The feud between Tyler Perry and Spike Lee continues. The writer-director-star of “Madea’s Big Happy Family” has been in a war of words with Lee ever since he described Perry’s projects as “coonery” and “buffoonery.”
Yesterday at a press conference in Beverly Hills, Perry told reporters, ”I’m so sick of hearing about damn Spike Lee. 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!” Perry added that he doesn’t understand why a lot of the criticism aimed at him comes from fellow African-Americans. He said, “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. … We don’t have to worry about anybody else trying to destroy us and take shots because we do it to ourselves. It’s attitudes like [Lee's] that make Hollywood think that these people [characters like Madea who are based on real-life members of his own family] do not exist, and that’s why there’s no material speaking to them.”
