The Guild sends word today that it reached an agreement with Perry after five months of negotiations, during which a handful of veteran scribes for his series Meet the Browns and House of Payne were terminated for attempting to unionize the staff. The catch? Those writers will not be coming back, according to a WGA release issued late this morning.

But, they added, the mogul "thanked them for their services and wished them well in their future endeavors." Surely that's of little comfort to the reeling Tyler Perry Four, who now confront the reality they may never again have the enviable opportunity to mass-produce Madea jokes for a Perry-starved populace. We hope the NAACP negotiators can sleep at night.

When straight black comedians do drag, they aren't trying to make women look fabulous. They reach for the floral housecoats and the chartreuse polyester pantsuits. It's anyone's guess why the no-nonsense old ladies hold more appeal for them — perhaps grandmotherly aggression and take-no-prisoners masculine attitude have more in common than meets the eye. The clumsy fashion sense is certainly a match.

[B]logger Darryl James sees the phenomenon as part of an effort to neutralize black masculinity. For him and a lot of other straight black men, gender-bending comedians are "castrated clowns," whose emasculation makes them palatable to white people and man-hating black women alike. "The black man in drag is one of the new coons," he writes.

Yikes! The ensuing shitstorm of comments is as theoretical and civil as you'd might expect from the Salon readership, but it underscores a reality that Perry and his less prolific black-drag contemporaries Martin Lawrence, Eddie Murphy and SNL's Keenan Thompson are, at the end of the day, handsomely paid commodities capitalizing on the minstrel tradition. And you know what? We're OK with that!

Because it sells. To dismiss Perry and Lionsgate — who've worked together on five theatrical releases since 2005 — is to condescend even more egregiously than a man wearing a dress; it suggests their audience is too ignorant to know it doesn't want what it wants. Lionsgate is responsible for a lot of atrocities, none worse than the Hostel duo and Crash, but it also has a proven marketplace to supply. And Perry's films are a market unto themselves, earning a total gross of $200 million. In other words, cultural commentators like Hannaham aren't the only ones parsing the question, "What's so funny about a black man in a dress?" All of Hollywood — and an audience of millions — stands to profit from an answer.

• The funny thing about black men in dresses [Salon]