Here’s something you probably never expected to read on tampatheatre.org – it’s time for some real talk about Ice Cube. In recent years, Cube has become a target of a lot of jokes for having turned into a kid’s entertainer, a comedian. Many of the people making those jokes only know his rap career. But that was never all he did; Ice Cube has always been primarily an entertainer. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, a new wave of African-American cinema was making huge waves in what had up until then been the almost entirely white culture of popular American film. Do the Right Thing, Boyz n the Hood, and Menace II Society (just for example) opened up avenues for filmmakers and actors that hadn’t existed before, and audiences were hungry for more. But part of exposure to a broader audience meant having to educate that new audience about the movies they were seeing – Friday can be understood as a reaction to popular (white) culture’s embrace of the new urban coming-of-age story. It’s a way of saying that not all these lived experiences are scary or harrowing; sometimes they’re funny. Not all the people these movies show are in the middle of a crisis or at a tipping point of violence; some of them are just relaxing on their day off. It’s a means of making familiar, of un-othering. And to do that it borrows the tropes of a subgenre that’s always been on the fringe of popular culture: wacky character comedy. Because besides all of the social, racial and political background above, Friday is also heir to the legacy of Cheech & Chong and Abbott & Costello. That’s why we started out talking about Ice Cube; Cube went from playing a deadly serious version of his own rap persona in Boyz n the Hood in 1991, to playing a Bud-Abbott-esque straight man to Chris Tucker in 1995. His two sides existed at exactly the same time. It just took some of his audience 20 years to wise up to it. Friday works for everybody. Drop a regular character in a crazy situation and surround him with crazy characters, and it’s hilarious. It’s a formula that never fails. Plus, we could all use a laugh. Come watch with us.