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Chris Rock is a funny guy. I don't get HBO, so I haven't seen his talk show on that network; but his stand-up comedy specials and brilliant work on Saturday Night Live are testament to his ability to make people laugh. Indeed, one of my all-time favorite television characters, Nat X, was a Chris Rock creation. Rock hasn't had as much success on the big screen. Of course, that's unfortunately typical; few stand-up comedians make that leap with their reputations intact.

It's no surprise, then, that his new movie, Down to Earth, is only fitfully funny. A remake of Warren Beatty's Heaven Can Wait (itself a remake), Down to Earth focuses on the life, death, and re-birth of one Lance Barton. Barton starts off the film as a struggling stand-up comedian who dreams of wowing them at the Apollo.  To make ends meet, he works as a bike messenger, until an encounter with a semi-truck ends that career.  As it turns out, Lance's appointment with death came 40 years too early. He's not "scheduled" to die until the year 2044. So it's up to two of heaven's angels, Mr. King and Mr. Keyes (Chazz Palminteri and Eugene Levy, respectively), to get Lance back to earth. Their solution? Stick Barton in the body of a wealthy, bald, white gentleman named Wellington who privatizes New York hospitals for profit. Lance goes along with their scheme in the hopes of hooking up with Sontee (Regina King), a beautiful black woman Lance has had his eye on.

If that development doesn't quite make sense to you, join the club. Much of the movie's plot is haphazard at best--scenes rarely connect with what's come before, characters come and go with no real purpose, and plot threads are repeatedly left dangling. Of course, maybe it's unfair to ask a movie that features Chris Rock in the body of an old white guy to be in any way coherent.

In fact, the right way to approach Down to Earth is with low expectations. Don't expect much in the way of plot or character development. Don't be surprised when the direction and blocking remind you of an 8th-grade drama performance. And don't be incredulous when Sontee immediately falls in love with a 60-year-old white guy just because he can sing the entire "Ruff Riders" anthem by DMX. Ignore all those things, and you'll probably laugh as much as the audience did at the screening I attended--which was quite a bit.

Though Down to Earth is no comedic masterpiece, it does raise an intriguing issue that I've been pondering ever since I saw Original Kings of Comedy and Bamboozled last fall. It's this issue of how language changes depending on whether it's uttered by a white person or a black person. I'm not talking about ebonics or anything like that. Rather, how the very same joke, phrase, or speech can provoke extremely different reactions depending solely on the race of the speaker and the race of his or her audience.

For example, in Original Kings of Comedy, four well-known African-American comedians did their stand-up routines to an almost exclusively black audience in Charlotte. Much of their humor revolved around racial issues, and a lot of it poked fun at black stereotypes. It's material that wouldn't have worked if it had come from a white comic (it would've been seen as racist) or if it had been delivered to a white audience (they wouldn't have felt comfortable laughing). Only in a "closed" setting, where everyone's comfortable letting their hair down (so to speak), could D.L. Hughley make a joke about black people not paying their bills.

The same dynamic was forcefully raised in Bamboozled, where a television writer (played by Damon Wayans) tries to exorcise the specter of racism by putting on a modern minstrel show (complete with watermelon patch and blackface) for a white audience. At first, the audience is aghast, but they soon embrace the show and it becomes a tremendous success. As I wrote last fall, "Original Kings of Comedy didn't worry about speaking a different language or worry about how it was being perceived. Bamboozled, on the other hand, is a movie about being black for a white audience, and how that is so much different and more complicated. It's also a testimony to the difficulties black artists face. Do you segregate yourself and end up preaching to the choir, or do you jump into the white-dominated culture of packaged entertainment and risk losing your identity?"

Down to Earth raises a similar point in the movie's one truly funny scene. Lance Barton, in the body of Wellington, wants to practice his new stand-up material. So he goes to a black club which has an open-mic night. His material is hilarious ("there are two malls in every city--the one white people go to and the one white people used to go to"), but it fails miserably since it's coming from Wellington's mouth. The film highlights the dichotomy by switching back and forth, mid-routine, between shots of Rock and Wellington delivering the material. It's easy to see why the largely black audience gets so upset.

I got into an argument with my friend Garth about this very matter. He thought the movie had chickened out by not showing much more of Wellington instead of Rock (usually it's Chris Rock on screen, and we're supposed to imagine that other people see him as white). But the few scenes featuring Wellington are surprisingly (and pointedly) uncomfortable. When he delivers jokes about black culture, it feels wrong. When you see him romancing Sontee, it's incredibly awkward. And when he starts yelling the n-word while singing along with DMX, we understand why someone comes up and punches him in the face. If Bamboozled was a movie about being black for a white audience, Down to Earth is at least in part a movie about the difficulties of being white for a black audience.

It's not that Garth was wrong--the movie does chicken out--but to make the kind of movie he suggested would've transformed it from comedy to discomforting cultural commentary. I'm not sure we can expect that from Chris Rock (who's clearly trying to break into the big time) or directors Chris and Paul Weitz (American Pie). What we get from Down to Earth isn't that funny, but it at least delivers what its audience will expect.

J. Robert Parks 2/17/2001