Like a teenage boy cleaning his room in 2005, plenty of maxims are thrown around carelessly, but occasionally, there are one or two that properly embody a truth. When it comes to cinematic comedy, there’s no grander one than “brevity is the soul of wit.” Comedy sketches are a low-stakes high-reward bet – if you fuck one up, there’s always another one after the commercial break, but if you succeed, you wind up with some epochal joke that may speak to a sort of truth – and a feature significantly ups the ante. The audience is trapped in there for 90 minutes, and once the popcorn’s gone cold by the end of the first act, if a filmmaker hasn’t managed to captivate them, well, they’re in for a long night. Such is the case with Kobi Libii’s The American Society of Magical Negroes, which lives in the shadow of a Key & Peele sketch that is funnier and more imaginative than anything on display here while also being more incisive and truthful in a way that Libii’s film doesn’t consider. That short is also roughly five minutes long – only taking up two more minutes than the trailer for the emo-rap Crow remake that’s likely going to play in front of this – while Libii struggles to stretch his premise out to 100 minutes. There are so many missed opportunities for humor or any deeper exploration of this story that it feels like the title is the only reason this movie is making its way into any given multiplex this weekend.
The problem is that there aren’t enough cited examples of this concept that can supply Libii’s reading of it. Now, I’m not saying that this isn’t a long-established trope spanning back to the 15th century, whose pernicious racism has infected so much media over time that it’s something whose consequences are probably going to take another few generations to undo – that should be particularly self-evident to anyone who managed to watch Unicorn Store or Music over the last few years. What I am saying is that the cinematic depiction of the “Magical Negro,” as understood here, amounts to almost exactly two films. When Spike Lee coined the term at a college lecture back in 2001, right around when Bamboozled came out, he cited four contemporary films as evidence of a trend, one more than a journalist needs to successfully have an editor not roll their eyes at a pitch and subsequently have them escorted out of the building by security.
Those were The Legend of Bagger Vance, The Green Mile, What Dreams May Come, and The Family Man. Interestingly, the latter two were essentially left out in the construction of our modern conceptualization of this cliché, most likely for being too contemporary (and, applied to narratives set in the past, it acts as an erasure of Black trauma in service of a feel-good lie). Still, all of them are united by the presence of magical Black characters – and their deployment to service a smarmy, treacly sentimental tone. This is why one can argue about whether or not Scatman Crothers in The Shining fits the bill (and if you’re looking for a Crothers performance that is unambiguously so, just watch Steven Spielberg’s “Kick the Can” from Twilight Zone: The Movie for a peak example of this cliche), or why Morpheus and the Oracle from The Matrix movies might slot in there. They don’t feel right, even though they can be read as stories with Black folks with powers serving a white person’s journey of self-actualization.
That Touchstone Pictures/Amblin Entertainment vibe – as best represented by Bagger Vance and Green Mile, which are directly parodied here – informs the nature of Libii’s story and its tone, from the sweeping orchestral music to the design of the magical spaces. We‘re introduced to Aron (Justice Smith), a thoroughly modern artist who makes yarn sculptures, as he fails to sell a big piece at a gallery show in the pseudo-real-world. This is because a) his art sucks, b) he’s just too meek and awkward to champagne and campaign with the assembled audience of rich people, and c) he’s too keenly attuned to white folks’ discomfort to advocate for himself. So, after echoing that famous panel in Amazing Spider-Man #50 where Peter Parker throws his costume in the trash – literally a shot-for-shot recreation – he’s introduced to Roger (David Alan Grier), who offers him the chance of a lifetime.
If he joins a secret society of Black people endowed with a collective magic used to solve the day-to-day problems that flatten a white person’s ego, he’ll make money and get put on the path to success. After some training, he proves himself by convincing a frustrated cop that he can be cool and have fun – transmogrifying the man’s nerd-dad outfit into cool-dude duds so a bouncer at an exclusive nightclub lets him in before the rest of the line while also soothing his fractured spirit – he’s let into the American Society of Magical Negroes, and given his first real assignment. He’s tasked with healing the wounds of a designer at a major social media firm and is given a job there where he can help him out. This section of the movie is essentially Sorry to Bother You but for people who can’t stand the sight of horse cocks, with its pained satire of modern-day tech excess (ain’t it quirky that they use maritime rankings instead of regular job titles? Does anybody ever actually do any work in those tech company offices? What’s the deal with airline food?) taking up so much more of this story than it should.
