Trading Places is Way More Racist and Way Less Funny Than I Remembered

I was surprised, and not in a good way!

I hate this part. I really do. You may not believe me, but writing negatively about movies that are widely loved brings me absolutely no joy, particularly when, up until three hours ago, I was one of those people. 

If you’d asked me yesterday what I thought of Trading Places I would confidently tell you that it is one of those instant classics that fundamentally just works. I’d say that it has a terrific, brilliantly structured screenplay and features a perfectly cast Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy at their very best. I’d hail Trading Places as part of director John Landis’ golden age and praise its iconic scenes and famous lines. 

If you were to ask me what I thought of Trading Places now, however, I would sigh audibly and, with a pained expression, wearily concede that I found it racist, sexist, classist and intensely bourgeoisie and capitalist. Also, unfunny.

This time around the screenplay that I previously admired feels sloppy, vulgar, filled with regressive stereotypes and long on plot and shockingly short on jokes. 

Trading Places was recently back in the news when star Dan Aykroyd discussed the film in an interview with The Daily Beast and the Saturday Night Live alum said that he “probably wouldn’t choose to do a Blackface part.”

I find it disconcerting that Aykroyd didn’t flat out state that he wouldn’t do a blackface part but instead hedged and said that he probably wouldn’t do it. 

The rest of Aykroyd’s comments are similarly clueless when it comes to race. He concedes that he wouldn’t be allowed to do blackface today. He also says that he probably wouldn’t be allowed to do a Jamaican accent. 

Then, in an unfortunate but deeply unsurprising bit of intense baby boomerdom, he chalks up criticism of the scene to the kids and the culture being too uptight about everything and also there was nothing wrong with doing blackface because Eddie Murphy and his entourage were there and they didn’t complain. 

“Eddie and I were improvising there. Eddie is a Black man and his entourage were all Black people, and I don’t think they batted an eye. There was no objection then; nobody said anything. It was just a good comic beat that was truthful to the story” are Aykroyd’s exact words. 

Not a good comic beat, not true to the story either.

I just want to point out that when he made Trading Places Eddie Murphy was twenty-one years old. He’d only made one other film, 1982’s 48 Hours. 

Dan Aykroyd and John Landis, on the other hand, were two of the most successful people in comedy at the time. Landis was coming off a string of hits that includes Kentucky Fried Movie, Animal House, The Blues Brothers and An American Werewolf in London and the “Thriller” video. Aykroyd was just a year away from writing and starring in Ghostbusters. 

If Murphy thought that a scene where Dan Aykroyd puts on very dark make-up, adopts a cartoonish Jamaican accent and immediately lights up a spliff despite being on a train was offensive and also not funny I’m not sure that he would have felt comfortable telling Landis. 

Murphy famously quipped that Landis had a better chance of working again with Vic Morrow—who famously died in the accident on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie that nearly destroyed Landis’ career and almost landed him in jail—than he did with him. He did not a have a great, or even good relationship with the red-hot comedy director. 

As for Murphy’s entourage, I similarly don’t imagine that if Eddie Murphy’s personal assistant or driver felt that Aykroyd putting on dark make-up and pretending to be a cartoonish black stereotype was part of a sad and deeply hurtful tradition of blackface minstrelsy in American humor they wouldn’t automatically go to Aykroyd with their concerns. 

As for blackface being just a “good comic beat that was truthful to the story” and not, you know, something shameful and regrettable, I gotta call bullshit on that as well. 

Murphy’s character Billy Ray Valentine is supposed to be a street-smart hustler as well as an instant stock market guru.  Our heroes are trying to bamboozle Clarence Beeks (Paul Gleason), a security expert who does dirty jobs for billionaire brothers Mortimer (Don Ameche) and Randolph (Ralph Bellamy) Duke. 

Beeks is the brother’s top enforcer. He’s a savvy operator so why on earth would he be fooled by Aykroyd’s blue blooded fop Louis Winthorpe III, Eddie Murphy’s Billy Ray Valentine, Jamie Lee Curtis’ hooker with a heart of gold Ophelia and Denholm Elliott’s opportunistic butler Coleman all doing characters that would feel more at home on Laugh-In or a tacky 1970s variety show than in real life? 

The film’s flimsy justification for having Aykroyd slather on the burnt cork is that Beeks knows what Louis looks like when he’s not inexplicably and unsuccessfully impersonating a black man so he has to disguise his appearance around him but Beeks is a sharp, savvy player, not the stupidest, most gullible idiot in the history of the universe. 

Beeks unsurprisingly does not fall for the dumbest trick in the book but the damage has been done. If Aykroyd had done drag instead of blackface it wouldn’t have been funny but at least it wouldn’t be jarring and offensive. 

