This may be the next antisemitism-in-pop-culture story everyone tweets about
Kanye, Chapelle, Eddie Murphy? I really hope not.
A few days ago, a trailer for a new movie called “You People” on Netflix popped up on my Instagram feed.
The trailer seemed to be for a sweet romantic comedy, a genre I love, starring Jonah Hill, who’s funny. His co-star Lauren London is pretty, but, refreshingly, is not stick-thin and not 10-15 years younger than Hill. And they have a funny meet-cute.
Plus, Eddie Murphy as London’s tough dad? Amazing.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus playing Hill’s tone-deaf mom trying to show how liberal she is by saying she thinks “the police are f*cked up to black people” cracked me up.
And then, about two minutes into the three-minute trailer, it became a very different movie.
(Trailer has some curse words in it, but is otherwise SFW)
"Oh, so you're all Muslim," Louis-Dreyfuss's character says when the two sets of parents meet.
"Very much so," Murphy says, adding that his hat was "a gift from the Honorable Louis Farrakhan. Are you familiar with the minister's work?"
"Well, I'm familiar with what he said about the Jews," Louis-Dreyfuss responds.
Later in the trailer, Hill's dad, played by David Duchovny, says Jews were "OG slaves," and Murphy asks, incredulously: "Are you trying to compare the Holocaust so slavery?"
"Our people came here with nothing, like everybody else," Louis-Dreyfuss says soon after.
The movie isn’t out until January 27 and I’m very intrigued by it. I’m going to reserve judgment until I actually watch the movie, but I admit that I already have very mixed feelings about it.
“You People” has a stellar cast, the makings of a really interesting plot, and a bunch of solid jokes in the trailer.
From the trailer and a second video clip with no reference to Hill’s character’s Judaism, it seems that Murphy is playing a familiar tough dad character, as well as a black man who is skeptical about white people, and his jokes are at Hill’s expense. His wife, played by Nia Long, seems pretty bland in both videos, though one hopes the filmmakers make better use of her talents in the actual movie.
It’s Hill’s parents who we are supposed to laugh at, not with. The joke seems to be that they’re clueless, privileged “white Jews” - a concept that, at the very least, displays historic ignorance and at worst, hostility, but seems to be what we’re supposed to think from what we see in the trailer.
While I hope that people watching the trailer who don’t know what Louis-Dreyfus is referring to when she mentions “what [Farrakhan] said about the Jews” will Google it and find out what a despicable person he is, I’m pretty sure we’re mostly supposed to cringe at the things she and Duchovny say. (I also cringed at Murphy’s outrage over comparing the Holocaust and slavery, but I don’t get the sense that’s the reaction the film was going for.)
There is no problem with Jewish characters being flawed. Perfect characters are boring. But if all the laughs are at the Jewish family’s expense, then they’ll get tired, fast.
It’ll be like that recent Amy Schumer video, where making fun of other groups is an HR offense, but Jewish jokes are not only fine but encouraged.
At the same time, Hill, who co-wrote the film, has a strong Jewish identity. There’s always the chance we’ll be pleasantly surprised by how his movie family is represented. By the way, three of his costars - Louis-Dreyfus, Duchovny and London, his love interest - have Jewish dads.
Hill wrote the movie with Kenya Barris, who wrote the TV show black-ish and its various spinoffs. Barris said in a recent interview that they came up with the idea after talking about how “Jewish and Black culture often sometimes run into oppression Olympics and we loved the idea of that…We definitely wanted to talk about things that were in our heart.”
Barris said they started writing the film three years ago. But he couldn’t have asked for better timing for its release, after a series of statements by African American celebrities that ranged from obviously antisemitic - Kanye West - to willfully ignorant and possibly hostile - Kyrie Irving, Whoopi Goldberg - to probably not antisemitic but still raised many people’s hackles - Dave Chapelle. Suddenly, Black-Jewish relations are a hot topic.
The fact that this is a serious topic should not mean that it can’t be used for comedy. A good joke can shed light on the absurdities of any issue and can make it easier for people to address things that may otherwise be too awkward to touch.
We’ll find out whether the film succeeds on that front when it comes out at the end of the month.
P.S. Almost any time I write an article, I do more research than I actually end up using. This time, I came across this Eddie Murphy monologue, which doesn’t really fit into what you just read, but I enjoyed it, so I’m sharing it.
Huzzah! All the best. thanks so much for adding the Eddie Murphy clip