Comedian Tony Sculfield’s talks funny and not funny in the black community
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Tony
Sculfield knows comedy. An accomplished comedian and radio personality
for Chicago’s WGCI, the tall, fair-skinned jokester is also very
involved in the African American community – the source of his biggest
inspiration. Recently rolling out caught up with Sculfield who shared his hit list of funny and not so funny issues facing black people in 2009. –gavin philip godfrey
“Stop Snitching”
– “The whole ‘stop snitching’ mantra that we’ve adopted [and] we’ve got
to protect Pookie, the killer on the block — but we’re not going to
protect our babies. It kills me that the only time I can get somebody
to tell me what happened at the crime scene, is when the police do the
crime, but if Pookie shot somebody, nobody knows nothing.”
Grown A** Kids
– “This goes on both list. These kids nowadays are grown as hell. You
walk down the streets [and] you see high school kids with cell phones,
and they got pagers and MySpace. They got $.12 in their pocket, but got
five devices on their belt.”
Youth on youth crime
– “Every time one of these stories hits the paper it says, ‘Another
Chicago Public School student,’ — as if that’s the only thing [to this
kid]. Just to see some of the things going on in these schools — it
really, really is not funny. As grown ups in Chicago, we’ve got a lot
of work to do. We’re blaming the kids, but the kids are [reacting] to
what they see every day. You tell a kid he’s got to walk through a
metal detector to go to school, [ and he’s thinking], ‘I got to sit and
think about some homework, [but] I just got frisked to walk up in
here.’ That needs to be fixed.”
Gentrification/City Budgets
– “All of this stuff we’re fixing up downtown, but hell can’t nobody
afford to come downtown. I mean we’ve got the most beautiful downtown
in the country, but hell, how many of us can even afford to come down
here and stay two hours? You can’t park — you can’t afford anything
down here. Fix it up, but damn, let me be able come too. And put some
black faces on that fountain at Millennium Park . I don’t ever see any
black faces on the fountain. I’m like Sal’s Pizza shop up here!”