I haven’t even gotten to the part in the film where a gorilla violently sodomizes Gleason’s character in a humorous fashion but these two eminently regrettable decisions are really just the tip of a very icky iceberg. 

I misremembered Trading Places as being very tightly structured but it takes a surprisingly long time to get going. 

Trading Places contrasts the very different lives of Louis Winthorpe III, who lives a life of comfort and leisure working for billionaire brothers, and Billy Ray Valentine, a hustler who unconvincingly pretends to be a legless Vietnam veteran. 

Eddie Murphy is very good in Trading Places but he’s unmistakably playing a caricature and not a terribly progressive one either. 

Trading Places is not entirely devoid of laughs but it is unexpectedly short on gags so the many ugly moments register a lot more strongly. 

In street hustler mode, for example, Billy Ray catcalls a woman while pretending to be legless. He grabs her coat but when she walks away he yells, “You bitch!” at her. This is supposed to establish that Billy Ray is nothing but rough edges but it plays much differently now. 

There are no gay characters in Trading Places but Billy Ray uses multiple anti-gay slurs. When the Duke brothers give Billy Ray Valentine a plush new life, complete with a driver, fancy apartment and high-paying job he initially assumes it’s because they’re gay and want to have sex with him. 

After Billy Ray gets a big cosmic upgrade he invites some of his old lowlife friends to party at his new home. The women soon take off their shirts to reveal their naked breasts because that’s apparently what the film thinks poor people do if given a chance: get naked and randy for no discernible reason whatsoever. 

Billy Ray’s new digs and cushy new life are part of a social experiment the Duke brothers are conducting to determine, once and for all, which is more important: nature or nurture. 

Mortimer, who is racist and evil, believes that nature is more important and that a black man will fail if given every chance in the world while a money-making white man like Louis will succeed no matter his circumstances. 

Randolph is also evil and racist but in a less ostentatious, more avuncular fashion. He’s the smiling, paternal face of bigotry. There is a wonderful moment when Randolph is explaining his business to Billy Ray as if talking to a small child and for just a moment Murphy breaks the fourth wall and looks at the camera, Jim in The Office-style with an expression that silently but indelibly says, “Can you believe the bullshit I have to put up with from white people?” 

It’s a wonderfully transgressive moment rooted in Murphy’s connection with the audience, a bond that is so strong that it allows the actor to briefly but memorably escape the world of the movie. 

Louis, meanwhile, suffers a swift tumble down the socioeconomic ladder when he’s framed for PCP possession, fired from his job, instantly loses his fortune and spends time in jail. 

The sad sack former blue blood finds an unlikely friend in Ophelia, a sex worker played by a young and frequently naked Jamie Lee Curtis. 

The female romantic lead in Trading Places may be a sex worker but the movie goes out of its way to establish that she’s not one of those bad, sleazy sex workers who are terrorized by their pimps and strung out on heroin. 

No, Ophelia proudly tells Louis that she had no pimp, doesn’t use drugs and has amassed forty-one thousand dollars from her employment in the sex trade and plans to retire in three years. 

Ophelia is a capitalist and an aspiring yuppie. In Trading Places that’s the best thing to be. It’s okay to be a hustler or a sex worker or even a servant as long as you have aspirations to do something more to make more money. 

Accordingly, Billy Ray makes an astonishing, instantaneous transformation from a small time criminal who will do anything to make a dollar to a savvy economic savant who believes strongly in personal property and punishing your enemies by getting rich. 

Trading Places’ preference for the bourgeoisie over billionaires and capitalists over oligarchs isn’t anywhere near as populist as the film seems to think, particularly since its black characters are generally criminals, its female characters are either gold diggers or prostitutes with the proverbial heart of gold and it seems to think poor people are tacky and gross. 

None of this would matter if Trading Places was anywhere near as funny as I remembered it being. But I didn’t laugh a whole lot watching Trading Places for maybe the fourth or fifth time. 

Instead I just experienced that awful feeling in your gut when something that you expected to love proves difficult to even like. 

As for James Belushi, he’s only in the movie for a few moments, as part of a plot thread whose payoff involves inter-species sexual assault being treated as a bad-taste joke.

Considering that Trading Places has been in the news for its wildly unnecessary blackface sequence I suppose it’s not surprising that it’s a quintessential problematic fave. 

What is surprising is that it’s extremely problematic but no longer a fave, at least for me. 

I assumed that this would mark a high in James Belushi’s career that would be hard to match. Instead I didn’t even find it good by the exceedingly lenient standards of a James Belushi movie.