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Humor, like music, being a highly subjective thing, there's not a whole lot to say about Spike Lee's film of a Charlotte concert starring Steve Harvey, D. L. Hughley, Cedric the Entertainer, and Bernie Mac, other than to attempt a few observations and suggest you'd probably enjoy it if you've seen these guys before on BET, HBO's "Def Comedy Jam," or their respective sitcoms and already think they're funny.
First, despite everybody concerned taking pains to say "God is everything," don't go expecting a kidsafe outing unless your idea of family humor leans toward the Wayans family. Second, comedy concert films have tended to find a broader audience when the star, such as Eddie Murphy or Richard Pryor, can tell a good story; regular jokes won't get it for two whole hours. So even though all these guys can bust a stitch or two, Steve Harvey, with his tales about blacks on the Titanic and swearing in church, consistently comes off best. Third, in an era when liberal white people think p.c. speech will somehow ingratiate them with minorities, it's encouraging that a movie so liberally strewn with un-correctness is doing pretty well at the box office. And lastly, there seems to be a certain irony that this movie was preceded by a trailer for Lee's next film, Bamboozled, about a struggling television network whose desperation leads them to create a modern-day minstrel show -- which becomes a huge hit. B-
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