The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Oscar Nominee Cord Jefferson on Why Race Is so “Fertile” for Comedy

Episode Date: January 26, 2024

The writer and director Cord Jefferson has struck gold with his first feature film, “American Fiction.” Nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay for Jefferson, the film is winning praise for portraying a broader spectrum of the Black experience than most Hollywood movies. It’s based on the 2001 novel “Erasure,” by Percival Everett, a satire of the literary world.  And Jefferson, who began his career as a journalist before branching out into entertainment, has long seen up close how rigid attitudes about what constitutes “Blackness” can be. “Three months before I found ‘Erasure,’ I got a note back on a script from an executive” on another script, Jefferson tells his friend Jelani Cobb, “that said, ‘We want you to make this character blacker.’ ” (He demanded that the note be explained in person, and it was quickly dropped.) Jefferson hopes that his film sheds some light on what he calls the “absurdity” of race as a construct. He finds race “a fertile target for laughter. … On the one hand, race is not real and insignificant and [on the other hand] very real and incredibly important. Sometimes life or death depends on race. And to me that inherent tension and absurdity is perfect for comedy.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. When a director's first feature film is nominated for the big award at the Oscars, Best Picture, that's always something to take note of. And that is certainly the case with the movie American Fiction, which is written and directed by Core Jefferson. It was nominated for four other Oscars as well. Before making the film,

Court Jefferson had a real career as a TV writer, early on with Larry Wilmore's Nightly Show on Comedy Central, then working on The Good Place, and Succession, and many more. He began, though, as a journalist. He contributed to the Root, the New York Times Magazine, and particularly Gawker. And that's how he got to know the New Yorker staff writer, Jelani Cobb. Court Jefferson and I met almost 15 years ago

when we were both part of a list serve for black writers. And we've kept in touch over the years, encouraging each other's work and keeping tabs on what we were up to. In 2019, he was a writer for Watchman, which was one of my all-time favorite television shows. And even though I've known him for many years, I've kept a much closer watch on what he's doing professionally and artistically since then.

This year, his directorial debut, American fiction, was released. And the film was garnered a great deal of attention and praise. American fiction is based on a novel called Eurasia, which is about a writer who's none too successful, and his name is Thelonius Monk Ellison. He's beyond frustrated with the publishing world, so he churns out a really trashy novel under a pseudonym, a deliberately offensive book full of the stereotypes that are euphemistically described as urban. And that book becomes a literary sensation. Yes, well, first of all, let me just say that all of us here at Thompson Watt are thrilled

with my pathology. It is about as perfect a book as I have seen in a long, long while. Mr. Lee, is this based on your actual life? Yeah, you think some bitch-ass college boy can come up with that shit? No, no, no, I don't. Jeffrey Wright plays the writer Monk Ellison, and here's Jelani Cobb talking with the director, Corr Jefferson. You know, the interesting thing I thought about the Ellison family is that they are affluent, educated, well educated, and distinguished, and at the same time, dysfunctional, troubled, not an ideal family. And, you know, they have problems, but none of which require a social worker.

Yeah, exactly. They have a different strand of... strand of difficulty. And I thought that was really kind of well represented in the line where Monk says that, you know, his life is to paraphrase, messed up, just not in the ways that people think. So you mentioned this being something that black creatives deal with. You know, and Monk is a character who very much feels that he's been constrained and has really been told who he is, or at least who he is supposed to be. based on these presumptions of what and who black people are.

Is that something you've related to in your own creative journey? Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, this was when I, you know, it started when I was, you know, when I was a journalist, one of the last pieces of journalism that I wrote was called The Racism Beat. And it was how I had reached this point in my journalistic career when it was like every week I was being asked to write about the latest, you know, black person, unarmed, a black person murdered by the police or, you know, a trigger-happy, nervous neighbor, or just sort of some other, other white person, or I was asked to write about, you know, somebody saying something racist about President Obama,

and it just felt like, you know, it felt like, well, it felt spiritually degrading, right? Just to sort of like to be writing about this misery and pain over and over, but more than that, it felt like, you know, what to write about Mike Brown that you didn't already write about Trayvon Martin or what to write about Brianna Taylor that you didn't already write about Mike Brown, right? Like, you feel like you're just sort of like writing stuff that is, A, you know, emotionally tough, but also you're sort of like writing stuff that seems like it's falling on death fears sometimes, that you're just like, is anybody even paying attention to what I'm saying? So,

when I got into film and television, it was incredibly exciting because it felt like, finally, you know, we are not beholden to any reality of the world. We're not, we're not sort of, but we can write about black people doing anything. We can write about black people living in fantastical, you know, other realms, or, or you can write about black people in space or in an underworld. Like, whatever you want to write about, you can write about because we are not, we are not tasked with sort of like representing the realities of the world. But I was, you know, surprised to find, lo and behold, that it wasn't long before people were coming to me and saying, do you want to write a movie about an unarmed black person being killed by the police? Do you want to write a movie

