A Fun-House Portrait of Black Life on “South Side”
I suppose it’s accurate to refer to “South Side,” a series set in the Chicago neighborhood of Englewood, as a workplace comedy. Simon (Sultan Salahuddin) and Kareme (Kareme Young) are best friends who grudgingly clock in at Rent-T-Own, a shady furniture-and-appliance-rental service. Its name, a parody of Rent-A-Center, is the bitter, primal joke of the show: a retail center where the true product is debt. “South Side” derives a great deal of its Black black humor from the encounters between its protagonists and the delinquent renters: the physical aspect of product repossession allows for so much slapstick. The tang of the show’s critique brings to mind other satires of workplace culture, such as “Reno 911” and the genre-shifter “The Office.” But the creators of “South Side”—Salahuddin, his brother, Bashir, and Bashir’s writing partner, Diallo Riddle—cast a wider net: they have crafted a fun-house portrait of Black life in the Second City.
“South Side” is now an HBO Max original; its second season premièred on the platform last month. But the show débuted, in 2019, on Comedy Central, where it joined a slate of excellent and underwatched indie-ish sitcoms, including “Workaholics,” “Detroiters,” and “The Other Two.” (“The Other Two” has also moved to HBO Max.) In recent years, Comedy Central has become an incubator for joke auteurs—willful classicists who prize, above all else, eliciting belly laughs. Bashir and Riddle are straight-up comedy and TV geeks: the same month they blessed us with “South Side,” the duo put out “Sherman’s Showcase,” on IFC, a loving and layered sendup of seventies variety shows.
Although Riddle-Salahuddin productions are entertaining to viewers of any race, make no mistake—the fun and the farce are pitched to please Black American audiences. You either get the references—to primping culture, to funeral culture—or you don’t. Such gleeful specificity is a rarity, and so, after the first seasons of “South Side” and “Sherman’s Showcase,” fans steeled themselves for the shows to enter the hallowed bin of single-season greats.
The first season of “South Side” can certainly stand on its own. The giggles come early, and easily. In the pilot, Kareme and Simon ditch their jobs at Rent-T-Own to pursue higher ambitions: Kareme dreams of a career in astronomy, and Simon yearns for the white-collar life. But neither of them makes it; Simon can’t pass a background check, and Kareme discovers that astronomers are racist. The guys come slinking back to their old jobs, and their boss, Quincy, Kareme’s twin brother (Quincy Young), punishes them with a dreaded task: they must recover an Xbox from the terrifying Shaw (LaRoyce Hawkins), a hottie gangster with a toothpick lodged in his teeth. “When you was a little homie, did you always dream of harassin’ Black people for their appliances?” Shaw asks Simon, inducing an identity crisis in the upward-striving schlemiel. “You succumb to the system,” Shaw continues. “I circumvent the system. I circumcise the system.”
American sitcoms are notorious for their own kind of circumvention: skirting issues of money. Even when lower-class characters are depicted, you never have to worry about their houses being repossessed. The stakes in “South Side,” however, are tangible: Simon spends a night in jail, for instance, because he owes child support. The steadiness of the show’s hilarity is therefore a miracle. Bashir Salahuddin and Riddle, obsessed with the sharper edges of seventies pop culture, bring the bite of Norman Lear to outlandish reflections on American inequality. “The Day the Jordans Drop,” a Season 1 episode, is a masterly satire of sneakerhead fanaticism which peaks with a risky joke based on “Sophie’s Choice.” The dig would be nasty if the writing weren’t so obviously steeped in insider familiarity. “South Side” is full of hustlers thirsting for the American Dream as it has been filtered down to them. Kareme and Simon engage in several get-rich schemes: shilling Viagra to horny senior citizens; hawking a hair cream that creates instant waves but also, inadvertently, attracts bats; selling flavored popcorn outside a local movie theatre. “Tuscan pineapple?” a customer asks, approvingly, after tasting it. “You an innovator.”
