Tyler Perry Snaps; Says ‘Spike Lee Can Go Straight to Hell!’
Tyler Perry went off on Spike Lee and other folk critical of his “Madea” films when asked about it yet again during a press conference for his new film “Madea’s Big Happy Family.”
(L-R) Tyler Perry, actors Loretta Devine, Shad “Bow Wow” Moss and Shannon Kane pose at the after party for the screening of Lionsgate Films‘ “Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Big Happy Family” at Opera/Crimson Club on April 19, 2011 in Los Angeles.
“I’m so sick of hearing about damn Spike Lee,” Perry told reporters Tuesday in Beverly Hills. “Spike can go straight to hell! You can print that. I am sick of him talking about me, 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!”
EURweb’s Lee Bailey asked Tyler Perry to discuss an email he recently sent to his website fans expressing frustration with the hate he receives from within his own community.
“I was writing about just people and how hard people work to discourage people from seeing my work,” he told Bailey at the press conference. [Scroll down to listen.] “I don’t even understand it [but] this is where the whole Spike Lee [comment] 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.
“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. Doubtfire’ or Dustin Hoffman in ‘Tootsie.’ I never saw it. It’s always black people, and this is something that I cannot undo.
“Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois went through the exact same thing; Langston Hughes said that Zora Neale Hurston, the woman who wrote ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God,’ was a new version of the ‘darkie’ because she spoke in a southern dialect and a Southern tone. And I’m sick of it from us; we don’t have to worry about anybody else trying to destroy us and take shots because we do it to ourselves.”
Listen to Perry’s response and read the email about his critics below.