‘White Chicks’ at 20: Comedy Beyond the Pale

[Pelican Press 0]

‘White Chicks’ at 20: Comedy Beyond the Pale

In “White Chicks,” the identity switch works in similar fashion with the added twist of a gender swap. When Kevin and Marcus become Brittany and Tiffany, they’re given the privileges of white femininity. In an early scene, set in the Hamptons, a concierge asks for a credit card to hold the room. Kevin and Marcus, stuck with their own debit cards, threaten to throw a “****** fit” if the hotel doesn’t allow them to check-in. After a tantrum, they’re allowed in their rooms.

They also pull the curtain, showing how white people might act when ****** people aren’t present: When a song by the rapper 50 Cent comes on the car radio, for instance, a trio of white women are aghast when Kevin and Marcus under white makeup use a ******* slur in the lyrics. “So? Nobody’s around,” says Kevin. Armed with permission, all of the white women freely shout out the slur. In her essay “

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,” the film scholar Beretta E. Smith-Shomade keenly gives the title of informant to the Wayans brothers, who conceived of the film’s story. Their infiltration of white spaces grant a window to how whiteness operates unseen. In “White Chicks” we hear other white observers derisively call Kevin and Marcus the “Wilt Chamberlain sisters.” We hear one white woman wonder aloud if someone is “Martha Stewart broke or MC Hammer broke.”

In the Wayanses’ roles as informants, however, their greatest ******* is Crews as Spencer. Prototypically in ******* passing narratives, white people are duped while ****** people see right through the subterfuge. The extreme artifice of the agents’ garish prosthetics, therefore, is a feature not a bug. While you might expect white people to be fooled by the terrible theatrics, it’s telling that Spencer can’t tell the difference. He unreservedly pursues Marcus as Tiffany, to whom he refers as his white bunny, because she is his ideal woman: She has white skin, but through her break dancing, her curvier rear and tenacious attitude, has ****** attributes.

Spencer’s own insecurities, exemplified through Crews’s incredible mix of slapstick body comedy and sight gags, become a catalyst for unmooring stereotypes about ****** masculinity and race. Ultimately, he is pursuing a ****** man, destabilizing his own assumptions about what defines manhood and whiteness. By Spencer coveting white femininity, to the point of memorizing “A Thousand Miles” so he might prove his suitability, he also mirrors how people of ******, through the media’s representation of race, are programmed to covet whiteness too.

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#White #Chicks #Comedy #Pale

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