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   Thursday, April 27, 2006

   TRAGEDY IS EASY...

Jeff Whitty is a New York playwright and author of the hit musical "Avenue Q" -- a sort-of R-rated "Sesame Street." Last week, he wrote "The Tonight Show" host Jay Leno:

"I caught your show when you had a tired mockery of "Brokeback Mountain," involving something about a horse done up in what you consider a "gay" way. Man, that's dated. I turned the television off and felt pretty fucking depressed. And now I understand your gay-baiting jokes have continued."

Hence Whitty's letter -- a passionate defense of gay people and, as he explains,

"I wrote the letter above on a Friday in about 20 quick but intense minutes, sent it to three friends, who asked if they could forward it to their friends, it exploded within an hour, and by Wednesday I was appearing live on CNN. The response to this letter escalated so quickly, it got a bit alarming. Heartening, but alarming...This has put me in the uncomfortable position of feeling like a comedy nanny."

To me, this reignites an old but increasingly relevant debate -- where exactly is the line between humour and homophobia?

Jay Leno got targeted here because of his odd and relentless fascination with "Brokeback Mountain" but it's a bit unfair to single him out when we've spent the last few months steeped in 'gay cowboy' jokes. Ang Lee's stately, heartbreaking film got dumbed down into sniggering wisecracks about that one minute of sex in the pup tent because people seemed to have trouble reconciling the manly image of the American cowboy with homosexuals.

There's an old joke that goes, "What do you call a guy who sleeps with one hundred women and one man? FAG!" On the surface, it's obviously homophobic but the real target of the joke is our culture's belief (need, even) of a wide and strict line between gay men and straight men. In a time not-far-enough-past, a straight guy could get laughs simply by dangling his hand in front of him, speaking in a lisp and flouncing about the room; now, however, it seems that straight comics dealing with homosexuality are having to work a little harder to find the comedy (and, in the case of the second video, very hard indeed -- consider that a 'parental advisory' warning):



I've posted that first video before and I love it because the real joke isn't just that the macho football fans have 'gone gay' but that they're actually rather sweet and thoughtful about it. It kills me every time when the one guy earnestly asks, "Should we go to a....gay...bar?"

The second video is a variation on the same theme but a much more aggressive one. It's hilarious to me how far they're willing to go for the joke but it's also more than a little uncomfortable in the way they're clearly trading on their audience's presumed horror of anal sex. To paraphrase the old Jewish line, "Is this good for the gays or bad for the gays?"

Gay men are no longer an instant target for comedy -- this is obviously a good thing -- so homophobia has become more specific to the sex acts themselves. Even the Catholic Church now says they're perfectly fine with gay men so long as they never, ever have sex. Is that progress? People giggled over "Brokeback Mountain" to an irritating degree but they did go down to the theatre in big numbers and made it a blockbuster hit. Again, progress?

As Jeff Whitty wrote to Jay Leno, "I suppose that in the end I do prefer comedy that’s challenging, instead of regurgitating the same old well-masticated clichés for snack-size consumption." Are sketches like these two
a) truly challenging the drawn line between gay and straight,
b) merely creating an all-new set of clichés, or
c) sadly maintaining our culture's ongoing revulsion towards gay sexuality?

Discuss!