Needs Help: Uncle Tomfoolery

I believe we have a Missing Supertrope here.

I just watched Cimarron—by the way, if you've ever wondered what the worst Best Picture winner is, wonder no more—and one of the tropes I wished to list is the racist, offensive Stepin Fetchit-style stereotype of the Cravats' black servant Isaiah.

The problem is that there doesn't seem to be a trope about this. We have Minstrel Shows, which is about the vaudeville shows that often employed this stereotype. There's Modern Minstrelsy, which appears to be about offensive stereotypes being employed ironically in newer works like Bamboozled. Then there's Uncle Tomfoolery, which specifically describes the use of this trope in modern-day works, The '80s and later, although, oddly, it suggests the trope goes back to Stepin Fetchit.

I think this could be dealt with in two ways. I could go to YKTTW and create a trope called, say, Stepin Fetchits. What seems like a better idea to me is to expand/revise the definition of Uncle Tomfoolery to make it clear that this trope extends to all portrayals of black people as offensive comic relief characters.

I made a unilateral decision here as a mod. The description o n the page read more like an essay for a film history class than a trope description. The actual definition (a black character as goofy, cowardly — or both — comic relief) was buried in the middle of the third paragraph. I've seriously trimmed the definition.

edited 5th Feb '15 5:23:28 PM by Madrugada

Awesome. That was almost exactly what I was looking to do. I'm going to try and think of more examples from the old-timey era of Uncle Tomfoolery, I may go to Image Pickin' and ask for an older image, and this trope probably belongs on Discredited Tropes. Other than that, there is nothing to do here, as you have fixed the definition quite nicely. I think this thread can be sent to the Morgue.

edited 6th Feb '15 9:38:46 AM by jamespolk

That kind of clean-up you can do yourself (you don't have to be a mod) as long as you don't substantially change the actual definition (like I didn't) and you leave a solid, civil edit reason (like I did).

In this case, the actual definition was pretty much what you were suggesting it be changed to. It was just that it was obscured by a mass of stuff about the way it's generally used now.

I'll probably go back in and restore some of what I cut; the general categories they fall into (hip streetwise sassy sidekick, servile cowardly comic servant, hip streetwise take-no-shit sassy hero or co-hero) and see if I can beat the rest of it into a decent start on an analysis page.

But it's serviceable now, so if you want to do the wick cleaning, and add more examples from older works that'd be great, and I'll lock this thread.

edited 6th Feb '15 9:54:24 AM by Madrugada

I will do it—wick maintenance and the like, I can think of three or four old-timey examples right off the top of my head—sometime in the next few days. Thanks much. I thought about changing the definition on my own but it seemed like a fairly substantial change so TRS struck me as the better way to go. And yeah, you can go ahead and lock this thread.

It was a substantial change to the way it was written up, but not to the definition. Still, better safe than sorry. Good thinking.

Locking up now.