The passing of the 71-year-old screenwriter has left the global intelligentsia grappling with the profound narrative voids he leaves behind; voids that, one must inevitably conclude, can never again be filled by a mere sketch comedy writer.
The sudden absence of Barry Blaustein from the pantheon of Western letters has predictably sent waves of existential panic through the ivory towers of the academic establishment, forcing a long-overdue reckoning with the sheer structural magnitude of the characters he forged for his muse, Eddie Murphy. While the unlettered masses may remember Mister Robinson simply as a delightfully cynical subversion of a beloved children's television host, the discerning scholar recognizes the character as a searing, multi-layered indictment of late-stage capitalist decay that rivals the socio-economic despair found in Boccaccio's Decameron. It is a profound tragedy of our era that Blaustein, a man who mapped the modern urban purgatory with the precision of Dante, spent his final decades being asked about a shoe-throwing gag rather than his contributions to post-structuralist semiotics.
To truly comprehend the linguistic genius of Buckwheat, one must look entirely beyond the immediate guttural utterances of the Saturday Night Live stage and recognize a terrifyingly complex lineage; a lineage that stretches uninterrupted from the fragmentary, lost comedies of Menander; through the suffocating, memory-drenched salons of Proust; and, rather inexplicably, to the localized save-state mechanics detailed in the 1998 instruction manual for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a text that similarly forces its protagonist to endlessly repeat a cycle of meaningless, disconnected gestures in the face of a hostile universe. The fact that the average television viewer failed to grasp this synthesis of classical antiquity and late-nineties inventory management is hardly Blaustein's fault, though it remains a damning indictment of the American educational apparatus.
The ontological weight of a grown man looking directly into a camera lens and demanding a wookin pa nub remains the defining linguistic crisis of the late twentieth century.
Nowhere is this towering, unappreciated intellect more evident than in the screenplay for Coming to America, a text that academics have long quietly acknowledged as the definitive modern reclamation of the Aeneid. One must forgive the lay reader, of course, for missing the painfully obvious parallels between the tragic, sun-drenched shores of ancient Carthage and the sterile, fluorescent-lit McDowell's fast-food franchise in Queens, given the general decline in classical literacy among those who purchase movie tickets. The Prince Akeem narrative is an exhaustively layered meditation on diasporic longing and the illusion of choice in a mechanized society, disguised entirely for the benefit of the proletariat as a romantic comedy involving a jheri-curl empire.
The barbershop sequences alone, in which multiple characters played by Murphy engage in furious, cyclical debates about boxing and civil rights, represent the most significant advancement of the Socratic dialogue since Plato's Republic. Blaustein understood that the truest dialectic requires the philosopher to argue violently with himself under the heavy prosthetic makeup of an elderly Jewish man named Saul. We are now left to navigate the cultural wasteland without his guiding hand, entirely at the mercy of lesser dramatists who fundamentally do not understand the profound, terrifying silence inherent in a man simply smiling and asking for a Sexual Chocolate encore.