about drug dealers? Do you want to write a movie about, about slaves? And it felt like, oh, even here, even in this sort of world of fiction and fantasy, there's still a rigid perspective as to what black life looks like and to what black stories are like the promise of suffering i think yeah exactly exactly and it's and it's a specific kind of suffering you know add to your point when you talked about sort of the problems that the ellisans have the ellisons are suffering you know there is tragedy in their lives but it's just not the same rote suffering that we that sort of people expect it's just like well wait a minute where's the conversation about food stamps right or sort of like where's the where's the where's the dangerous interaction with a police officer. It's kind of like all of these things that like we've come to

expect are not there, but it doesn't mean that they're not, they're not suffering. It just means that it's a different kind of suffering and that there's a diversity and sort of like they're suffering. And just as there's a diversity in the humanity of blackness. So, so I think that that to me was a real, it was something that I really could not, I guess I wasn't surprised by, but it was something that I felt like pained by. And so when I found this novel, you know, Three months before I found Eurasia, I got a note back on a script from an executive through an emissary, not from the executive, but I got a note back from an executive that said, we want you to make this character blacker. And that was, you know, I said to the emissary, I said, I will indulge that note if whoever gave it to you will sit in front of me and tell me what it means to be blacker. Tell me how to make the character blacker. And I will have that conversation. And of course, that note went away because the person was terrified to have that conversation. Invariably, I guess the idea of that was going to be more of particular types of suffering or deprivation. Exactly.

I think for me, and I've written a whole lot of those stories myself, it's never been simply telling that story. I think it's the idea of telling that story to the exclusion of telling other stories. Exactly. Which becomes the biggest. Exactly. That to me is that to me, especially nowadays, I think that those stories are more important than ever. You know, I think that in a country that's actively trying to erase slavery as it was from children's textbooks, I think that it's very important to remind people over and over again that this happened in the reality of what it looked like. You know, black history in America now includes slavery and it includes being the president of the United States.

And between those two polls, there are many, many other stories that have yet to be told. You know, the 40 million variations on the theme. Exactly. Let me ask you, what drew you to this novel and of all the kind of projects that you could have taken on? You know, what were the themes in Eurasia that felt familiar to you? Well, Eresher is this very interesting sort of juxtaposition of two stories, right? Which is, it is monk, the protagonist. It's his professional life and sort of his professional ambition, which,

is simply to just to write the kind of novels that he's interested in writing, which, many of which are contemporary adaptations of classical Greek literature and classical Greek theater. And you have him sort of focused on trying to write the work that he wants to write and being told that it's not black enough, essentially. And then that story is juxtaposed with what's going on in his personal life. But it's juxtaposed with this more complex view of black life. It's sort of like his life. His life. and his family are what he wants to see in the world. So it's so it's sort of like this, it's this two-handed story of like, here's the problem

and here's a solution to the problem. And sort of here's what we want to see in the same novel. So to me, I was incredibly attracted to the professional themes and the satirical themes and what about the limitations that the world puts on black creatives and black art and sort of the expectations that the world puts on black art. But also on top of that, I was really drawn to the family stuff. My mother didn't have Alzheimer's, but my mother died of cancer eight years ago. And like Monk in the book, I moved home to help take care of my mother as she suffered.

I have two siblings, like Monk has two siblings in the novel. We have a push and pull relationship the way that the siblings in the novel did, where sometimes we're closer, sometimes we're farther apart. we have like the father in the book, we have a very overbearing father figure who was, who we, you know, we sort of lived under underneath his sort of very, very high expectations and sometimes I would say impossibly high expectations. And so the more that I read, it started to feel like the sort of Venn diagram of Monk's life and my life, all these overlaps to the point that it started to feel a little eerie as I read.

So why did you choose to call the film American fiction as opposed to Eresher? A, because we were worried about what, that people would confuse it with Eraser, that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie from the 90s. In the world of all the sort of reboots and remates, we were like, well, we don't want anybody thinking like, oh, yeah, I remember that movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger. I don't want to see that. That was one of the reasons. The second reason was that erasure is a great title,

but I think that you need something that feels a little bit splashier and catchier for for films, unfortunately. I just think that more self-explanatory than I guess Eurasia was. The two final titles, when it really came down to choose, the two that I were sort of was most excited about, were the Western canon and American fiction. And everybody thought the Western canon was a little too sort of literary. It was too sort of cutesy by half.

