An hour or so into “Fear of a Black Hat,” a 1994 mockumentary about a gangsta-rap group called N.W.H. (the H is for “hats”), a peculiar negotiation takes place: Ice Cold, the crew’s politically awakened frontman, wants 15 dead cops on the cover of its forthcoming album. Citing the “moral watchdogs,” the white record executive politely requests that there be no dead cops. N.W.H.’s manager, played by a ponytailed Richard Lewis clone, has a compromise in mind.
“Why don’t we split the difference?” he asks. “Seven?”
At 17, whenever I found myself in a negotiation, whether with my parents over what time I was expected home or with my bosses at the pizza parlor over how long I had to stay after closing to clean up, I would always ask: “Why don’t we split the difference? Seven?” “Fear of a Black Hat” was my filter for everything I found funny about the world. And like all overenthused, lonely teenagers who have discovered a true comedic love, I took every opportunity to tell everyone about every single joke:
They have an album they wanted to call “Don’t Shoot ’Til You See the Whites.” An interviewer asks, “Of their eyes?” and Ice Cold asks, “Whose eyes?”
They say that the reason they wear hats is, during slavery, their ancestors had to work with their heads exposed to the sun, which made them too tired to rebel against their masters. So what they’re saying with N.W.H. is, “We got some hats now!”
Then there’s the scene in which Ice Cold is explaining how his song “Come Pet the P.U.S.S.Y.” is actually political; the acronym stands for Political Unrest Stabilizes Society . . . Yeah!
“Fear of a Black Hat” was released in 1994, at the tail end of a run of critically acclaimed films about inner-city America. “New Jack City,” “Boyz n the Hood,” “Juice” and “Menace II Society” were all rooted in violent realism, which titillated and frightened audiences. “Fear of a Black Hat,” which lampooned not only the self-seriousness of gangsta rap but also the sanctionary “moral watchdogs,” offered a lighter alternative. I probably watched it once a week.
To call my fixation cultural tourism might be fair, but when you’re a Korean teenager in North Carolina, you have no culture of your own. Most of my friends were Jewish, and they were going through their own cultural head trips. After a few years of testing different flavors of hip-hop identity — including the inevitable and unfortunate “freestyle cipher” stage — my friends and I eventually settled into an obsession with “Fear of a Black Hat,” the funniest, most absurd depiction of the culture we could find.
The chronology of the film makes no sense — a friend of mine, a fellow obsessive, once tried to map the timeline of “Fear of a Black Hat,” and the drawing looked like the universal symbol for anger in comic strips. Some of the gags are punny and referential in a way that ages poorly. The jokey names given to N.W.H.’s contemporaries — the white rapper who goes by Vanilla Sherbet, a girl group called Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme — might never have been that clever. Most jarring is that Ice Cold, played by the film’s director and writer, Rusty Cundieff, is a terrible rapper.
But if “Fear of a Black Hat” is, by most standards, a bad movie, it is one that is fully committed to its badness — in the way great spoofs like “The Naked Gun” and “Spaceballs” are. Even if plot, character development and logic are banished from the script to make room for more jokes, the results remain chaotic, electric and hilarious to this day.
After “Fear of a Black Hat,” Cundieff bounced around Hollywood for about a decade before landing a job in 2003 as a director on “Chappelle’s Show,” overseeing a run of brilliance that ended only when Dave Chappelle left, without offering a clear explanation. There are many theories, but the one that has gained the most traction is that Chappelle grew tired of seeing people consume his comedy for the wrong reasons. He suspected that much of white America was laughing at him rather than with him, the theory goes, and this suspicion pained Chappelle so much that he walked away from tens of millions of dollars.
When my friends and I watched “Fear of a Black Hat” every week, we may not have been laughing for all the “right reasons,” whatever those would have been. But I think we kept watching because we saw Cundieff’s satire as an open invitation; it let us in on the joke. For years we had emulated, in our own safe way, the hardheaded posturing we listened to on mixtapes and saw on BET. “Fear of a Black Hat” turned the lens back around on us — in N.W.H.’s absurd fronts, we could catch glimmers of our own farcical and constructed selves.
My father, who moved to the United States in his late 20s, tracked his proficiency in English by the number of jokes he could follow on “The Simpsons.” This yardstick took him beyond language and toward the realm of cultural fluency. This is how I like to think of my obsession with “Fear of a Black Hat”: not just as appropriation or tourism but also as a second stage of acculturation. Having grown up in the United States, I understood comedy, but “Fear of a Black Hat” was the first work of humor I could relate to. Recently I watched the movie for what must have been the 80th or 90th time, and despite knowing better, I laughed at all the old jokes. They reminded me of home.