Patron Pick – Pootie Tang

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month, those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Matt Harris.

Pootie Tang (2001)
Written and directed by Louis C.K.

Let’s talk about Louis C.K. For a few years in the 2010s, this stand-up comedian had hit the big time. He had a hit TV series on FX that allowed him to play creatively with the format and even push the line between comedy, drama, and absurdism. After about a decade of success, the allegations came out. Multiple women accused C.K. of sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior over many years in several different settings. His main proclivity seemed to be pleasuring himself in front of women without their consent. These women were either comedians trying to break out or crew on the set of shows C.K. worked on. His career has never quite recovered, though he still has plenty of celebrity comedian buddies backing him up. Before all of that, he created the character of Pootie Tang for the Chris Rock Show.

Pootie Tang is…complicated to explain. On the surface, he’s a parody of jive-talkin’s blaxploitation characters from the 1970s. The character originated on the Chris Rock Show, where he was played by writer/performer Lance Crouther, who reprises the role for the film. As for the plot, it’s a real mess. The film begins with a framing device of Pootie giving an interview to Bob Costas, who introduces a clip to the character’s new film Sine Your Pitty on the Runny Kine, a joke referencing the incomprehensible speech the character uses. The majority of the movie is the story of Pootie caught up in a genre-appropriate battle with an evil white businessman. 

This is not an inherently terrible concept. Attempts to parody blaxploitation cinema aren’t uncommon and range in how successfully they pull it off. Keenan Ivory Wayans’ I’m Gonna Git You Sucka is an example of a film that gets it mostly right. However, something is way off and immediately recognizable because of the editing. Bad movies are easy to spot when you can see that they are chopped up to hell and use constant voice-over to inform the audience of who these characters are and what they are doing. A good film should be able to rely on images and bits of dialogue to communicate its story and the exploits of the characters. There is such a lack of confidence in that area with Pootie Tang you can practically see the producers quietly apologizing and trying to walk away.

This was essentially a way to keep the cast & crew of The Chris Rock Show employed. His HBO late-night series ended in 2000, and Pootie Tang had been one of the characters featured in the series. Louis C.K. and Wanda Sykes (who appears as Biggie Shorty) were the co-producers of the HBO show. Apparently, film producer Caldecott Chubb took over the film, which Chris Rock had predicted would happen. That takeover occurred mainly in the editing phase, during which C.K. was kept out while Chubb attempted to piece the film together himself. So, in that regard, I won’t blame the final product entirely on the now-disgraced comedian.

What is certainly the product of C.K. and his collaborator Rock is the insane amount of misogyny in the film. There is not a single woman who isn’t an evil, conniving temptress or a dumb-as-rocks bimbo. Jennifer Coolidge is in this film, one of her roles after success with American Pie and Best in Show. She is utterly wasted. Sykes’s Biggie Shorty is presented with the visuals of a sex worker while pining away for the title character. There’s a farmer’s daughter who is offered up to Pootie Tang when he’s on the run from his foes, who he then hands over to his friend Trucky (J.B.Smoove). They marry, and the last we see of her, she’s stereotypically nagging Trucky.

This era was littered with strange cobbled-together comedies with minuscule cult followings: Death to Smoochy, Freddy Got Fingered, Cabin Boy, and Half-Baked. They were movies I found humor in when I was a college student who didn’t know better. As an adult, whatever charm I imagined them to possess clearly faded. Pootie Tang was one of those movies I probably laughed at sitting around the dorm watching it the one time I did at the time. When it ended, the details faded from my memory because rewatching it made me realize I had forgotten 90% of this. 

What walked away with this viewing was bewilderment at how the damn thing even got made. I often think the present is full of lazy, sloppy comedy films, but it’s something that extends way back through American cinema. Pootie Tang was received by audiences and critics the way it deserved to be, as a waste of everyone’s time and money. I didn’t find myself laughing once, and the film constantly threw half-thought-out ideas that needed a lot more work to discover their humor. I’m guessing the following events of 2001 helped wipe this film from most people’s memory. While I don’t think it’s close to being a masterpiece, 2002’s Undercover Brother at least has a plot you can follow and does the blaxploitation thing a bit better. Literally, no reason to revisit Pootie Tang unless you were forced to like me.