It’s not too hard to lie cowardly in the shadows and fire off sniper rounds at an easy target in the open. That’s basically what cartoonist Aaron McGruder did when he used his popular “Boondocks” show to blast holes in filmmaker Tyler Perry’s character, image, leadership style, sexuality and spirituality.
In that infamous and outlandish episode, McGruder ripped into Perry like he had a personal score to settle. He didn’t even use his own artillery to try to inflict damage on Tyler Perry Studios. McGruder used someone who allegedly had intimate knowledge of Perry’s peculiarities and idiosyncracies. This was someone who after being terminated from Tyler Perry Studios, traipsed to the other side of Turner Broadcasting, set up tent with McGruder’s camp and regurgitated the contents of his mental database of Perry into McGruder’s lap.
What that former TBS employee told McGruder became the basis for the “Pause” episode.
If I were McGruder, I would be wary and watchful of someone who chucks bombs at his former employee as he speeds away to his next opportunity.
But there’s another issue here. McGruder basically cast Perry as a perpetrator of a buffonish character [Madea] and a sex-crazed movie mogul who uses his position, power, Hollywood influence and the Word of God in a wicked way to bribe sex from men.
But then, I’m struck with how McGruder could shoot arrows of hate at someone’s cranium when his characters spit out the N-word and other profane words with regularity. I was personally disgusted when he had Martin Luther King use the N-word in one of the episodes a few years back. And let’s not even mention how the two kids disrespect their grandfather and exhibit random buffoonery. This is the same man who named his lead character Huey P. Newton, after the founder of the Black Panther Party.
Don’t get me wrong. I love how “South Park” has made satire de rigueur in adult-oriented animation. And Jay Leno and “Comedy Central,” in my opinion, provide some of the funniest, dead-on parody of high-profile personalities (sometimes I wondered what former President George W. Bush felt after some of Leno’s scathing skits ventured right up to the line of demarcation of good taste). But McGruder’s “Pause,” seemed intent on humiliating, beating down, demeaning and belittling Perry — as if McGruder attended some Howard Stern workshop on how to grind celebrities into sand with absolute disregard for boundaries or decency.
This didn’t seem like some detatched observation that McGruder made. It seemed like something deeper was at work here. –terry shropshire
