A Quote by Will Smith
In black neighborhoods, everybody appreciated comedy about real life. In the white community, fantasy was funnier. I started looking for the jokes that were equally hilarious across the board, for totally different reasons.
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People have a comic bent or an angularity to their thinking, and those are the people who make jokes. And it's usually people who were in an environment, when they were young, where jokes were at a premium, or at least considered important to a life. My parents always listened to the comedy radio shows, we went to the comedy movies, and my parents appreciated comedy. So kids listen and follow what their parents like.
White people made up the n-word, they knew about racial jokes before anybody, and in their old movies and old cartoons they made fun of everybody, especially black folks. Racial jokes were not new to them.
These events are swirling around them. In the white community, people felt like they had no control over their neighborhoods, their destiny. In the black community, centuries of government and economic forces were pushing on them. I went in with a kind of arrogance, maybe, that came from living in a very intellectual family, and I left knowing that there was a lot about the way people lived that I didn't know about.
Here's a woman, a real pioneer for other women looking for careers in stand-up comedy. And talk about guts - she would come out here and sit in this chair and say some things that were unbelievable - where you would have to swallow pretty hard... but it was hilarious... the force of her comedy was overpowering.
I have a black Grandma and white Grandma. My white Grandma lives in Fort Lauderdale, paints, and teaches bridge. She's wonderful. My black Grandma, equally wonderful, is my neighbor across the street, Bobbie, who's always insisted that I call her Grandma, and honestly, over the years she's become a real Grandma to me.
I think one of my first jokes - in the black community, there's people who have jokes about skin tone. People like, 'You so black, you purple.' 'You so black, you gotta smile so we can see you at night.'
I was brought up in black neighborhoods in South Baltimore. And we really felt like we were very black. We acted black and we spoke black. When I was a kid growing up, where I came from, it was hip to be black. To be white was kind of square.
In 1990, when we started the Black Community Crusade for Children, we were always talking about all children, but we paid particular attention to children who were not white, who were poor, who were disabled, and who were the most vulnerable.Parents didn't think their children would live to adulthood, and the children didn't think they were going to live to adulthood. That's when we started our first gun-violence campaign. We've lost 17 times more young black people to gun violence since 1968 than we lost in all the lynching in slavery.
The reason why rappers are living in - you know, driving in Mercedes-Benz's and living in neighborhoods is because they're selling their music, not just to the black community, but to the white community.
If we're united, I wouldn't care about a White school board getting me a little something. The hell with the school board; that's the White supremacy board and the White supremacy board wants you reading stupid books rooted in the idea of White supremacy. I don't want a thing to do with White supremacy.
All good writers across the board, if they're dealing with real tragedy, they will give you comedy in it. And if they're dealing with real comedy, there will be tragic moments in it.
There is an overarching comedy community, and then there are little comedy community pockets, almost like the way L.A. is structured. You have this grand scope of what Los Angeles is, but within that, there are all of these multi-functioning cities and neighborhoods.
I was influenced by a lot of comedy growing up, I had good parents. They were funny, too. My mom was hilarious; my dad was hilarious. I guess being at home around the environment was just a good stage to get started.
Interestingly, when you do films, sometimes you have conscious reasons, things that you were looking for, or stuff that you were trying to do. And then, you see the film and you think, "Wow, it ended up being something totally different!"
I'd say a lot of black comics were forced to do the black comedy circuit. I'd go into black comedy clubs and see what they're going through, which is different because they're almost made to be in another world.
Feminists must denounce the use of white insecurity - whether in relation to white womanhood, white neighborhoods, white politics, or white wealth - to justify the brutal assaults against black people of all genders.
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