“I’m sick of that old bitch,” Tyler Perry recently said of Mabel “Madea” Simmons. “Time for me to bury that old broad, man.” Usually that’s no way to talk about a septuagenarian great-grandmother, but Perry is referring to his own fat-suited alter ego, and many would agree with him. After nearly 20 years, 10 stage plays, 10 movies, numerous cameos and even a straight-to-DVD animation, Perry announced he is retiring the Madea character after next year’s A Madea Family Funeral. Few will mourn her passing but it’s the end of some kind of era.
For the uninitiated, which includes most non-African Americans, Madea is a bewildering proposition, her enduring popularity even more so. Her pantomime-dame antics make Eddie Murphy’s Nutty Professor II: The Klumps look Shakespearean. She speaks in exaggerated “Ebonics”, shuns political correctness, commits crimes and often asserts her ol’-time values with the aid of firearms. In the movies, her painfully broad slapstick is often mixed in with soapy family melodrama dealing with themes of domestic violence, religious salvation and conservative family values (Perry is a Christian). To many, Madea movies are virtually unwatchable: her 2005 movie debut, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 16%. Its sequels have fared little better, but the franchise has made nearly half a billion dollars.
Not that everyone loves Madea by any means. Spike Lee has dismissed Perry’s films as humiliating, racially stereotyping “coonery and buffoonery”. Writer Donald Bogle also described Madea as “mammy-like”, observing: “If a white director put out this product, the black audience would be appalled.” Such criticisms are condescending towards his audiences, says Perry.
But even his critics see how far Perry has come. He first tried her out in 1999, in low-budget stage productions which he wrote, directed, financed, starred in, and sold the half-time popcorn at. He kept on rewriting and restaging his works until he found a shtick that clicked. Now Perry runs a 330-acre studio in Atlanta. He produced non-Madea movies such as Precious and For Colored Girls and the new Tiffany Haddish comedy Nobody’s Fool. In 2012, he signed a huge TV deal with Oprah’s OWN network and signed an even huger one with Paramount and BET in 2017 (maybe why he no longer needs Madea). He is quite possibly the most successful indie film-maker of all time.
Like it or not, Madea has sustained African-American film-making through lean, pre-#OscarsSoWhite times. Where once she and Perry represented “black cinema” as a whole, now he is one in a multitude of voices. He should be thanked. They’re not likely to erect a Madea statue in Atlanta any time soon, but the old broad at least deserves a decent burial.
