The obscure link between Mantan Moreland and the Beastie Boys
Goggle-eyed comedian Mantan Moreland is most famous for playing chauffeur Birmingham Brown in the Charlie Chan movies, for his supporting role as one of Lucifer Jr’s “idea men” in Vincente Minnelli’s musical Cabin in the Sky, and for portraying the hapless mailman in the “sick humour” cult favourite Spider Baby.
Do you know how some people are so naturally funny that the minute you see them, you’re primed for laughter? Mantan Moreland has always had that kind of effect on me.
I can’t tell you the number of times I have inflicted King of the Zombies on unsuspecting friends in the 1980s. It’s a terrible, terrible film, but his scenes are hilarious. I’ve watched it a lot. Too many times!
The Beastie Boys must have been Mantan Moreland fans, too, as there is a particular punch-line from one of his rude-n-crude “party records” of the 1970s sampled in a song called ‘B-Boys makin’ with the Freak Freak’ from 1994’s Ill Communication album.
The line—“shit, if this is gonna be that kind of party, I’m gonna stick my dick in the mashed potatoes!”—is (inexplicably) hilarious on its own, but here’s the entire routine from Mantan Moreland’s album That Ain’t My Finger.
I mean, there’s a kind of injustice baked into the way Mantan Moreland has been remembered—if he’s remembered at all. He was rarely top-billed, rarely given a role with dignity, but he always walked away with the scene. You watch these dusty old B-movies and there’s Moreland, often the only spark of life in the whole reel. He didn’t just survive the racist film industry of his era – he outwitted it, grinned through it, and left fingerprints on it. Every double take, every deadpan, every expertly timed pause was an act of resistance in its own small way.
And then there’s that mashed potatoes line – vulgar, absurd, and weirdly perfect. The way Moreland throws it out is pure timing: not jokey, just matter-of-fact. It’s the sound of a man who’s done playing by anyone else’s rules. You hear it now, sampled into the middle of a Beastie Boys track, and it becomes something else – a rupture in the fabric. A line so filthy and stupid it circles back around to genius. That the Beasties dug it up is no accident. They knew exactly what they were pulling: raw, undiluted, outlaw comedy from the underbelly of showbiz history.
Watching Moreland in King of the Zombies now, what sticks isn’t the cheap gags or the bad script, but his energy. He’s the only one onscreen who seems like he knows he’s in a horror movie and a comedy at the same time. When he leads the zombies into the kitchen like a stoned camp counsellor, it’s not just funny, it’s controlled chaos.
In the clip below, Moreland is basically the star of King of the Zombies, but he’s not given top billing; the white actors are. My favourite scenes are when he gets hypnotised into believing that he’s a zombie, and the scene in which he leads the zombies into the kitchen to be fed. He says a line in the scene that begins at the 54:00 minute mark that I have used as a “catchphrase” for decades: “As I member, I has privileges”.
No one ever knows what I mean when I say that, but I laugh.