This may be the most timeless satire about being a Black actor ever.

Smart, funny, and poignant. Excellent comedy that touches a lot of deep material without feeling heavy handed or distracting.

Robert Townsend and Keenan Ivory Wayans co-wrote this loose, irreverent comedy about their experience as young black actors, struggling to break into an industry that only saw them in one of a few demeaning roles. If you were this color, in this time and place, you were usually auditioning for parts like “Lead Rapist” or “Liberated House Slave,” and if that caused an ethical dilemma, fine, producers could pick your replacement from the roomful of equally desperate actors with less qualms about how they put food on the table. It’s a frustrating situation and these are frustrated dreamers, but that doesn’t mean their story has to be all about venting and wallowing. They make their points, but it’s with a tongue planted in one cheek and a gruff determination to leave their stamp on the comedic landscape. Easy to see this as a trial run for _In Living Color_, which Wayans (and brother Damon, who appears for about twenty seconds in _Hollywood Shuffle_) would launch on Fox three years later. One of the show’s most memorable recurring skits, Men on Film, pulls its premise from a pair of rough ideas in this film, but its DNA is all over the place. Of the two, the film is clearly the lesser example. There are good concepts here, really funny and original bits for the era, but they’re belabored and stretched past the point of amusement. This was clearly a learning-on-the-job experience for all, but tighter editing and a more focused script could’ve made it forty minutes shorter. It just keeps going back to the well, long after the laughs have subsided. Punchy but thoughtful, _Hollywood Shuffle_ bounces between soft moments of well-expressed trepidation and hammer-to-skull smashes of spicy, unrefined sketch comedy. The two faces of that coin don’t always mesh so well, and Townsend may have donned too many hats as writer/actor/director/producer, but its crosshairs are pointed in the right direction and its long-term influence probably carries more weight than the sum of its parts. But as a standalone? This ain’t great.

Bit of a weird one. Loses the plot completely. But actually very funny nevertheless. Basically it's a stoners movie 😆