Booty Call (1997)
Director: Jeff Pollack

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Written by Takashi Bufford and Bootsie, and directed by Jeff Pollack, Booty Call has the advantage over Friday of a tighter basic conception. It’s less of a variety show, having four longish sequences that the makers let play out fully. Jamie Foxx stars as Bunz, like Chris Tucker’s Smoky another permanent adolescent, whom we first see shooting dice on the street as his best friend Rushon (Tommy Davidson) picks him up to go on a double date. Rushon’s new girl Nikki (Tamala Jones) has put off sex for seven weeks, and tonight she’s bringing her best friend Lysterine (Vivica A. Fox) to try to keep Rushon from pressing her. Rushon’s stratagem is to bring Bunz to occupy the chaperone while he tries to advance to the next level with Nikki. And to make things interesting Bunz has bet Rushon that he won’t make it.

Jamie Foxx’s ’hood rat Bunz, a slapstick noodle lacking the innocence usually included to make the audience like such characters, is the odd man out in the foursome. He’s the one without class ambitions (i.e., without credit cards) whose street-life braggadocio won’t get him what he wants with these girls. His no-nonsense attitude (which part of us takes as the voice of "reality") drags down the tone and provides some impolite entertainment. But what’s sensational about Foxx’s act is that there’s always a point of diminishing returns in his attitude. He’s a petulant and raunchy adolescent, and we’re with him that far, but then he keeps talking and posturing until he’s exposed his lack of class or, worse, his inability to live up to his spiel. (Toward the end, he claims to Lysterine, "I’m gonna love you all night long," and it wouldn’t be a lie if nights lasted ten seconds.) Davidson is the male ingenue, but Foxx is the most memorable character, because of the volatility with which Bunz’s performance of studliness collapses in on itself. It’s also important that Foxx, with his shiny eyes, can look sexy-cute, or caught short like a little boy who’s been talking big, or even donkey-faced (when he mugs, he could almost do Jerry Lewis’s nutty professor without the prosthetic buck teeth). It’s not a movie built around a star but you wouldn’t mind if it had been built around Foxx.

The bet between the two guys serves as a dowel holding up the episodes: the two couples meet at a Chinese restaurant; they go back to the girls’ apartment building where the guys talk the girls into the bedrooms; the coitus is repeatedly interruptus when the girls send the guys out for safe-sex paraphernalia; the guys give up in disgust and end up arguing on the sidewalk, where the girls find out about the bet; Rushon is accidentally shot by a frightened immigrant cab driver; and they all end up in the ER. Some parts are more satisfactory than others--a four-hand card game in which the girls are trying to keep the guys from leaving but also to occupy them with something besides the inevitable--is particularly hilarious when two games of under-the-table footsie intersect.

Booty Call deals with the negotiations specific to young blacks couples on the line between ghetto and middle-class culture. Since its premise assumes the massive expansion of the black middle class it seems only realistic that, like Friday, it treats these tensions comically. It makes sense to treat even the shooting comically (the way earlier comedies would have treated a character’s being splashed by a taxi), though it draws on a headline-making complaint, and though the frustration beneath it is genuine. In a battle-of-the-sexes comedy like Booty Call that kind of urban tension can be stylized right alongside the translatable sexual tensions, and everything together seems like part of the crazy life in the big city. With everything available all around you it’s still so hard to get the kind of ride you want, whether as simple to arrange as flagging a cab or as delicate as seducing a skeptical, confident woman who can appraise your assets as against her worth in a glance. ("Tender offer" is perhaps the best pun for seduction in the professional class in New York nowadays.)

Screwball comedies of the 1930s were so bracing because they used slapstick to heighten rather than undermine the romance. The knockabout made the couples seem that much more appealing and physically alive. In Booty Call the combination of modes is more extreme--burlesque and eroticism. In other words, Booty Call is burlesque that features attractive young couples in the place of a baggy-pantsed, leering clown and an overblown floozy who symbolize the undying universality of the itch that such types both stimulate and parody. These young couples are scratching the itch in their prime, which gives this lewd farce an unusual bloom.

