Matt Walsh's "Am I Racist?"

Comedy for people afraid to tell jokes

There are two big problems with Matt Walsh’s new comedy/documentary Am I Racist? First, it lacks anything interesting or even coherent to say about race relations, which destroys any point in making a documentary. Second, it’s not very funny, which raises certain problems in making a comedy.

There’s no reason why this movie shouldn’t work. The premise is pretty simple: a conservative Borat, except where in that film the marks are respectable middle-American types, here the marks are the worst and most credulous and stupidest people on earth. More than that, the film is produced by The Daily Wire, which means they have the resources to actually get these con artists and scumbags together in one place. And in fact, they are able to get some of the most notorious race grifters into the room with Matt Walsh, which is an impressive feat, the film’s failures notwithstanding.

The problem is all in the execution, which is everything. First off, it’s a film, so it needs some kind of premise to move it forward. What we get is that Matt Walsh wants to learn about racism (of course we know he doesn’t) but he’s too famous to infiltrate most anti-racist groups (pretty dubious) and so he needs to don a bad wig and some different glasses in order to do so (OK maybe he’s not that famous). It’s such a lazy setup not even aspiring to the level of fiction. Even a neutral observer watching Sacha Baron Cohen had to concede that the fish-out-of-water premise was funny. It makes it easier to endure what is, after all, blatant mockery of your political enemies. Why not bring in Ben Shapiro threaten to fire him if he doesn’t get diversity training? It’s not a big deal, but when your schtick is “humble everyman” encountering crazy people, the extra layer of conceit really helps.

Take a step back from it all, and you realize that the central theme of the film is the greatness of black people, whose sanctity is besmirched by the rising tide of race hustlers (mostly women—some white women). After all, hate crimes are down (a very light-skinned professor comes on to talk about that). And some French Guyanan immigrants from the Bayou are there to tell you how great America is. Also, Walsh talks to some Good-Ol’-Boys who drunkenly assure us that they’re living by Dr. King’s mantras and that the only people keeping alive racism are the people attacking it (or maybe that was a Thomas Sowell quote, but same difference).

To put it succinctly: The movie is totally about black/white race relations, and the filmmakers are really really afraid of offending black people. As such, jokes that would have flown fast and furious in sitcoms just ten years ago are verboten here. Walsh gets off one decent crack about a black carjacker. The best ethnic joke in the film is told by a stand-in for Matt’s racist uncle (who should’ve had much more screen time) and it’s about Mexican men. That’s about it as far as real wisecracking goes. Look, I’m not expecting Walsh and crew to promote overturning the 14^th Amendment, but why can’t they at least try to bring comedy back to the edginess of circa-2010 Jay Leno? That raises the question: If race relations are really so great, why can’t we tell jokes about one another?

Straight black men come off pretty well in the film. Women are the primary focus of Walsh’s real animosity. The filmmakers keep track of the amount they have to pay the DEI experts to come talk to them on camera. One of them is a Ph.D. holder from Arizona State who harassed some white people in a student lounge for a “Police Lives Matter” bumper sticker on their computers. Another is a black mother who sought legal action after her two girls were snubbed by someone in a Sesame Street outfit at a parade. This woman, according to the producers, got $50,000 to appear in the movie. Listening to her, it’s pretty clear that this woman shouldn’t fetch $50,000 on a slave market let alone for an interview. But Walsh doesn’t even raise any real disputes with them, let alone mock them. These people are clear charlatans and crooks who deserve all kinds of chastisement and probably much worse. At the very least he could’ve asked them some hypothetical questions about breakfast that morning.

It's hard to tell if the producers are just toothless, insipid, or lazy. The best comedic bit of the movie is with “White Fragility” author Robin DiAngelo (again, kudos for just getting the interview). Walsh brings out a black producer and starts giving him reparations directly out of his wallet. After some prodding and debate over systemic and personal acts against racism, he convinces DiAngelo to chip in thirty bucks from her purse (which the producers tally against the $20k they have already paid her).

That’s a good bit, but it’s one of the few real bits conjured up in the whole film. Most of the time the producers are content to bring on the shysters to embarrass themselves. But if that’s the only scheme, why not just watch youtube videos, or browse their twitter accounts? Why go through with such an elaborate setup if you’re not willing to deliver the punchline?—especially when the premise is like shooting fish in a barrel. The problem faced by derisory comics like Sacha Baron Cohen, Robert Smigel, Don Rickels (etc.) is that at some point the audience might start to sympathize with the objects of mockery. But the people Walsh interviews are the biggest con artists in the world. Real insult comics used to be twice as mean to people they liked, while Walsh gives kids-glove treatment to people he supposedly hates. One thing I kept thinking while I was watching was, Couldn’t they find a Jew to do this?

The theater I was in was full of like-minded Trump supporters, all of us probably desperate for some entertainment that doesn’t openly despise us. The problem is that it just isn’t very good. It isn’t because the people making it don’t have talent; if Walsh were to hone his comedic chops, he could carry a movie pretty easy. But the movie is kind of a conservative version of the “nod and clap” stuff that has made all liberal comedy unbearable since Trump rode down the elevator. But literally all the Daily Wire folks have to do to get schlubs like me in the seats is make comedies with joke in them. Instead of pushing “conservative media,” why can’t they just conserve media?