I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the evolution of gay jokes in sex comedies, teen comedies, and related genres of late. It’s come to mind because I’m frequently finding myself perplexed by which films get a pass from gay critics, and which ones get criticized.

Take, for example, Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. It’s not quite as good as the original film, and that’s being kind to a fault, but it was certainly a…continuation of the kinds of humor and situation that the first film dealt with. Fairly early on in the film, there is a sequence in which Harold and Kumar narrowly escaped being raped by the prison guards at Guantanamo Bay. And, as you would expect, the point of the scene is to fear the 18-25 male target demographic with revulsion at the thought of a straight man being forced to perform oral sex on another man. Now, personally, I think that it’s a sign of deep sickness in our society that we make jokes about rape being “okay” because it’s happening in prison. But the way the scene is played in the film is slightly more nuanced than the usual “guys get raped in prison” gag. The guards, of course, are laughably homophobic. Yet they’re the ones seeking sex with other men.

This is offensive humor, but to complain about this particular joke, and gloss over the numerous jokes about race, religion and Appalachia is to miss the larger point, which is that the film is one of those all too rare “equal opportunity” offenders when it comes to offensive humor. In fact, if one takes the approach that the prison rape jokes are really centered around the irony of the abusive, homophobic guards secretly craving sex with men, rather than the usual “its funny because they’re faggots” than it becomes notable that gay people are not singled out for ridicule. And yet, this is the film that I saw bloggers, apparently in all seriousness, implying that Neil Patrick Harris owed the world some justification for appearing in.

Along similar lines is the film Sex Drive. It’s actually a fairly superior example of the “teen sex comedy” genre, with a bit of a bildungsroman lurking beneath the surface (and it doesn’t hurt in the slightest that in, oh, say five to ten years, lead actor Josh Zuckerman is probably going to be making all those “handsomest men alive” lists). The plot is typical: nerdy teen is on a quest to lose his virginity, chaos ensues, social order is restored when he realizes that love is more important than sex. What elevates the film is that, unlike most examples of the genre, its actually funny, with some good performances and the right air of plausible absurdity. But it has two gay jokes that stick out and seem to have aroused the ire of many gay critics. The first, is a man who attempts to solicit Ian, the character played by Zuckerman, in a men’s room. As much as I personally try to remind people, when the topic of men’s room sex comes up, that the kind of men who most frequently engage in it tend to think of themselves as straight, as far as the general public is concerned it’s still a “gay” thing. To the film’s credit, the scene in question is not played as Ian being preyed upon, but rather as Ian being naive and accidentally sending out the wrong signals, but overall, yeah, let’s call that a point against the film.

Interestingly, to me anyway, was that the character that really seemed to bother people was Ian’s older brother, Rex, played by James Marsden. Rex is a sadistic bully and virtually every line out of the character’s mouth is a homophobic taunt of his younger brother. Incessantly. To the point where other characters begin to comment on Rex’s seeming obsession with gay sex. And the pay-off, of course, for all of this is that Rex is revealed to be gay at the end of the film. His homophobic insults were a cover. What critics who objected to Rex seemed to miss is that at no point in the film is Rex a sympathetic character. Even after coming out he’s somewhat of a bully. To object to Rex is to object to homophobic characters as much as homophobic jokes. It’s dangerously close to arguing for no gay jokes whatsoever in popular films, even as a sign that the character making the joke is to be viewed with disdain.

The flip side of these types of characters and jokes has been the slightly older aimed films like I Love You, Man. While being, in general, a very good film, it was highly praised by many gay critics and bloggers, and the film itself seems to pride itself in its lack of offensive jokes simply for the sake of having offensive jokes. But it is also the recent film that I had the most problems with when it came to the portrayal of gay men and the use of gay-aimed humor. First, there is the Thomas Lennon character, Doug, who goes on an ill-fated “man date” with Paul Rudd’s Peter, who has managed to reach his mid-thirties with no male friends. When Doug is introduced, he’s played as a regular guy, not totally dissimilar to Peter. He even checks out their waitress at dinner. At the end of the dinner, however, he kisses Peter, and we find that Doug is gay. The kiss itself is drawn out to mine humor from the (supposed) uncomfortableness the audience will have with watching two men kiss. Later, Peter goes home to his fiance and tells her what happened. He then brushes his teeth, multiple times, and jokes about cleaning his mouth with detergent. The set-up for those jokes is that Doug is a smoker, but the notion of Peter going to such extremes because he kisses a man is not going to escape the audience. That ambiguity is compounded later in the film when Doug reappears, and he has gone from a regular guy to an over-emotional, prissy queen. It’s as if the film-makers, having now identified the character as gay, felt the need to resort to a tired, effeminate stereotype to prolong the joke.

More bothersome and problematic for me, however, was the role of Peter’s brother, Robbie, played by Andy Samberg. Robbie, the clearly preferred son by their father, is a macho, guy’s guy kind of fellow, who happens to be gay. The film takes great pains, in fact, to make sure that we understand that Robbie is a really cool, macho, masculine guy. It’s almost an over-reaction, a deliberate attempt to forestall criticism about the portrayal by making him the most stereotypically straight-acting character of either gender in the entire film. What makes me uncomfortable about the character is Robbie’s assertion that he’s only sexually attracted to straight men. The makers of the film are presenting a gay male character as a lech who pervs on straight men, and presenting it as a positive portrayal of a gay man. It’s one of the oldest and most tired of all anti-gay stereotypes, the gay man who sexually obsesses over straight men, and I’m frankly astonished that in 2009 it can appear in a film without attracting more conversation.

What makes all of these films and characters worth discussing to me is that, with the exception of Neil Patrick Harris in the Harold and Kumar films, none of these films feature openly gay actors, or to the best of my knowledge, are made by openly gay writers or directors. While I’m not suggesting that only gay men should be allowed to make gay jokes, it does tend to beg the question for me: are these straight men laughing with gay men at homophobia and gay caricatures, or are they simply exploiting their audience’s homophobia to dress up a “it’s funny because he’s a faggot” joke in slightly more politically correct clothes. A good example of this “are they or aren’t they” problem occurred recently on Saturday Night Live, again with Andy Samberg:

The satire in that skit works beautifully, because the films being parodied are, by any possible standard, homoerotic to the point of satire being nearly redundant. However, the skit does dance around the issue of whether or not we’re supposed to laugh because the films in question contain unacknowledged homoerotic undertones, or are we supposed to laugh because Samberg and Seth Rogen are two guys who look like they’re about to kiss. That area of ambiguity seems to be the zone in which most contemporary comedies are addressing gay issues.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 12:01 AM and is filed under gay issues, movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.