In some ways, “South Side” is of a piece with animated sitcoms. There’s the controlled sprawl of loony characters, the granular picture of a city and its people, the surfeit of meticulously wrought gags and cultural references, the interplay of goofy and existential humor, the razzing of dirty political princes. The universe of the series is as dense and as technically adroit as that of “The Simpsons.” We have the cops, Officers Goodnight and Turner (Bashir Salahuddin and Chandra Russell, Bashir’s wife); the mewling politicians, Allen Gayle and Adam Bethune (Diallo Riddle and Langston Kerman); Shaw and his bullies; the pissy desk worker, Stacy (Zuri Salahuddin, Bashir and Sultan’s sister); and a bunch of child wiseacres. These characters have inner lives, but they also behave, and even look, like cartoons. In one episode, a crowd of vengeful clowns descends on the neighborhood, wreaking havoc on cops and citizens alike; when an armoire falls on Simon, you almost expect his eyes to bug out like Wile E. Coyote’s. The background is thick with the activity of lovable freaks—Scary Barry, Red Cornrows, Trapper (who sells furs, by the way, not drugs). This wackiness is fun, but it is also oddly literary, a kind of translation of the hyperbolic in Black American humor.
No scene demonstrates this so well as one in which Officer Turner, a vulture of sorts, spontaneously buys—using Venmo—a shabby home from an old man sitting on his stoop. It turns out that there’s a tenant inside, Miss Dorothy, a legendary civil-rights leader, who refuses to pay rent. Turner rips into the old lady, who hits right back, and their fight escalates with the appearance of a gun, and the funniest line I’ve heard in years: “Fuck Coretta Scott King! You may know her as King, but I just know her as Retta. Always thought she was so-o-o-o funny. Well, the bitch never made me laugh once!” Through farce, the show stealthily skewers moralistic discourse.
“South Side” has many complete story arcs, and yet it retains the spontaneous energy of a sketch show. Bashir Salahuddin and Riddle have assembled a troupe of lively performers, professional and amateur, unknown and famous. The standout is Russell, as Turner. She’s wired a bit like Olivia Pope—cunning, no-nonsense, venal, sexually dominant. We meet her when she’s out on patrol, using her police siren to flag down a “zaddy.” In a show that is constantly playing the Dozens, Turner reigns supreme; there is a tinge of the sadistic in the way her serrated tongue comes for Officer Goodnight, an uptight, self-loathing dope. But the show also gives her a complex interiority. At a Spades tournament, she is taunted by her slimy pastor father: “I don’t even tell nobody my daughter a po-po. Holdin’ us down, killin’ us, everything.” Turner visibly shrinks. The moment is realistic. All the Black cop’s bombast has obscured her inner torment: Turner’s hustling, more than anyone else’s, exacts a human toll.
Sultan and Bashir Salahuddin are Chicago natives, and “South Side” is shot on location. No detail is too minor for the production designers, who arrange tableaux of slightly distended realism. I also want to praise the costume design—in particular, the parodic genius of Turner’s wig-cycling, how rooted it is in diurnal Black womanness. My favorite cold open involves Stacy and Turner buying human-hair extensions from a Vietnamese beauty-supply store. “This is that real uncut virgin,” Stacy says, licking the fibres.
Idealizing one’s love object is a cowardly way to love—“South Side” is a teasing ode to the place for which it’s named. Occasionally, the series portrays TV news segments, in order to detour away from its viewpoint and ventriloquize sensationalist perspectives of the city. These are the show’s version of a righteous rant. In a Season 2 episode, a character reads a fictionalized autobiography by the controversial Lori Lightfoot, titled “If I Did It: How I Became Mayor.” After Gayle, an arriviste alderman, strikes an environmentally disastrous deal with the mafia running the city, his hype men visit a local school: “Hey, kids, do you like oil? Let’s play some drill music!” The kids roar. The writers brilliantly blur the line between stereotype and reality; “South Side” may be naughty, but it’s got a strong moral core. ♦
"Fun" - Google News
December 06, 2021 at 06:01PM
https://ift.tt/3EwNznA
A Fun-House Portrait of Black Life on “South Side” - The New Yorker
"Fun" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2ZVoWNN
https://ift.tt/3c6iubT
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "A Fun-House Portrait of Black Life on “South Side” - The New Yorker"
Post a Comment