Comedy Duo Lucas Bros .: NPR

The Lucas Bros is a professional comedy duo that laughs with twisted and faint material. There’s amazing humor, snappy satire, philosophy, and jokes about Jell-O and Deion Sanders. Keith and Kenny Lucas are identical twins who open up extra space for them to play.

“That’s a general rule. You should never deal with a guy who looks like you,” they joke 2017 Netflix Special.

The Lucas Bros is on the Rise: They are writing and will be starring in Seth MacFarlane’s “reimagining” of the 1984 movie Revenge of the morbid. They also wrote the story for the new movie Judah and the black Christ It is based (from February 12th in theaters and HBO Max).

Judah and the black Christ It tells the story of Fred Hampton (Daniel Calluia), the charismatic leader of the Illinois Black Panther Party in the 1960s and the Black Christ of the story. Judah is William O’Neill (Laketh Stanfield), an African American arrested for interstate car theft and impersonation of a federal officer. In the movie, we see how the FBI recruited O’Neal. To avoid prison time and make some money, he was instructed to infiltrate the Black Panther Party and provide the FBI with information about Hampton. O’Neal became so much of a Panther insider that he was appointed in charge of security. The FBI provided a floor plan for a Hampton apartment. In 1969, Chicago police raided the apartment and killed Hampton and Panther Commander Mark Clark.

The Lucas brothers first learned about Fred Hampton in college. Instead of a straightforward biographical film, they wanted the movie to also show how the FBI recruited informants into the black community. “I think it’s important to see how cunning the regime has turned young African Americans against each other,” says Kenny. “How fundamentally they use poor black people against poor black people to implement their goals of reducing the threat to black Christians. We felt it was important to see both sides of the coin.”

The Lucas brothers have seen firsthand radicalization in society. They spent their childhood in Newark, NJ at the infamous Garden Spears housing project. They remember “scattered lanes and broken elevators. Filled with rats and rodents … drug trafficking and violence everywhere.” “But there is a community there. There are people who live there, there are families, and my family,” says Kenny. Their father was sent to prison when they were six years old. When their mother landed a job at Virginia Hospital, they were able to move to a safer neighborhood. Kenny and Keith Lucas went on to graduate from college and go to law school (Duke and NYU) but both dropped out.

“It was weird to study law and be poor and kind of black, because I see what the consequences of politics and law are on a daily basis, especially when it comes to African Americans, the concept of criminality and how it is presented to blacks,” Kenny says. Instead, the Lucas brothers decided to focus on doing something that had a direct impact on people from an emotional point of view.

Last summer, the Lucas brothers wrote about what it was like when they grew up at Garden Spiers for Vulture. at “Our brother Kaizen, “They describe their friendship with Kaizen Crosen who, years after the Lucas brothers left, killed a neighbor, a father of two, before the police killed him.

“It seems that we and Kaizen were separated when we sat on the manicured lawns of our college discussing Kantian metaphysics with outstanding students from all walks of life, while Kaizen challenged the harsh winters in Newark in search of money for his growing family, they wrote.” Yet, inside, we were struggling. All from acute PTSD from growing up in a war-torn inner city. “

The Lucas brothers’ awareness and connection to Newark caught the attention of New Jersey Senator Cory Booker. In 1999, Booker – who was a member of Newark City Council – went on a hunger strike in front of Towers Park. He also served as the mayor of the city. Last summer, in a conversation with Keith and Kenny on his Instagram account, Booker compared them to Eddie Murphy for their “insightful and ruthless sense of humor” and because they are “uncompromising in how humor is used to wake people up.”

On their Netflix, they remember about a former white co-writer who complained after a long day that they were “working like slaves” even though the work entailed, as the Lucas brothers said, “talking about Steve Harvey and whether his mustache is drugged.” They tell stories about their father who was in prison for most of their upbringing. When he’s released, he wants some time from father and son. The Lucas brothers joke that they don’t. “Dude, we’re paying the rent now.”

The humor aside, the brothers have been upfront about the real pain behind their jokes. Kenny says, “We never had a relationship” with their father. “It was, you know, very difficult when a child grew up without parents present, especially when you grow up in a city like [Newark]In the end, they reconciled with their father, but “It was a very long emotional journey. “

The Lucas brothers, with all their art, say they want to raise awareness about systemic racism and the PTSD it causes. Erica Huggins, president of Fuzzy Door Entertainment for Seth MacFarlane, described her as “cool” and says mind-blowing comedy is partly why she reached out to them to see if they were interested in writing and starring McFarlane Revenge of the morbid The project. “They are pushed by circumstance and they have a kind of philosophical way of looking at the world, which comes through their comics as well,” she says.

The Lucas brothers admit that they like the original movie but admit that it did not get old. They promised that their version would be completely different because times, Kenny says, had changed.

“It’s like the juxtaposition between being a bully and a geek so different than it was in the 1980s where you had that kind of stark dichotomy between what it used to be a bully and what it used to be to be a nerd,” he says. “Now, this is put together. And I think that’s why the time is right to write a story about it.”

They are excited to donate Revenge of the morbid The update it needs – and make it personal.

Nina Gregory edited this story for radio, and Petra Mayer adapted it for the web.