And so American fiction was the one idea that I came in and everybody kind of rallied around that one pretty quickly. So you have an astounding cast for this film. And it's kind of an embarrassment of riches. Yeah. You have in this cast, Jeffrey Wright, Tracy Ellis Ross, Issa Ray, Sterling K. Brown,

and the great Leslie Uggams, and, you know, just to name a few of the people. Can you tell me about how that cast came together? I know that Jeffrey Wright was your first choice for Monk. Yeah. Yeah. So he, I started reading the novel with Jeffrey's voice in my head.

That's how early I started thinking of him for the character. And I thought that our luck was over once we got Jeffrey, I thought, well, we got our first choice, so everything else is going to be our sixth, seventh choice. And then I started, you know, we started getting word. Like, actually, Issa Ray said yes. Sterling K. Brown said yes. Eric Alexander said, yes.

Everybody was very excited to work with Jeffrey. Jeffrey legitimized the movie in a very real way. It was no longer just a good script and director who had never directed anything before. It was Jeffrey Wright's involved. And that was like caused people's ears to perk up a little bit. Here you go. Right. Yeah.

Wait a minute. Why are these books here? I'm not sure. I would imagine that this author, Ellison, is black. That's me, Ellison. Yeah. He is me, and he and I are black. Oh, bingo.

No bingo, Ned. These books have nothing to do with African-American studies. They're just literature. The blackest thing about this one is the ink. I don't decide what sections the books go in, and no one here does. That's how chain stores work. work. Right.

And you don't make the rules. But then what they told me, you know, a lot of them was that was that it was the script and it was the characters, you know, John Ortiz, who's wonderful. Who was amazing in the film. Yeah, he's wonderful as Arthur, who plays Monk's agent. He told me that he'd read the script. And then he called his agent. He said, wait a minute, what part do they want me to play?

And his agent said they want you to play Arthur, the book agent. And he was like, they want me to be the book agent. He said, you know, it was the, it was the first time that somebody had just come to me and said, like, we just want you to be a guy. We don't want you to talk anything about. It's nothing about being Puerto Rican. It's nothing about being sort of like raised in the projects in Brooklyn or whatever or sort of like your tragic childhood. It's just like, yes, you're Puerto Rican, but you're just a guy. That's not coming up.

We talk about it all the time. Black actors are just not utilized in the ways that. they could be. And not black actors of color are not utilized in the ways that they should be. We talk about it every year. They're underrepresented. They're underutilized. They're asked to play the same sort of parts over and over and over again. I say to everybody, look at what happens when you give these characters real roles. Look at the kind of actors you can get for these parts. The writer and director, Corey Jefferson, who made the film American Fiction. He's talking with Jolani Cobb and their conversation continues in just a moment. This is the New Yorker.

Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour and we'll return now to a conversation with Core Jefferson. He's the writer and director of American fiction, which was just nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Jeffrey Wright,

and Best Adapted Screenplay. Jefferson is speaking today with Jelani Cobb, a staff writer at the New Yorker. You know, you mentioned Erica Alexander, you know, who is an amazing actress. And, You know, there's a particular scene in the film where Monk realizes that she is reading a novel, that he has anonymously written.

And he has this really incredible reaction. And I wondered, you know, what you were thinking about as you directed that scene, you know, how that came together. because it really is a kind of striking confrontation on multiple levels between Monk and Coraline, who is Erica Alexander's character. Monk is a very pugnacious guy. From the very beginning of the movie, he's arguing with his students, his colleagues, his family. You know, this is a guy who steamrolls everybody in his life. He's arrogant. he's frustrated and he's angry because he's so frustrated and wounded.

Because sort of up until that part in the film, Monk very frequently just gets away with yelling at people and being arrogant and rude. I knew in that scene I wanted somebody who could really stand up to him and sort of be formidable in the way that he's formidable. And Eric Alexander was one of the reasons why I wanted her for the role was because she is a formidable woman.

She is, she is age appropriate. She's not, you know, it's not, I didn't want to do the Hollywood thing where we're getting women in their 20s and 30s for a guy in his 50s. She's somebody who has lived experience, who's smart, who's intelligent, and who can sort of serve as the other side

of this argument too, which is that I didn't want it to be like respectability politics, pull up your pants movie. That sort of this is good black art and this is bad black art. And so I think that showing somebody in that scene also who is smart, who's accomplished, who's a lawyer, a professional person, the way that Monk is a professional person,

who we understand has a good rapport with Monk, who likes this book, this book that Monk hates, who sees value in this book that Monk hates, who sort of sees it as being art when Monk sees it as being garbage. I think that to give voice to that was incredibly important for, the movie to not feel like it was scolding, um, scolding certain kinds of blackness or scolding certain kinds of black stories. Another scene that I think is incredibly important to the film and to, to, to that,

