Nothing on sitcoms succeeds as well as the perfectly volleyed wisecrack.
Actresses from Audrey Meadows on “The Honeymooners” to Jane Kaczmarek on “Malcolm in the Middle” knew how to wait for the perfect moment to puncture a hole in their TV husbands’ pipe dreams or flights of fancy.
This season, Tracee Ellis Ross joins their ranks with her sharp and funny performance on the new ABC series “black-ish.”
As Rainbow, the biracial wife to Anthony Anderson’s black advertising executive Andre, she keeps her husband in check when he whines about getting a promotion to senior vice president. Of the urban division. Or, as he puts it, “Did they just put me in charge of black stuff?”
“You gotta stop it with the pity party thing,” she tells him. When he tells her she doesn’t truly understand his concerns about his racial identity because she is — after all, half-white — it takes her about 10 seconds to deflate him: “If I’m not, uh, really black, can someone please tell my hair and my ass?”
In person, Ross is just as funny as Rainbow Johnson — and she’s also biracial, the daughter of Diana Ross and music producer Robert Ellis Silberstein, (Diana’s first husband). Sitting on a swanky couch at the Beverly Hilton hotel, she explains her affinity with her character.
“Although I am not a mother and a wife, I am a mixed woman and I do understand these feelings she’s going through,” she says. “The show’s not about being fresh. It’s about telling the truth. And I think that comes across in the lines.”
“black-ish” was created by Anderson and Kenya Barris. The idea for the show came from a conversation Anderson had with his 12-year-old son when he said, “Dad, I don’t feel black.” As the Johnson family in the show sees cultural identity co-opted by everyone from white recording artists to Asian dancers — and Anderson’s character has to cope with a son who’d rather play field hockey with his white friends than basketball — the writers explore what happens when your cultural frame of reference loses meaning. “I think it’s great that they really love each other to the point that Andre’s insanity is actually charming to her,” Ross says.
“Until Rainbow goes outside and sees him performing that African ceremony with their son. I draw the line when you start torturing my children.”
She had worked with Barris on the long-running sitcom “Girlfriends” and he was able to write the dialogue with the rhythms of her speech in mind. Rainbow and Andre might go at it from time to time, but they are not the Bickersons.
That lady swallowed the sun. I look at her sometimes and I’m like, ‘Who are you?
- Tracee Ellis Ross on her mom, Diana Ross
“One of the things that really drew me to the role was that she loves her husband and that her husband really loves her. A lot of husband and wife comedy works off of how much they hate each other,” Ross says. “And that’s a new image to put out into the world. Marriage is not the end of your life. Marriage doesn’t mean it’s over.”
Executive producer Larry Wilmore says “black-ish” got lucky casting its leads. “Anthony is very gifted and he has known Tracee for years,” he says. “She is so natural and lovable. When she read [for the part], we all said, ‘Why should we even look at anybody else?’ ”
One might assume that Ross, 41, gets her timing from her singing mother, but she says, “I got it from my father because he’s a Jew from Jersey.”
She says her dad has a better sense of humor than her mother, but that the Motown legend still likes a good laugh. Her daughter knows how to supply them.
Speaking about her mom, Tracee says, “That lady swallowed the sun. I look at her sometimes and I’m like, ‘Who are you?’ I saw a picture of my mom at 55. She’d had five kids already. In a bikini. Getting out of the water at the beach and I’m like, ‘Who looks like that?’ I haven’t had kids, I’m 41 and I don’t look like that.”
When I suggest the Motown legend’s svelte form might be the product of good genes, Ross’s eyes flash at me.
“It’s bulls- – t!”