Cord Jefferson speaks onstage at 'A Big Long Talk With Cord Jefferson' during New York Magazine's Vulture Festival LA at Goya Studios on Nov. 12, in Los Angeles.Tommaso Boddi/Getty Images
When Jordan Peele’s genre-defying social thriller Get Out was nominated as a comedy at the Golden Globes, the writer and director famously responded, “What are you laughing at?” His body-snatchers movie about post-Obama racism in the U.S. is witheringly funny in a gag-getting-caught-in-your-throat kind of way. The humour is a way to process the insidious violence the movie is about.
I thought about Peele’s question when American Fiction, Cord Jefferson’s riotously funny satire with a tragedy coursing beneath its surfaces, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. The film, an adaptation of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, stars Jeffrey Wright as a frustrated African-American author whiffing at a culture industry that capitalizes on Black struggle and trauma. The audience was in hysterics, awarding the film TIFF’s coveted People’s Choice Prize, which tends to fix the bow tie on crowd pleasers making their way to the Oscars. I wondered whether the (mostly white) Toronto audience felt implicated in some of the scathing humour Jefferson packed into his celebrated debut feature.
“I’m not getting offended by what people are laughing at,” Jefferson tells me in a Toronto hotel just a couple days after the premiere. He’s sitting on a couch, thinking about an editorial he wrote for Gawker a decade ago, back when he was a journalist. The piece was a response to an audience laughing out loud during Django Unchained when a slaver played by Quentin Tarantino throws dynamite at terrified Black men trapped in a cage. “People are complex and nuanced,” Jefferson continues, “and you have no idea why somebody’s laughing at something.”
Before anyone doubts it, American Fiction, which opens in Canadian theatres Dec. 22, is meant to be a comedy, even if it’s grappling with a difficult reality for the Black community. The laughs, penned by a guy who cut his teeth writing and producing for TV shows such as Watchmen and Station Eleven, are very intentional. “I want it to feel like a big-tent movie that allowed a lot of people to come in,” Jefferson says. “I don’t want anybody to be afraid to come to see this movie because they feel like they’re going to be lectured or guilt-tripped or scolded for their beliefs.”
Jefferson is tall and handsome, wearing a loose beige shirt that hangs relaxed from his broad muscular shoulders. He’s way too good looking to be hidden behind the camera, or in print.
Jefferson’s time as a journalist casts an emotional shadow over American Fiction. He was perennially called on to write about the Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Mo., or racists spewing hatred at Barack Obama. He described that tokenizing experience in an article called The Racism Beat, recognizing the valuable insight he as a Black man brings to a homogeneous industry but chafing against the way that same industry then pigeonholes his voice to only speak about Black trauma and the hatred directed at people of colour. When he shifted into TV, he discovered the limitations, even when playing make-believe, were the same. Every story had to be about slavery, civil rights or poverty. That’s what led him to adapting Erasure.
Jefferson, who opens up about having to seek out anger management therapy when he was younger, empathized with the protagonist Thelonious (Monk) Ellison’s acting out on his “impotent rage.” In American Fiction, Wright’s Monk, a figure internalizing a lot of the subtle racism around him, lashes out at his publisher’s demand for “Black” content by parodically writing the novel he assumes they want, My Pafology. The Precious-like autobiography cynically repackages all the stereotypes and tropes about “the ghetto” you might recognize from Menace II Society or Get Rich Or Die Tryin’. The prank blows up in Monk’s face when the novel becomes a mercurial sensation, putting pressure on Monk to lean further into the charade.
The plot shares some DNA not just with Spike Lee’s confrontational Bamboozled (2000), where Damon Wayans plays a TV executive popularizing minstrelsy again, but also a 1987 film that proved formative for Jefferson: Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle. Townsend stars as a Black actor competing to play slaves or criminals at the movies. Jefferson cites the parodic scene when Townsend’s Bobby Taylor imagines an acting school in which white instructors teach how to walk Black and talk jive, so that they can pursue a career playing rapists and gang members.
“I remember watching that when I was a kid and thinking, oh my god, these guys are talking about racism, but they’re just having fun with it and laughing about it,” says Jefferson, describing how that influenced his own approach to comedy. “These are obviously, very serious issues, sometimes with fatal consequences. And yet, if we can’t find a way to experience joy in all of that, then I think we’re really, really in trouble. I think that it does a disservice to the reality of human beings to pretend that all of this stuff breaks our spirit. Because it doesn’t.”
Like Hollywood Shuffle, American Fiction is a response to the way Hollywood corners artists like Jefferson to tell a certain type of Black story. But I wonder if responding is breaking free or if Jefferson is still being cornered into making a movie in dialogue with those very limitations.
When you get past the self-conscious satire in American Fiction, there is a moving Alexander Payne style dramedy, featuring warm and generous performances from Sterling K. Brown, Tracee Ellis Ross and Leslie Uggams. I ask Jefferson if he thinks it would have been possible to make a movie just about that – about a middle-class Black family where the weight of racism is not central to the plot. He ponders the question long and hard, throwing out scenarios where it could happen if this proposed movie had a low enough budget and/or the power of Denzel or Viola behind it.
“After working in this industry for about a decade,” he says, “I think I know enough to say that that movie would probably not get made.”
Special to The Globe and Mail