Salon's James Hannaham grapples with a question that has long vexed the guardians of popular culture, not to mention John Singleton: what is it about black comic actors and ladies' dresses? And is the eagerness of such performers as Tyler Perry and Eddie Murphy (and such predecessors as Flip Wilson, the first black comedian with his own network variety show, which made his character Geraldine a household name) somehow a step back for racial progress? Drag has a long and distinguished show business lineage, if you're in England, where comedians both low (Benny Hill), high (Monty Python), and in between (the Australian Barry Humphries) had treated women's wear as just another weapon in their comic arsenal, but in America it's often been looked down upon; perhaps tellingly, one of the few famous comedians since the dawn of the TV age to regularly appear in drag was Milton Berle, who was legendary for two things: his willingness to put on a dress, and the oversized manly appendage that one writer referred to as "an anaconda", which must have helped protect him from any feelings that he was somehow "emasculating" himself. Some, like Singleton, and Dave Chappelle, who says that he felt "pressured" to perform in drag on his own TV show, think that emasculating black men is what black drag is all about, that it defuses their sexual identity and makes them harmless and easier to laugh at. "The black man in drag," writes Darryl James, "is one of the new coons."
One big problem with this argument is that it seems to presume that black comedians who dress as women are doing so to pander to white audiences, and the principal audience for Tyler Perry's films, and even for a subpar Eddie Murphy vehicle like Norbit, is black. As Hannaham points out, "Perry's core audience began with middle-aged black women, introduced to [Perry's character] Madea by the outrageous traveling theatrical shows that made her name. These faithful admirers, and the millions who have caught on since, still can't get enough of the character" even as others protest that "the surefire laugh-garnering power of slipping a macho Negro into chiffon doesn't represent anything but an effeminizing, racist spectacle." Perry seems to have a surer sense of what he's doing than Singleton or Chappelle, whose comments about the denigration of black men have a subtext, and sometimes just a text, expressing distaste for cross-dressing because they associate it with homosexuality. "What Chappelle and Singleton may miss out on by refusing to pimp those pumps is the dangerous fun of performing outside the constraints of race and gender. The desire to inhabit the lives and bodies of others doesn't necessarily make you a racist any more than sporting a double-D cup makes a man love men. Often it is inspired by a sense of play, and sometimes it is meant to increase understanding." Essentially, Perry means the pistol-packing, no-nonsense Madea as a comic tribute to a certain kind of black woman. Granted, good intentions aren't always enough to counteract lack of talent fortified by cluelessness: that's the message one is liable to get from examining the terrifying career of Chuck Knipp, a white "comedian" (and onetime Libertarian candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives) who dons drag and blackface to pay "tribute" to black women by impersonating a grotesque babbling figure he calls "Shirley Q. Liquor." If his fame (bolstered by performance clips on YouTube) continues to spread, Knipp will be lucky if he doesn't end up delivering his last plea for tolerant understanding to an angry mob with flaming torches. But Tyler Perry's audience — the very people who might be expected to object Madea if the character was truly objectionable — have got his back.