It’s especially good because another of the many gifts blacks have bestowed on American pop culture is a much freer handling of sexual material. Even in Waiting to Exhale, there were two scenes involving beautiful soap opera heroines in explicit sexual slapstick, unheard of in this country outside of African-American movies and stunningly refreshing in the context. (Imagine Lana Turner swinging low à la Bette Midler; it’s the difference between Sirk and Almodóvar.) The major advantage in Booty Call, aside from some good rank jokes, is that the girls are not drearily demure. This is a curse in far too many comedies, and even in Friday Nia Long simpers. (Robin Givens has been an exception, sizzling in A Rage in Harlem and Boomerang. But I want to know why on earth moviemakers haven’t given starring roles to that big velvety cat Lisa Nicole Carson.)

Nikki and Lysterine are the kind of black urban middle-class girls who dress out of Vogue and are college-grad-articulate but can also swing into the language and attitudes of a looser urban-folk culture. (A boon they share with an earlier generation of Eastern-European Jewish-Americans.) So we take it in stride that a young woman as well put together as Lysterine is as shocked as the guys that Nikki hasn’t been giving Rushon any "nay-nay," as she puts it. This wider range of persona also allows both actresses to let fly with amazing shifts of tone and tempo. When Jones has to deal with an ER admitting nurse, we see with comic éclat the advantage of having both middle-class and ghetto styles of address. If anyone seems a little too nice it’s Davidson, not these girls who know what they want, when and how they want it, etc. We’re not stunned to see Fox literally wielding a whip.

Almost all of the large cast of bit players get their laughs. (A gay Chinese waiter and two Punjabi convenience store clerks are the exceptions. Manhattan is a multi-cultural city in this movie, but the moviemakers don’t know how to make anyone but blacks amusing.) Even a crazy-angry woman on the street makes her mere minute of screen time memorable, and some of the stray, two-act conversations are beauties, particularly Lysterine’s insistence that men are good for only one thing: Nikki: "How they gonna bet on us like we some dogs at the racetrack?" Lysterine: " ’Cause they not human, baby!"

You have to be careful not to oversell a movie like Booty Call. But I’ve seen it at a second-run theater in New York, at home by myself on cable, and with friends in Northern California on the VCR, and it never fails. I think people are particularly pleased that a comedy with glamorous leads will get so down about sex. But with the guys thrusting and the girls feinting, the characters act out of that combination of confidence and diffidence that marks most people’s feelings about themselves on the sex market, and the movie gets naked about it in a way we can laugh about openly in company.

Booty Call is a ribald updating of glamorous Manhattan-set romantic comedies and has a feel for African-American experience in New York to serve as a bookend to Friday’s feel for L.A. I would say Friday shows even more what comic moviemakers can get out of a setting. Because the makers have rounded experience of South Central’s African-American neighborhoods, their use of it in the movie feels organic in a way beyond the relatively arbitrary settings that comedians used to select: Harold Lloyd hustling in a department store, Buster Keaton adrift on an ocean liner, Charlie Chaplin overworked in a factory. Friday is admirably tasteless but has so much feel for the setting, and respect for the format, that Ice Cube could justifiably say, "It’s a low-budget movie but it came out with some class." 1   Class, as determined not literally by social class and its restrictive propriety, but by the skill with which the comedy was shaped. (Keenen Ivory Wayans’s Scary Movie is often as funny as Friday and Booty Call in the same double sense of raunchy but is too ramshackle to have what Ice Cube means by class. It’s more fun than Scream, which can’t get around being an example of the corny genre it’s taking off from, but not up to Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein or James Whale’s nearly visionary camp classic Bride of Frankenstein as horror parody.) Booty Call is a great date comedy for uninhibited couples, while Friday is an out-and-out classic among friendly, time-passing slapstick variety shows. And I predict that they will live on because of their raunchiness, which, like the randiness of Mae West’s pictures, gives them roots in the enduring earth of human experience rather than in the shifting topsoil of polite commercial trends.

1. It’s a low-budget movie: Smith 11. Ice Cube has not, so far, been able to duplicate it, certainly not in the sequels to Friday, or in the amiable, uneven Barbershop (2002). Barbershop is a comic melodrama in which the hero’s immaturity threatens to disperse the community centered in the south Chicago neighborhood barbershop. He grows up in the nick of time and defeats the villainous loan shark, but the plot isn’t resonant enough as melodrama and at the same time lacks the roman-candle quality of Friday. It is at least generous-spirited, and in Cedric the Entertainer’s controversial Rosa Parks speech makes a decent pitch for the freedom of thought and speech that are central to comedy at its most irreverent. This puts it leagues ahead of Spike Lee’s Get on the Bus (1996), a demagogic work masquerading as comedy, in which a black Republican is literally thrown off the bus. (return to text)