Is It Racist to Cast Ice Cube As the Kool Aid Man?

Seth Rogan continues to skewer a cancel culture he thinks doesn’t exist

When it comes to cancel culture, there are two Seth Rogans.

One pooh poohs its existence to reporters. The other creates TV episodes that lampoon its insanity.

Recently, I noted how Episode 5 of Rogan’s Apple TV series The Studio skewered cancel culture taboos about race, sex, and diversity. Now I realize that episode serves as the warm-up act for Episode 7 “Casting.” It’s almost entirely devoted to mocking cancel culture, the same societal migraine Rogan can’t bring himself to admit exists.

Imagine a standup comedian riffing on the absurdities of racism while denying the existence of racism. That’s sort of what it’s like to watch Episode 7 of The Studio.

It Starts with a Bad Movie Concept

Imagine Kool Aid: The Movie.

The series opens with the CEO of Continental Studios enthusing about the box office potential of a movie based on the famous fruity drink. This puts Matt Remick in a pickle.

The recently-installed studio head (played by Rogan) yearns to make films so beautiful and important that his peers will think he’s cool. Of course, there’s zero chance the Kool Aid Movie will deliver Oscar statuettes or a 10-minute standing ovation at Cannes.

But Matt also loves money and power, and his new position gives him plenty of that. So if he wants to remain the studio head, he has to find a way to turn Kool Aid into box office gold.

Fast forward to Episode 7, and guess what?

Kool Aid’s first promotional poster has scored better than any movie poster in the past five years. Not only that, the movie has attracted A-list actors including Jessica Biel, Sandra Oh (who will voice Mrs. Kool), and Ice Cube (who will voice the lead role of Mr. Kool).

Everything’s looking up for the buzzy project and its team, who will unveil the Kool Aid Movie the next day at Comic-Con Anaheim. A casting board adorned with the headshots of his A-list cast stands in Matt’s obscenely large office. Flanked by a couple of execs, Matt enjoys a quiet moment before his inevitable triumph.

He asks, “How can you not love this cast?”

That’s when the second guessing begins.

Is Ice Cube Problematic?

Continental’s head of marketing examines the casting board. She grows nervous.

“I’m starting to think that casting Ice Cube could be problematic,” warns Maya (played by the great Kathryn Hahn).

Matt shoots back, “You actually said for a musician, he’s remarkably unproblematic!”

Matt doesn’t understand the problem, so another senior exec (played by Ike Barinholtz) spells it out:

SAL

What Maya is saying is that perhaps we're playing into some stereotypes because there might be a group of people who historically enjoy Kool Aid more than others. I think that's what you were saying.

MAYA

Yeah. Thank you.

MATT

Fuckin-a! Everyone enjoys Kool Aid! I grew up drinking Kool Aid. Who doesn't like Kool Aid?

SAL

I agree. It's fine, it's fine.

MAYA

He doesn't see it, so it's good.

MATT

Oh no. (long pause as Matt walks over to Ice Cube’s head shot). He’s black!

MAYA

You don’t have to say it out loud!

MATT

Is this racist? Did we do something racist?

SAL
Yeah. Kinda.

MAYA

This could be a major marketing issue. This is exactly the kind of shit that social gets salty over. They're gonna tear us new assholes and that's gonna leave a stink on this whole beautiful thing.

SAL

I always knew something like this could happen to me. I’m the whitest motherfucker in this room, trust me, I will take the fall for this. I am dead!

MATT

Are you kidding me, I am personally getting up in front of thousands of people tomorrow and announcing this hate crime!

Note the looming fear of that thing that doesn’t exist — cancel culture (Maya is terrified of a social media backlash). Note the execs’ knowledge of the racial hierarchy (Sal laments his damning whiteness). Note the racial paranoia, and note how deeply it runs. Even one’s opinion about a beverage may reveal white supremacy.

The execs know they’re playing a dangerous game, and what’s worse is they don’t know all the rules. It’s not so much that they care about not being racist, they care about not being perceived as racist. They don’t reference any coherent definition of racist, they’re just eager to cover their asses.

Note Sal and Maya’s temporary relief at Matt’s initial reaction. If the boss says it’s ok, then they have cover. But when Matt flips back to his natural state — fear — nobody knows how to avert the gathering catastrophe.

Then it hits them. Ask a minority!

They rush over to their young Persian colleague Quinn seeking absolution. But she just makes things worse. She says she’s never thought of Kool Aid as a black person’s drink. She thinks of it as a poor person's drink.

Now they’re really screwed!

Then again, Quinn is barely a minority and Matt decides they need “a more specific perspective.” They hustle over to another college, a photographer named Tyler, and yes he’s black. The execs rejoice when Tyler renders his verdict — “I’m cool with it” — but their relief is short lived because Tyler isn’t comfortable speaking for all black people. Matt pleads with him, “Can’t you just like rubber stamp it on their behalf for the time being? Anaheim Comic-Con is tomorrow, dude!”

