Posted by | Cyrena Rose
The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg is directing a documentary entitled I Got Somethin’ To Tell You!
The 90-minute film is about the life, impact and legacy of Jackie “Moms” Mabley, born Loretta Mary Aiken, (March 19, 1894 – May 23, 1975) who was an American standup comedian and a pioneer of the so-called “Chitlin’ Circuit” of African-American vaudeville.
Mabley, who was nicknamed “Moms” later in life as she became a mother figure to comedians in the 50’s and 60’s, came out as a lesbian at 27 years of age; she became one of the first comedic acts to be rated triple-X.
Goldberg is slated to finish the project by fall and hopes to distribute I Got Somethin’ To Tell You via cable and/or arthouse release.
“It’s really about her impact on comedy, on comics, on women and the idea that she was able to maintain a standup career pretty much from 1930 to 1975, which is pretty extraordinary,” Goldberg told Variety. “So I want to revisit some of those periods of time and talk to people who were there and people who were impacted like myself.”
“She could say stuff that nobody else could say,” Goldberg said. “She talked about homosexuality, she talked about ageism, she talked about racism. She could be really risqué, and she did all these great double-entendre jokes and talked about all this stuff without using one bad word.”
