Pootie Tang - The A.V. Club

So who is Pootie Tang? As played by Lance Crouther, he’s the personification of cool, at least by the high standards of ‘70s blaxploitation: He’s like a streamlined version of Rudy Ray Moore, replacing Moore’s masculine paunch with a cut physique, and his mush-mouthed line-readings with an indecipherable made-up language that’s “too cool for words.” Pootie stands up to The Man, in this case Dick Lecter (Robert Vaughn), head of an omnipresent corporation that pushes drug, cigarettes, malt liquor, and Tasty Heavy Pork Chunk cereal on America’s children. He also contends with the pimptastic Dirty Dee (Reg E. Cathey, of The Wire and Oz fame), who’s like the malevolent Pigpen of the inner city, comfortable only when trailed by clouds of filth. In this early scene, Dirty Dee works as the point man for Lecter Corp, pushing crack on “the dumbest kid in town.” Only Pootie’s belt can stop him:

That clip offers a good idea of Pootie Tang’s junky aesthetic, from the whip-pans and jump cuts to its arcane references (dodging bullets in black leather pants and an open shirt, Crouther resembles Leroy Green after he gets “The Glow” in The Last Dragon) to the dumber-than-a-box-of-rocks Master P music cue. There can be a fine line between smart-stupid and stupid-stupid, and C.K. toes along it unsteadily throughout the film’s slender running time; he’s keenly aware of the cultural ephemera he’s sending up, yet he’s not invulnerable to it, either. Pootie Tang exploits blaxploitation and hip-hop conventions with the obscure particularity with which Wet Hot American Summer tackles ‘80s comedies like Meatballs, but without the same sure-handedness.

Whenever the film sags, however, Wanda Sykes comes along to pick it up again. Naturally, Pootie is a ladies’ man—they’re both the ornaments of his masculinity and the Kryptonite that brings him to his knees—and Sykes as Biggie Shorty represents his bedrock, the fiercely devoted woman waiting to rehabilitate him when he inevitably hits bottom. In the meantime, she occupies street corners in short skirts and fishnets, perpetually grooving like Rosie Perez in the opening credits of Do The Right Thing. As a comedian, Sykes excels at the brusque, in-your-face cutdown—just ask Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm—and she’s a grounding force here, too. When a couple of guys cruising for hookers inquire about her asking price, Biggie Shorty shoots back, “You think that just ‘cuz a girl likes to dress fancy and stand on the corner next to some whores, that she’s hookin?!”

Other members of the ensemble fare less well—casting Chris Rock in multiple roles is never a wise idea—but the real star of Pootie Tang is the absurdism that pops up at random intervals. A few favorites: Pootie’s blue-collar father dies after getting attacked by a gorilla (“only the third time a man had been mauled by a gorilla at that steel mill”); a scene where Pootie, looking to placate a desperate groupie outside his door, leaves her a bowl of milk as if she were a stray cat; a closing-credit where-are-they-now caption that places Dick Lecter on the touring company of Wesley Snipes’ Murder At 1600: The Musical. And then there are weird self-referential moments like this one, when the voiceover narration and the dialogue suddenly merge in a redundant chorus:

Pootie Tang repelled mainstream critics and audiences, but it holds an exalted status among alt-comedians and fans of subversive anti-comedy in general, who responded to it—and to similar films—as if to a dog whistle. (Ditto C.K.’s short-lived HBO series Lucky Louie, a minimalist sitcom that plays like a vulgarized Honeymooners.) It’s a shame C.K. didn’t have a firmer handle on the quality-control button, and who knows whether the studio had anything to do with bringing the Cuisinart into the editing room. But a piece of guerilla art like Pootie Tang isn’t supposed to be smooth sailing; it’s probably no coincidence that the cinematographer, Willy Kurant, was Godard’s lensman on 1966’s Masculin Féminin, another playful film that shot a few holes in the medium for sport. There’s an illicit excitement to movies like Pootie Tang, a sense that the filmmakers stole off with The Man’s money and really got away with something. Pootie himself would no doubt approve.

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