President Shapiro may not be black, he may not be a private dick and, from what the 'Prince' has heard, the only chick he's a sex machine to is Viv, but his name starts with the same three letters as Shaft, star of the 1970s Blaxploitation films. And for members of Quipfire, that's more than enough evidence to have featured the Shaft-Shapiro connection on their posters for the group's Houseparties weekend shows.
The improv comedy group's flyers advertising its May 3-5 performances were parodies of the posters for the 2000 remake of Shaft, which starred Samuel L. Jackson as the badder-than-bad vengeful private eye John Shaft. The Quipfire poster includes lyrics from the hit 1971 Isaac Hayes song "Shaft" — "He's a complicated man. No one understands him but his woman" — and urges Princetonians to take their women to Quipfire.
The idea for this powerful cultural statement was born late one Saturday night in Theatre Intime, as Quipfire members brainstormed ideas for their spring ad campaign. They tinkered with the idea of using Shapiro's head somewhere in their ads. "We wanted to do something sort of Shapiro-themed because he was leaving," explained Scott Eckert '03, Quipfire's artistic director.
"At some point we started thinking about Samuel L. Jackson," said Josh Boak '01, Quipfire's former managing director. "And someone asked if Harold Shapiro was ever called 'Shap.' "
"You see the S-H-A and who else do you think of besides Hal and, of course, Dr. Bernard J. Shapiro, President of McGill University?" he added.
The resourceful members pirated a copy of the Shaft movie poster, changed the F-T to a P, replaced Jackson's head with Shapiro's and voila, a new cultural icon was born —Shap.
"We knew that was it the second we came up with it because it was less work for us and we could go home," Boak explained.
Though Quipfire regularly attracts capacity crowds, its show Saturday, May 5 "broke the record for the most number of people in Intime ever," Eckert said.
The group presented Shapiro with a full color copy of the poster and invited him to the show, but he was a no-show. "I don't think his schedule permitted him to attend," Eckert said.
Shapiro is reportedly amused by the posters. "When I played hockey for my high school team, they always referred to me as 'Shap'," he said.
But the posters are just a publicity-seeking attempt to get people to come to Quipfire's shows, Eckert said. After the election of incoming President Shirley Tilghman was announced on Saturday, the group did do a few bits of presidential humor. But the shows weren't really about Shapiro. "It wasn't as if we were trying to make a statement on the Shapiro presidency," Eckert said.
Eckert said that Quipfire wasn't trying to make any deep Shapiro-Shaft comparison. Reaction to the posters has been positive, Quipfire members said. "I overheard one professor saying that it was the weirdest thing he'd ever seen," Eckert said.
But not everyone is amused. Black Student Union president Salih Eissa '03 said he wasn't happy to see the "negative stereotype" of a "sexually deviant outlaw black male" plastered on lampposts and bulletin boards around campus.
"The Shaft movies were representative of a time when black people were looked at as exotic and outside the norm," he explained. "The people who [made the posters] should understand the connotations."
Eissa said he is not delighted about the poster, but it isn't the worst thing to happen to race relations at Princeton. "You have to pick your battles," he said. "I wouldn't be too critical of it."
Quipfire has produced politically-charged posters in the past. Last year's Houseparties weekend poster featured photographs of Elian Gonzales with the slogan "Go home happy."
Quipfire tries to be tasteful, Eckert said. The Shap poster was something of a farewell tribute to Shapiro, but in the future the group may well do a poster featuring University President-elect Shirley Tilghman. "If we did something like this [for Tilghman], I'm sure it would be tasteful," Eckert said. "We wouldn't put her face on top of a naked body."
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