Andy Friedman

Published in the August 2008 issue.

Robert Downey Jr.'s chocolate complexion, kinky short hair, and "hot damn!" cadence in the Vietnam satire Tropic Thunder is blood kin to the shoe-polish-stained cheeks, Brillo-pad pompadours, and declarative "yessum, massa!" of yore. Honky is still playing Negro. But once the lights dim, it's hard to tell what's more shocking: that Robert Downey Jr. is in blackface or that after about two minutes, you stop thinking about it.

Hollywood hasn't manufactured this kind of wide-release minstrelsy since that nice Jewish boy Gene Wilder delivered his hilariously inept and subversive strut with Richard Pryor in Silver Streak in 1976. (Unless you count the times African-Americans wore it themselves, like Spike Lee's black-blackface diatribe against nappy-headed racism in 2000's Bamboozled, or the Wayans brothers' creepy paleface cross-dressing in 2004's White Chicks.) Time was, blackface was as common as Uncle Tom servants and jim crow laws. Even the transition from silent film to talkies wore its racism as a badge of honor, with 1927's The Jazz Singer best known for Al Jolson's ebony visage belting out "My Mammy." The most lily-white stars in Hollywood's firmament -- including Judy Garland and Bing Crosby -- were only too happy to rub on that inky greasepaint and shake their jazz hands while smiling with those big painted lips.

And once you were bedecked in bigotry, there were two options: ham it up like Stepin Fetchit (Amos 'n' Andy's white creators Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, for example) or just wear the outfit but act the way you always do (Al, Bing, and Judy).

Downey mixes both, playing up stereotypes by declaring his love of crawfish and collard greens, but pulling back enough so it's not a shrill caricature. (Helping him to balance that act is black stand-up comic Brandon T. Jackson as a rapper-turned-actor who keeps busting Downey's chops about the mahogany charade, which gives him even more license to black it up.)

How does Downey pull it off? Singular talent. The Oscar-nominated actor has spent his career perfecting humor and pathos in equal measure. Which means that when, in Tropic Thunder, he plays a dead-serious Australian Method actor who insists on taking a role originally written for a black man, what ends up parodied is the self-seriousness of Method acting and the Vietnam-movie trope of the chitlins-chewing Negro grunt. Blackface isn't the subject; it's the vessel.

And it doesn't hurt that he's in a damned funny film. Writer-director Ben Stiller uses the conceit of three self-centered actors making a Vietnam drama in Southeast Asia as his starting point for moviemaking mockery. And Tropic Thunder (August 15) is relentlessly, mercilessly, brutally hilarious.

Still, what major movie star wants to risk offending anyone -- especially a star who just rocketed into the blockbuster-franchise stratosphere with Iron Man? "If Downey thinks something is going to be offensive, it's going to tempt him to do it," says James Toback, who has directed three movies starring Downey, including Black and White, in which he cast the actor as a bisexual documentarian who makes a pass at an unsuspecting Mike Tyson (and almost gets pummeled).

Downey may be fearless, but he's also shrewd enough to know the difference between being racist and telling a joke about racism. In Tropic Thunder, minstrelsy is a curiosity, not a flash point -- precisely because the man in black is so cool.

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