ABSTRACT
At the 2009 BET Awards, its host, Academy Award winning actor/comedian Jamie Foxx, previewed for the live in-house and television audience a film project that he was developing with actor/comedian Martin Lawrence entitled Skank Robbers. The two-minute clip showed Foxx reprising his role of Wanda, a character from his In Living Color (1991-1994) television variety show days. The “joke” that is Wanda is that she is a grotesquely ugly Black woman—cross-eyed, protruding lips, an enormous rear end—who not only does not know she is freakish and undesirable, but has the audacity to be a hypersexual flirt. The clip also featured Lawrence in a co-starring role as Shenenah, a character he popularized in his TV sitcom Martin (1992-1997). Shenenah is a hot-tempered, quick to “whoop ‘dat ass” kind of gal whose ridiculous clothes are as loud as her mouth. Together, the two “skanks” form a trashy, ghetto-fabulous bank-robbing team. The clip concludes by claiming the film was brought to viewers by the makers of Godzilla and by the producers of Planet of the Apes.
