Tyler Perry Gives His Opinion About Spike Lee

Tyler Perry is so sick of fellow director Spike Lee and his negative comments regarding his films. While at a press conference yesterday in Beverly Hills, to promote “Madea’s Big Happy Family”, he was asked about fellow director Spike Lee trying to bring him down and he snapped.

I’m so sick of hearing about damn Spike Lee. Spike can go straight to hell! I am sick of him saying, ‘This is a coon, this is a buffoon.’ I am sick of him talking about black people going to see movies. This is what he said: ‘You vote by what you see’ — as if black people don’t know what they want to see. I am sick of him. He talked about Whoopi, he talked about Oprah, he talked about me, he talked about Clint Eastwood. Spike needs to shut the hell up!

According to Movie Line the two haven’t exactly seen eye to eye ever since 2009 when Spike Lee referred to Tyler Perry’s films as “coonery buffoonery” Whatever that means. Tyler Perry also says he doesn’t know what he has done to deserve this and does not understand why people are constantly questioning and criticizing his work ethic.

I don’t even understand it. There [are] so many people who walk around, and this is where the whole Spike Lee [issue] comes from — the negativity, ‘This is Stepin Fetchit,’ ‘This is coonery,’ ‘This is buffoonery’ — and they try to get people to get on this bandwagon with them, to get this mob mentality to come against what I’m doing.

What they don’t understand is this, and this is what I want to make perfectly clear to everybody, especially black people: I’ve never seen Jewish people attack Seinfeld and say, ‘This is a stereotype.’ I’ve never seen Italian people attack The Sopranos, I’ve never seen Jewish people complaining about Mrs. Doubtfireor Dustin Hoffman and what they were doing in Tootsie. I never saw it. It’s always black people, and this is something that I cannot undo.

They go on to say that people of other ethnic groups or white people don’t go see my movies, and that’s all a lie. I’m standing on stage looking at thousands of people, thousands of faces, with every race represented, and I’m tired of it. I’m tired of just laying down, tired of just being nice and letting them say whatever they want to say however they want to say it without people knowing what the intent really is.

I have to agree with Tyler Perry and I’m not even a big fan of his films.  He appeals to a certain audience and most people who have issues with his films are not a part of that specific audience.  He’s taken a specific demographic of people and he makes films for them and they are loyal and come out to see every single film. Ironically, his lowest grossing film was one in which he didn’t play “Madea”, (For Colored Girls). Of course, I’d like to see more black films that handle deeper topics but dramas don’t really fare well at the theaters among our community and people don’t necessarily run to the theaters to see them. They’d rather laugh at a black man dressed up as our grandmother or funny aunt instead, so to me, Tyler tries to take serious subject matters and embed them into his comedies so that his audience still gets the message but are able to laugh through the process.