What the sitcom Martin reveals about beauty, humor, and representation.

I was reading something the other day and it pulled me back to an old show a lot of us grew up on. Martin. The classic 90s sitcom starring Martin Lawrence. If you watched it, you remember the dynamic immediately. Gina, played by Tisha Campbell, was Martin’s girlfriend. Pam, played by Tichina Arnold, was Gina’s best friend.

But something about the way the jokes landed between those two characters says a lot about a conversation we still struggle to have.

Gina was the light skinned love interest. Pam was the darker skinned best friend.

When Gina was the butt of a joke, the insults stayed relatively harmless. Big head. Attitude. Something playful. Something cosmetic.

But when Pam was insulted, the language shifted.

One of the running dynamics of Martin was the constant roasting between Martin and Pam. Some of the lines became iconic. Martin would say things like:

“Damn Pam, you so ugly when you walk into a haunted house you come out with a job application.”

Or mock her hair directly with lines like:

“Girl your hair so nappy…”

He compared her to animals. Questioned her femininity. Treated her appearance as the punchline.

Meanwhile Gina’s teasing rarely went that far. The running joke was that she had a “big head,” or that she was stubborn in her relationship with Martin. The insults stayed playful. Cosmetic. Situational.

The contrast is hard not to notice.

Now to be fair, Tichina Arnold has addressed this conversation herself. She has said publicly that the jokes were never intended to be about colorism and that the character was written to be roasted because of personality and comedic timing.

And intent does matter.

But what something is supposed to be and what it looks like can sometimes be two different things. Television, like culture itself, reflects patterns whether the writers mean it to or not. When viewers look back and notice that darker skinned characters were often the target of harsher appearance based jokes, that observation becomes part of the conversation too.

Because sometimes what something looks like carries just as much weight as what it was meant to be.

The darker the skin, the harsher the punchline.

And people laughed. Week after week. For five seasons and 132 episodes.

This is not about canceling a 90s sitcom. Humor from that era was built differently, and the show gave us plenty to love. But it is worth asking why those particular jokes existed in the first place and why they felt so unremarkable. So normal. So easy to laugh at and move past.

Because colorism has always been one of the quiet fractures inside Black communities. Not loud enough to start arguments at the dinner table, but present enough to shape everything from who gets hired to who gets called beautiful.

Lighter skin has historically been framed as softer, prettier, more desirable, more palatable to mainstream audiences. Darker skin gets pushed into toughness, loudness, aggressiveness, or comic relief. The love interest versus the sidekick. The beauty versus the joke. That framing did not come from nowhere. It was taught, reinforced, and eventually handed back to us as entertainment.

And that pattern did not stay in the 90s.

You still see it today. In media. In casting. In whose beauty gets celebrated and whose gets explained away. In whose art gets amplified and whose gets politely ignored. Even in whose voices carry weight in local community conversations.

Which brings me closer to home.

On the coast, we love to talk about supporting Black artists, Black businesses, and Black voices. The hashtags go up every February. The statements get posted. Everyone is suddenly very passionate about community.

But support often comes with an unspoken condition.

A certain kind of Black gets embraced more easily.

The safe Black.

The aesthetic Black.

The digestible Black.

The darker, louder, more politically inconvenient versions often get treated the way Pam did on television. Present. Visible. Occasionally celebrated when it is useful. But not centered. Not protected. Not pulled into the room the same way.

Colorism rarely announces itself. It hides in patterns. In preferences people swear are “just taste.” In the subtle but consistent ways certain people get pushed forward while others are left to carry the room without the same backing, the same grace, the same benefit of the doubt.

If we are serious about supporting Black voices on the coast, that conversation has to include all shades of Blackness.

Not just the ones that are easiest to applaud.

Not just the ones that make everyone else comfortable.

Because support that only shows up for certain shades is not really support at all.

It is just preference wearing the costume of solidarity.

Written by Cici Marz, artist, writer and cultural commentator exploring media, identity, and community on the Central Coast.  For the Soil. For the Sound.  For the Soul.