to that end is, is the scene where him and Santara sort of butt heads and discuss their, certainly. They're sort of like different ideological opinions. Yeah, Centara is the author of the novel that he, uh, that kind of sends him on this spiral in the first place. Exactly. And so I just, it also sort of allows, us to see what happens when monk is sort of not honest with the people in his life and then sort of how that lack of how that sort of that facade and that dishonesty are sort of leading him on this dangerous path toward you know this toward a life that his father led which is one of constant lying and constant hiding and ultimately you know a very very tragic end so you mentioned

tragic end, it's important to note in the course of this conversation that this film is a comedy. It's a satire. And it is a tremendously funny one. Thank you. You know, one where, you know, I laughed, you know, throughout the movie, you know, the people in the audience at the screening where I saw, you know, laughed at it a lot. I had a really interesting conversation with a person who said that they laughed at it,

who works in publishing, who's they laughed at it, despite. the fact that they thought they might have been the butt of the jokes themselves. So I'm curious about what goes into grappling with the weighty themes that we've been talking about, you know, for the past however long, and also presenting that in a way that makes people laugh. Despite sort of like the tenor of things in the year 2020, three and 2024, I think that race is actually really, really a fertile target for laughter. On the one hand, race is not real. You know, we've sort of, we've read enough,

and there's enough scientists who have told us enough to understand that race is a social construct, that there is no basis for it in biology, and that we are kidding ourselves if we think that it's real at all. that being said race is also incredibly real in that we've we've constructed our institutions and our societies believing that it is real and so on the one hand race is not real and insignificant and very real and incredibly important sometimes sometimes life or death depends on race and so to me that inherent tension and absurdity is perfect for comedy i grew up in a

household in which my dad played a lot of Richard Pryor vinyl. And I watched... Ditto. Hollywood Shuffle over and over. And in which sort of I, we watched Eddie Murphy and sort of a lot of these like great Paul Mooney. Earth is the save itself. Have you noticed it's been fighting back with earthquakes and the rest of

stuff? It's fighting back. It don't need. Don't worry about that. Worry about people, each other. Can't worry about the animals or anything else. Something with four legs and got teeth. It'll be fine.

And I blame it on all. I blame it all on white people. I blame it on white people. I do. Because you guys started out messing this stuff up. Chopping down trees to build boats to go get black folks. And now the picnic is over, you want us to help you recycle. I'm not recycling a damn thing.

These things in which people sort of approach these subjects with a comedic lens was just part of my upbringing. And I think that I sort of saw that as being a way to diminish the power that it had over all of us and to sort of mock it and sort of mock the idea of it, while also finding ways to laugh to keep from crying, right? You just have to underline that and point it out to people and have them laugh at it. That does sort of, it also invites a lot of people into the party.

You mentioned Hollywood Shuffle, and elsewhere you've referred to that film as a spiritual predecessor to American fiction. And, you know, it's a cult class. classic by Robert Townsend. And it deals with the subject matter of kind of stereotyping and, you know, how black actors have to grapple with that. Only in Uncle Tom would do this shit.

They're just looking for somebody to sell out. Sell out. The only role they're going to let us do is a slave or butler or some streethood or something. Don't sell out, brother. Don't be a butler or a slave. Jesse Wilson. Jesse Wilson, you're next.

That's me. Good luck, brother. Were there particular themes or even like scenes in American fiction that were inspired by what you took from Hollywood Shuffle? I would say, I don't think necessarily scenes, but I think that one of the things that Hollywood Shuffle does so well is it never sacrifices commitment to character for comedy.

And so what I mean by that is that it is a very, very funny movie. It's almost sort of like sketch comedy at certain points. Like that's how sort of like much it becomes a comedy film. It gives you a real

perspective into his family and to his is sort of like this emotional Sophie's choice that he's making between professional success and sort of personal dignity. Like there's, there's all these commitments and efforts to make you understand that this is a real person that I really felt was important when I wanted to make my movie.

For me, there was three pillars that sort of were maintaining the spirit of Eurasia. The one was that it needed to be funny because the book is incredibly funny. The second is that it needed to be meta-textual in some ways like the book. I knew that that was important to the novel. So I wanted the movie to feel a little meta. And then the third was that it couldn't be didactic. You know, the book takes great pains to never say, this is right or this is wrong. I needed to make a movie that didn't spoon feed morality.

And, of course, he was writing that book Eurasia in response to a lot of what he saw going on in the fiction world and the same sort of stuff. Absolutely. So it really is a kind of meta situation. I'll tell you how meta it is, is that Percival, last week, Percival got stopped in a coffee shop by somebody who thought he was Jeffrey Wright. That's pretty amazing. Yeah. Incredible. That's pretty amazing.

CORE Jefferson, the director of American fiction, which is based on a novel by Percival Everett. The film was nominated for five Oscars. Jelani Cobb is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the dean of Columbia Journalism School. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining me this hour. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios. and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbiz of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, and Louis Mitchell, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Mike Cutchman, Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandro Decker. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.