"He knows how to bring trash and soul together in a way that doesn't make one get in the way of the other"

Via Booker Rising, is this by Stanley Crouch, on the genius of Tyler Perry:

What Perry has mastered is the perfect mix of buffoonery, anguish and spiritual redemption. He knows he can hold his audience with variations on slapstick, pies in the face and clown costumes as long as he does not avoid the sandpaper that has scraped the hearts of so many who are lost, living far above or all the way down at the bottom. Finally, Perry knows that he must take his characters and his audience back to the church, where the greatest use of the English language other than Shakespeare lives. It's right there in the King James Bible, where forgiveness and redemption are made more than real in the big feeling of those who truly believe and who live it by the day.

Indeed.