Matt’s reaction is more evidence that the execs are focused, not on avoiding racism, but on avoiding the guillotine. For them being on “the right side of history” means being on the side that still has jobs.

But Tyler remains steadfast and directs them toward some other black colleagues. The execs rejoice again when a judge with even more intersectional authority, a black woman named Ziwe, says, “I love Ice Cube as the Kool Aid man.”

Another black man in on the conversation convinces Matt, Maya, and Sal that the Kool Aid man has the soul of a black man and therefore must be played by a black actor.

Even better, but then Ziwe introduces another complication.

ZIWE

Mrs. Kool is black too, though, right?

MAYA

Mrs. Kool is, for sure, a woman of color.

ZIWE

Is the color black?

SAL

Her color is Korean.

MATT

Is that bad! Is that bad!

Turns out it is bad if, as another black man in the conversation puts it, “You're implying that a black woman is not good enough to be with successful black men like Kool.”

Now the execs have no choice.

They must fire the white-adjacent Sandra Oh and replace her with KeKe Palmer. They must also recast the half-Asian actress who plays the Kools’ daughter. At first Matt objects, but Maya quickly sets him straight: “You want ‘Who's the father?’ questions coming up? We might as well burn a cross at Comic-Con!”

So it’s settled.

The whole Kool family will be voiced by black actors. But the execs soon realize they’ve taken one step forward and two steps back. Ice Cube and Keke Palmer may be playing the lead roles of Mr. and Mrs. Kool, but they’re merely voicing CGI characters. All the live-action actors—all the faces audience members would see on screen—are white. And not just white, Jessica Biel white.

Good thing Matt has a solution—make the whole cast black. “We black Black Panther this shit,” he declares. “That's unassailable. That’s doing the work!” The more he thinks about it, the more he likes it. “This actually makes it feel important almost,” Matt says. “You know, this could be like our Hamilton.”

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No Way to Win

Through their bumblings, Matt, Sal, and Maya reveal what so many of us have known all along. The social justice game is a lot like another frustrating game—Monopoly. Everyone kind of knows the rules, but nobody knows how to win. But the social justice game is even worse because every “solution” the execs agree upon creates new problems.

Consider the screenplay.

With an all-black cast, the script will now require major rewrites that must be completed pronto. When Matt informs the director and writers, the writers pull out of the project because they, as non-black scribes, don’t think it’s right that they should be writing a script for an all-black cast.

The white director saves Matt. He agrees to rewrite the whole script by himself. But in order to free up enough time to complete the new task, he’ll have to hire an AI animation company. Matt squirms at the mention of AI, but what can he do but agree?

However, Matt’s all-black cast survives as long as his other decisions.

Quinn convinces her colleagues that making the whole cast black actually is racist because it implies that only black people like Kool Aid. So the execs decide there’s only one thing they can do.

Says Matt:

If we don't want to be racist or seem racist, we just gotta make this cast reflect America's racial demographics. You know what I mean? That way, no one can possibly accuse us of not being representative of America racially, because we will mathematically be representative of America racially. Let's do that.

The execs soon discover what anyone with a cursory understanding of demographics has long known. Our nation is, alas, still packed with white people.

According to Census data cited by Maya, America is 75% white. Time to ring up Biel’s agent and start groveling, because if they really want to represent America, the cast should be mostly white. Maybe lesbians can save them? Maya loves lesbians, but adds that they can’t be white because white women are currently toxic.

And on it goes. Their reckoning with The Madness descends into absurdity after absurdity.

The team begins to grapple with our culture’s strange method of racial categorization. What does it mean to be Hispanic? Who counts as an Asian? Matt points out that Israel is technically in Asia, but nobody wants to go there. An exasperated Matt finally decides that only Ice Cube can resolve the controversy.

Cube says casting him as Mr. Kool isn't’ racist, but—and you should have seen this coming by now—that doesn’t mean Matt is out of the woods. What is offensive, says Cube, is that “some asshole studio exec thinks that I’m not sophisticated enough to see that” some people might regard the casting decision as racist.

Cube emphasizes that he doesn’t think the casting is racist, but he knows some will see it as such.

Don’t Try to Figure It Out

In other words, casting a black man as Mr. Kool could be racist or mandatory. It depends on who’s delivering the verdict, and it depends on the current configuration of the hierarchy of oppression.

Episode 7 ends with the Comic-Con audience thrashing Matt for hiring an AI animation company that takes jobs from human animators. The audience already hates the movie, yet the execs feel relieved—at least they weren’t called racist!

The episode serves as a kind of hilarious time capsule that will help future generations understand the madness of peak woke. But of course, the laughs are contingent on the existence of cancel culture in the first place.

And that’s why The Studio remains such a bizarre project.

The expert skewering of cancel culture is brought to you by a man who does not seem to believe in the existence of cancel culture.