's minstrelsy to flourish, and had somehow found a away to resurrect Stepin Fetchit in the form of Flavor Flav.

Flavor Flav: not Stepin Fetchit, but an amazing simulation.

Mister Flav plays Calvester Hill, a cartoonish, over-the-top hip-hop caricature who has recently gotten out of jail after taking the rap to prevent his "good" younger brother from ruining his much more promising life after crashing his car. Once out, Calvester calls in the favor owed him by his brother — who is now a bourgie real estate gazillionaire with a white wife — and promptly moves into his bro's mansion, thereby bringing his streetwise ways and sensibilities into conflict with what is perceived as his brother's disconnect from his own "blackness," as well as opening the door to his thuggish pals and former fellow prison inmates. In the first episode, Calvester must fend off the unwanted presence of "Pumpkin" (Tiny "Zeus" Lister), a hulking violent offender who protected Calvester during his days behind bars, who now seeks payback in the form of post-incarceration prison-style man-on-man lovin'. Yes, you read that right: a sitcom that seeks to wring laughs from a gargantuan black man set on ass-raping his former cellmate, and said former cellmate's outlandish efforts to avoid being sundered by a huge, throbbing wedge of ebony soul pole.

That setup is bad enough, but the icing on the cake is the parade of broad ethnic cliches. The black people present are either "buppies" or hip-hop "playas" and blaxploitation stock characters, complete with pimp walks, gold chains, and flamboyant threads, and as for the other races about the only offensive stereotype not present was a Jew with a gigantic hook-nose and Smith Brothers beard who controls all aspects of the media and lusts after hot, blonde shiksas. But the true standout here is the Chinese cook (Emily Kuroda) who yammers in embarrassing pidgin English and sports fashions seemingly designed by Mao Tse-Tung. I know she's an actor and is looking to earn some cash, but this isn't the way to do that and maintain one's dignity. And as I predicted nearly twenty years ago, without Public Enemy and Chuck D, Flavor Flav has degenerated into the living embodiment of the classic minstrel show coon.

But, you may ask, is any of this funny? The answer to that is an unequivocal "no." I'm not alone in my assessment, as can be found in articles from the LA Times and Courant.com that for some reason I can't establish links to. But that's no big deal; just Google Under One Roof MyNetwork and search for yourself. Read the reviews at the aforementioned spots and you will know all you need to know. As for me, I plan to regularly tape this atrocity, just so I'll have it for posterity; no one believes me when I tell them about HOMEBOYS IN OUTER SPACE (1996-1997), a show I wish I'd taped just to prove how extra-stupid it was, and I won't make that mistake twice.

The late, unlamented HOMEBOYS IN OUTER SPACE (1996-1997).

OH, FOR FUCK'S SAKE: THE PLAGUE OF WIGGERS

One of the many things that regularly drives me into a state of foaming-at-the-mouth apoplexy is how American black slang of roughly the past twenty-five years or less has crossed over into common parlance, no doubt thanks in large part to white folks' love of hip-hop culture. But while imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, it's downright ludicrous and embarrassing to see the apple-cheeked spawn of suburbia going about speaking of "dissing" one another, "droppin' it like it's hot," "getting their drink on" and other such displays of wannabe sepia coolness. That shit is amazing to me, having grown up at a time when much of what we descendants of slaves and other "low" types contributed to society was considered vulgar, offensive, and flat-out worthless, the exceptions being our music, crazy styles of dancing, humor, and fried chicken.

Proto-wigger, circa 1928.

When rap and hip-hop culture really began to work its way into the mainstream fabric of American life — an hilarious and unintentional act of cultural revenge/subversion, if you ask me — I was in my second year of college (Fall 1984-Spring 1985) and began to notice white people spouting terms like "word up" and "word to your mother," among others, and I wondered if it was the resurgence of such collegiate lingo as "twenty-three skidoo" or "It's the bee's knees." Having finally had enough of pop music radio thanks to the oversaturation of the disco era and the nightmare of the early-1980's insinuation of soulless MTV-style music-as-product, I missed much of the early hip-hop, my knowledge of such stuff being pretty much limited to having heard "Rapper's Delight" exactly once in 1979, followed in short order by Blowfly's pornographic attempt at the form, "Blowfly's Rap." I didn't know "Planet Rock" from "Rock Lobster, but that would change as my fellow students shook their collective booty to Grandmaster Flash, Run DMC, and others, all while the genre's vernacular was disseminated, absorbed, and implemented across the nation, causing the rise of the white boy who would be black.

"Yo, Mistah Deejay! Rock dat shit, mah wigga! Muthafuckin' Red Hot Chili Peppers, son!!!"

My fondest memory of the early days of this phenomenon was during a mid-1980's summer stint as a counselor at Westport, Connecticut's Camp Mahakeno, when one of my under-ten charges began to execute a sequence of spastic "moves" that were allegedly break dancing steps. A portable radio tuned in to one of the area's pop stations blasted "Jam On It" and the kid began a wild St. Vitus' dance that looked for all the world like he was possessed by a tequila-fueled Pazuzu, limbs flailing in all directions and displaying about as much rhythm as a demolition blast. I asked him just what hell he was supposed to be doing and he answered, "I'm breakin', Buncheman!" When I asked him where he learned to perform this borderline-epileptic display he responded, "I learned it on the street, man!" As I nearly pissed myself laughing (which he did not appreciate) I said "What street? The Post Road?" and told him to get up off the ground and rejoin his fellow campers in their current activity (which was making lanyards, or some shit). The kid ignored me, flipped over onto his stomach and began doing "the worm," at which point he propelled himself nuts-first onto an upturned rock. As he writhed in the dirt, practically vomiting from the physical agony, the other children exploded with howls of derisive laughter and pelted him with clods of dirt until I put a stop to it (admittedly well after I really should have stepped in).

First there was Hitler Youth, now this.

I see unaware and awkward white niggers, or "wiggers," all over the fucking place nowadays and I wince when I witness their behavior. But while I find them annoying enough in the world at large, I really find it irksome to be in the midst of several of them while I'm at work. As I've mentioned in other posts, I'm one of the older employees at the design gulag, the average staffer ranging somewhere in their early-to-late twenties, just the right age to be among the first generation to have the hip-hop argot be a part of their lives since infancy, rather than having it enter their consciousness as a something happening organically in whatever urban region they grew up in (like my buddy Hughes, a Bronx-born and raised Irishman who is far "blacker" than I'll ever be, yet somehow isn't a wigger), or merely through TV or the radio; hip-hop is a part of their speech, the once-reviled "Ebonics" now an accepted part of the lexicon.I can make a statement in conversation with some of my white co-workers and hear them answer with a "true dat," be greeted with a " 'sup, B?" and a host of other terminology that makes me feel like I've been trapped in a post-modern TWILIGHT ZONE story where everyone in the world is a character in the AMOS 'N' ANDY universe except me. All of it is done with no intent to offend or offer ironic content, but it does put me off and strikes me as silly. And I'm curious to know if the same people would affect this way of acting if dropped into the heart of Bedford-Stuyvesant, near the old Slave 1 theater. Somehow, I think not.And do not get me started on "yiggers..."Or would that be "Chiggers?"