Watch Jimmy Kimmel Unpack Gentrified Brooklyn In ‘Do The White Thing’ Sketch
It's funny, because it's true.
After a week of Brooklyn-themed episodes on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, which highlighted the area’s rapid gentrification, host Jimmy Kimmel wrapped up the neighbourhood’s extreme hipster transformation last night by reimagining the 1989 classic Do the Right Thing with Do the White Thing — a star-studded, aesthetically accurate representation of Brooklyn in 2015.
The sketch mimics the film’s iconic scenes flawlessly — except instead of Radio Raheem carrying a boombox, Vinyl Raheem (Mr. Robot’s Rami Malek) carries a portable record player; Samuel L. Jackson’s radio DJ Mister Senor Love Daddy is played by Democracy Now!‘s Amy Goodman; in place of Spike Lee’s Mookie, who in the original asks Sal of Sal’s Pizzeria where all the framed photos of black celebrities were, Zooey Deschanel asks why none of the framed subjects are wearing “thrift shop finds” (which ‘triggers’ her subsequent meltdown); even Mookie 1.0 takes the form of a white, walking moustache (Billy Crudup) pining for a gluten-free menu.
The only cast member to reprise their role in the spoof is Rosie Perez — but even she’s being seduced by ice cubes “crafted from water hand-pumped from a sustainably harvested spring frozen using bicycle power” — and Public Enemy’s Flavor Flav features only to hear his “Fear of a Black Planet” replaced by a whitewashed folk version.
Watch the full skit below, and laugh/cringe/cry at middle-class white culture:
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