Review: Who’s Your Caddy?

In honor of this weekend’s The Simpsons Movie, a quote from the inestimable Homer J. Simpson that brings the stupidity of racial stereotypes into clear focus: “Ever notice how white people have names like Lenny, but black people have names like Carl?” And on the polar opposite side of the spectrum is Who’s Your Caddy?, a fiasco that never met a crass stereotype it didn’t milk for lowest-common-denominator laughs. But don’t count on laughing. Don Michael Paul’s film is the latest in a string of urban comedies whose sole idea of humor is cool African-Americans sticking it to goofy, racist Caucasians, the former here embodied by Outkast’s Big Boi as a rapper named C-Note looking to join an exclusionary golf and polo club, and the latter personified by Jeffrey Jones’s prejudiced club president Cummings. Look out WASP sensibilities, it’s an invasion of music video hoochies and golf carts equipped with 18-inch rims and nitrous! As must already be clear, the less said about the inane, clichéd plot, the better. And the same goes for the film’s tense white-black dynamic, in which C-Note and his buffoonish crew’s crude behavior—which wouldn’t be tolerated at Chuck E. Cheese—is not only celebrated, but cast as beyond reproach, since only a one-dimensional bigot like Cummings (or Big Boi’s perfunctory mom) might disapprove of the rapper’s tasteless vulgarity and misogyny. Anyway, C-Note can’t be criticized for being an obnoxious low-life—he’s a graduate of Dartmouth, where he played lacrosse! One might say that, by stacking the deck and casting all opposition to C-Note and company’s antics as racist, Who’s Your Caddy? exhibits a startling lack of self-criticism (as well as some thoroughly skewed values). But according to the film, that would probably also make one a racist like Cummings, and that’s not good, because racists like Cummings inevitably wind up with their faces in horseshit, and their crotches punched by midgets.