The white dude in question, Jason (Drew Tarver), is one of the dudes responsible for a massive fuck-up that has this social media company scrambling, a case of tech facial-recognition racism that has them angling for a rebrand after the entire country of Ghana gets pissed at them when they can’t log-in. Jason also has a massive crush on one of his co-workers, Lizzie (An-Li Bogan), who he dubs his “work wife,” which proves to be a problem for Aron. See, he and Lizzie had a meet-cute a day or two before he got his assignment, and he’s got feelings for her as well. So when satisfying this guy’s ego becomes a two-fold project – getting him the recognition he deserves and the girl – Aron starts to have second thoughts about his membership. But it also turns out that it’s a one-way trip: The entire society’s magic depends on their adherence to the credo, and if one member acts out of something other than benign servitude, they all lose access to the source, and the offending member is kicked out before the contagion spreads, forced to live life as a normal Black person without the powers of charm that protect them from harm. So, he’s faced with a choice: Either let this white guy walk all over him for safety and a paycheck or tear the whole thing down and pursue his dreams and a worthwhile romance? I’ll let you guess which option he chooses, and while you’re doing that, I’ll bring up Key & Peele.
For those who haven’t seen it, that sketch, which was filmed nearly a decade ago, is about two similar expressions of this cliché – wizened old janitors — fighting it out over who has the right to help out a boring white-collar worker, using their magical powers to do Harry Potter-like combat in the guy’s office. We’re already off to a good start because the sketch immediately undermines the idea of these figures as benign and passive figures, with the incongruity heightening the ridiculousness. The ensuing fight is goofy, going to a broad sort of physical comedy that isn’t present in what Libii’s cooked up here and managing to draw from a wider pool of cinematic sources to parody (a cartoon bird shows up, echoing Disney’s Song of the South) in those five minutes. A broader cosmology is hinted at, even if it’s not explicitly shown, which does more for these characters than the whole-scale exposition dumps heaped on us by Aisha Hinds in Society manages. To once again reference Boots Riley, Sorry to Bother You is willing to go broadly absurd and can be fierce in its criticism while still being fucking hilarious. It’s an approach that might have served this concept better – one, in fact, hinted at in the final moments of the movie, even if it does manage to uproot the entire premise and place it in a Nesting Doll of sub-standard narrative representation (watch out, Scott Pilgrim).
The Key & Peele sketch also turns things upside down in its final moments. After the white guy’s office is destroyed, a kindly Black woman shows up and offers some nice words. The fellow — along with the audience — assumes she’s a third cliché here to provide the salve that was promised to him by the structure of the sketch. Her smile fades, and she says, “Who are you calling ‘Negro,’ bitch?” before walking out in disgust. There’s no perspective like that present here: Every Black character we meet throughout the film is part of the society or will soon join it, which is done mostly to service the consequences of an average character’s banishment from said society. But this choice undermines its ability to show how this trope is incongruous with reality and closes off an entire avenue for potentially interesting conflicts for the film to explore. Surely, there would be people of principle who’d refuse this Faustian bargain when presented with it, who wouldn’t trade potentially deadly liberty for servitude-bound security, and who it wouldn’t take the course of an entire mediocre comedy for them to come to a conclusion based on their ethics. But this is just one of many chances the film has to broaden its perspective, and with each manicured branch, the opportunities for real humor shrink.
That’s where the real problem lies: For all of the provocations of its title, there’s no punchy humor in The American Society of Magical Negroes – it’s very mild and inoffensive, mainly because the people watching this have cognizance of how this narrative trope functions and are there to see it politely deconstructed rather than raucously skewered alongside the totality of American society and capitalism (again, those who wanted that perspective paid to see Sorry to Bother You, horse cocks and all). Instead, the film is at its best when it lets us glide through meandering rambles between Aron and Jessica as their romance blossoms, being a typical flirtation that wouldn’t be too bad in a movie just about regular people, free of the trappings of fantasy and/or social satire. Smith and Bogan are a cute on-screen couple, and I really wished I could have spent more time with them instead of stumbling through hacky doofy-white-dude comedy and choir-preaching on the way to the credits.
If there’s any true suggestion of the harm of this trope, it’s that the perfectly pleasant romantic dramedy at its heart – an unremarkable but sturdy and sweet one – is thoroughly smothered by the movie it was pitched as. And any of the variations of the scene in Green Mile where Michael Clarke Duncan summons up the good semen in Tom Hanks’ balls with the palm of his hand parodied here – seriously, it’s more than once — can’t top a five-minute sketch with its insight or ability to entertain.