Yo Momma`s So Fat from Planck's Constant

Bruce Lee Statue - Hong Kong
Photo by: Inti

In 1974 I couldn't get enough of Chinese Kung Fu movies, especially Bruce Lee films, such as Enter the Dragon
or The Chinese Connection. Bruce Lee arguably had the most cut body and the fastest attack moves of any person in history. Very few people realize that Bruce Lee was much too fast to even be recorded in 24 frames per second.

This was a few years before video cassette recorders hit the US market and so if you lived in Jersey and wanted to see Bruce Lee films you had to go to a 42nd street movie house in New York City. My favorite time to go was very late at night when the audience was almost entirely filled with ghetto blacks. One of the reasons to see a film in a theater, compared to watching it on the small screen of a TV at home is the audience experience. Certainly comedies are more enjoyable with a large audience laughing along with you then sitting home with just a girlfriend or relative.

If you haven't seen Fists of Fury in an audience of 2,000 young blacks, you haven't truly enjoyed watching action films. Of course with such an audience you should expect noisy commentary. Although talking loudly during a film is considered rude in polite society, no such prohibitions exist if you are young and black. Anyway, it's not important here because the dialogue in martial arts films are completely forgettable and practically irrelevant. If the film is subtitled then talking doesn't matter at all.

Let me explain why you should see action films with a black audience: no inhibitions. You can yell, scream, curse, jump up and down and genuinely get into the frenzy of the mob. I found myself unashamedly screaming and jumping up and down at the appropriate moments as when Bruce Lee executed a particularly fast and impressive movement. During some lulls in the action, there would be much discussion of the previous scenes, and eventually would descend into good-natured jibing if someone missed the point of why this guy hit that guy in the film. Indeed I even found myself joining in a set of doing the dozens, where insults are traded among the participants. The term urban blacks use today would be "signifying" and you have probably heard some signifying yourself as when one starts off with, "Man, yo momma's so fat, she...".

All attention would refocus when the action resumed. I wouldn't leave until the credits finished rolling - I needed the time to let my excited body calm down. If your heart's not pounding feverishly at the climax, then you weren't watching theater at its best: Uninhibited, boisterous, lively, exciting, even breath-taking.

It's easy to understand why young, black audiences enjoy kung fu films. Usually there is one fellow that is being oppressed who fights back at a seemingly superior enemy. Whether it is this fighting school oppressing that one, or of Japanese oppressing Chinese, or of a wealthy businessman oppressing a group of poor laborers or farmers, there is something very appealing in a hero who fights against social injustice.

Our hero fights oppression, not with courts or going to college, but by physical prowess, something that can be attained by blacks even later in life when academic achievement is a lost hope. I don't mean to imply that blacks cannot be smart or educated, I'm saying that if you got kicked out of the third grade, it is excruciatingly difficult to pursue a career in law or medicine, while a career in basketball or football is a more attainable object.

I enjoyed the films simply because the good guys always won and they did it with style and panache by their own actions - no Deus ex machina that was popular in American films where the hero is saved by some miraculous Rube Goldberg series of preposterous events.

A few years later I bought my first VHS player for about eleven hundred dollars. Over the years, the convenience of watching films at home slowly replaced the excitement of watching them in a theater. In my home we have a 110 inch screen, stadium seating for 12, with a Samsung projector allowing us to watch 1080p movies. Eight of us watched Tropic Thunder on Thanksgiving Day. As much as I enjoyed the film, I did have a small frisson of nostalgia, a sense of loss, of a time I can no longer recapture.