The Black and Brown Comedy Get Down, starring George Lopez, Eddie Griffin, Cedric the Entertainer, D.L. Hughley and Mike Epps, is dead. Long live the Comedy Get Down. “It wasn’t the blacks and browns that wanted it changed — it never is,” Lopez says. “But in the society we’re living in today, some people thought it was limiting, and limiting the audience. We all decided that instead of having to battle that every day, we’d call it the Comedy Get Down. It’s sad that you just can’t put ‘black and brown’ in anything.”
Outspoken as always, Lopez, 54, talks by phone from his Los Angeles home while awaiting a doctor visit. Filming for TV Land’s “Lopez,” a single-camera, reality-style series based on his life a la “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” begins in a few days. The physical is standard TV practice, says the veteran comic who became a household name with his six-season, self-titled ABC show and returned in FX’s short-lived “Saint George” in 2014. “There’s so much insurance involved,” he says. “They like to make sure you’re not going to drop. I’m going to drop one day, but I hope it’s not during the taping of the show.”
For about the 787th time in his 30-some years in comedy, Lopez seems on the brink of taking off. Like most top comics, he puts out some major product every few years, like a 2012 HBO standup special and album called “It’s Not Me, It’s You” and a 2013 memoir titled “I’m Not Gonna Lie, and Other Lies You Tell When You Turn 50.”
(Sample joke: “They try to make it so safe for kids now. … When they go trick-or-treating, they don’t even go at night anymore. Latinos, we want it to be pitch-black; we don’t want nobody to see us because we trick-or-treat well into our early 40s. ‘Is that a man?’ ‘No, I think it’s a werewolf.'”)
(Sample passage: “Pot soothes my aches and pains, relieves my stress, calms my stomach, takes away my nausea and improves my enjoyment of Van Halen.”)
Lopez reveals one true-to-life bit from the upcoming TV show, which has yet to announce a premiere date. He bought a house “in a great neighborhood” and decided to cut the trees surrounding the property for the first time in 17 years. His new neighbor immediately dropped by for a visit and scoffed, “I’m a little bit disappointed in you.”
Lopez’s response: “About what?”
“And it’s on,” he says. “So I put that in the show.
“My facial hair, now, people say looks menacing, or they aren’t sure if I look how they think I should look, or it doesn’t test well. I’m not living my life to test well! There’s an opinion on your clothes, your tie, the color of the walls,” Lopez continues. “You can show the ridiculous of that on this show, where you couldn’t on other shows.”
Lopez turned to comedy, in part, to cope with his traumatic childhood. His father, who’d worked as a migrant farmworker, ditched the family when George was 2 months old; his mother, whom George once described to CNN as “epileptic and then illiterate,” remarried when he was 10, then departed, too, for Sacramento, Calif. That left Lopez’s grandmother to raise him — she was a factory worker who had a harsh personal style of withholding praise. As Lopez revealed to The New York Times in an article titled “A Life So Sad He Had to Be Funny,” he was inspired to try comedy upon seeing Freddie Prinze on TV.
The comedian has conflicted feelings about his grandmother, who died in August 2009. “I think about her every day. I think, probably, about her, like, every hour,” he says during the 15-minute phone interview, which otherwise deals with weighty subjects like Cedric the Entertainer’s golf game. “I don’t fear anything. I always look to the bright side. Negative brings the positive in comedy, like in math. But I don’t worry about things that I can’t control, and that would’ve been a lesson I would’ve liked to learn when I was 18. I would’ve liked for my grandmother to instill those things, instead of: ‘Are you eating well? Don’t you think you’d like to have a jacket one size bigger?'”
Lopez’s discussion of social negativity extends to politics. He was so dismayed by GOP front-runner Donald Trump’s 2015 depictions of Mexican immigrants that he portrayed a crazy-haired Funny or Die character, “Donald Trumpez,” who complained that all the Americans visiting Cabo and Cancun during spring break were drunks and rapists.
“That dude (Trump) reminds me of an MC at a club: ‘What’s wrong with you? You got a disability? You want to talk? Get out of here!’ I don’t look at him as a political candidate,” says Lopez, who supports Bernie Sanders. “You have to have women and people of color vote for you, you have to have a younger vote. I’m not sure all of those things he needs to become president are there for him when it comes time to put the gloves up.”
So you’re saying Trump has a chance? “Well,” Lopez adds with a thick laugh, “everybody who runs for president has a chance — except maybe (Martin) O’Malley.”
Steve Knopper is a freelancer.
Twitter @chitribent
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