December 17, 2006 Anti-Gay Slurs: The Latest in Hilarity By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
T HE predilections of Sebastian Venable, the gothic ghost who haunts Tennessee Williamss Suddenly Last Summer, were so unspeakable that they essentially went unspoken in the text of the play. Dark hints about his taste for young men bloom all through the lyrical foliage of Williamss dialogue, but the actual subject of homosexuality is never explicitly mentioned. Nobody would have called the doomed poet a gay man, although thats what all the tortuous innuendo essentially amounts to. The play, which was teamed with a curtain-raiser actually called Something Unspoken when it had its premiere in 1958, was written in an era when the word gay had not come into common parlance, and the word homosexual had a clinical and disreputable ring. (The something in Something Unspoken was lesbianism, by the way.) The coyness about the subject in Suddenly Last Summer, written by a playwright who was famously uncoy about matters of sex and sexuality, firmly dates the play. Today neutral terms describing homosexuality are commonplace, having long since joined the vocabulary list deemed fit and proper to be spoken in front of the footlights. But as The Little Dog Laughed, Regrets Only and Borat have lately shown, old-school mockery, refitted for a new, post-politically-correct era, is making a comeback. In The Little Dog Laughed, Douglas Carter Beanes Hollywood satire at the Cort Theater, the central character, a ruthless female agent played with verve by Julie White, uses the following terms, among others, to refer to her client, a closeted gay movie actor: that pansy, Mary and Miss Nancy, little fairy Tinkerbell and little fruit. Coining her own variation on derogation, she calls another character St. Francis of the Sissies. At the performance I recently attended, virtually every one of those lines got a laugh. As they were meant to. For the characters noxious vocabulary isnt meant to mark her as a bigot. The epithets, generally employed in acerbic monologues addressed to the audience, are meant to establish her as a funny gal, if maybe a little soulless. It seems for most people they do. Little notice has been taken of Mr. Beanes comic exploitation of what is, in other contexts, called hate speech. But he seems to be aware that he is treading on tender turf: how else to explain the agents opening announcement that shes a lesbian? Her sexuality then disappears until a passing reference in the last scene. But its enough to inoculate her (and perhaps him) against accusations of homophobia: shes on the team, so shes allowed, and were allowed to chuckle. (For the record, Mr. Beane is an openly gay man.) The play raises a question that has been brought to the forefront of the cultural chatter recently in another context: Who is and is not allowed to use and to laugh at or milk laughs from derisive names for minorities? On a Broadway stage, Ms. White is warmly applauded for tossing out those nasty words. At a multiplex near you, Sacha Baron Cohen, playing a fictional anti-Semite, has em rolling in the aisles. But Michael Richards, also an entertainer, repeatedly uses a derogatory term for African-Americans in a stand-up act that queasily devolves into a fit of pique, and his offense makes headlines and cripples his career, possibly for good. Is it all about context? Certainly Mr. Richardss ghastly rant was not a scripted piece of entertainment, nor was it designed to provoke a discussion of slang and semantics. In savaging a heckler, he used the word the only way it was once used: as a weapon meant to demean and hurt. (Likewise, Mel Gibson got into trouble for his anti-Semitic rant because it appeared to be an expression of personal animus.) But at some point in his tirade Mr. Richards also tried to frame his attack as a political challenge. Muttering grimly in response to the audiences obvious displeasure, he said, You see, theres still those words, those words. Lenny Bruce was the first comic to start a conversation about those words on the nightclub stage. In one of his most famous, and controversial, routines, he asked if there were any African-Americans in the house using the usual offensive term. He went on to run down a litany of bigoted epithets. His point was that by keeping the words taboo, we unwittingly preserve their power to hurt. He ended the bit by suggesting that if they were allowed to fully enter the cultural conversation, their batteries would go dead. History has proved him to be at least half right. Gays and blacks took the language meant to demean them and put it to sly new use when speaking among themselves. Lately, as attitudes have relaxed, it has become easier for the rest of America to join the parties. (The character of Jack in the popular sitcom Will & Grace was pure minstrelsy, but by the time he minced onto the airwaves, in the context of a gay-friendly show, his dizziness and effeminacy hardly raised an eyebrow.) What is disappointing about Mr. Beanes flippant use of provocative language in The Little Dog Laughed is how provocative it isnt. Mr. Beane is not pushing boundaries to get his audiences to examine their own prejudices, or jolt them into an awareness of its lingering prevalence in the culture. Hes just pushing the classic put-down button, used to garner laughs on sitcoms and in life from time immemorial. Because he knows his audience is overwhelmingly made up of the gay and the gay-friended, Mr. Beane can safely use words that in other contexts would still call down opprobrium. But it doesnt make the humor any smarter, and as the snipes kept coming and I stopped counting, the barking of those words in viperish tones began to push a few of my buttons. (Lets just say that, as a gay man, I dont look back on my suburban junior high school years with unalloyed fondness.) Regrets Only, the new comedy by Paul Rudnick at Manhattan Theater Club, similarly exploits our new comfort with old stereotypes for some easy laughs. (Mr. Rudnick is also an openly gay playwright.) The plot turns on the notion that a Manhattan wedding would be stopped in its tracks if the citys gay men went out on strike. No flowers, no one to pin the babys breath in the brides hair and tell her she looks fabulous. Mr. Rudnick includes lawyers and doormen and elevator operators in his legions of gay protesters, but mostly the humor turns on the sudden absence from the citys working populace of florists and hairdressers and dress designers, occupations that havent made for clever antigay jokes since the days of Match Game. Wrapped in a comfy pashmina of preachment about the issue of gay marriage, the conceit is hardly going to offend, but the general mediocrity of Regrets Only suggests that Mr. Rudnick may have played with gay stereotypes a little too long: the play has far fewer good gags than his riper efforts in this sphere, like The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told and the short solo plays Mr. Charles of Palm Beach, about a quintessentially queeny cable-access host, and Pride and Joy, about a matron from Massapequa laying claim to the title of most accepting, most loving mother of all time, bar none. For a dose of truly discomfiting and provocative comedy trading on mans universal tendency to sort by group and sneer at the guys in the other camp, youll have to look not to the stage but to the movies, where a certain boob from Kazakhstan reigned this fall. In contrast to the tame, middlingly funny and rather retrograde flavor of The Little Dog Laughed and Regrets Only, the often uproarious Borat has the harsh sting of just-distilled vodka. Mr. Cohen is himself Jewish, so Borats smiling anti-Semitism is a con mostly used to seduce the clueless rednecks and drunk frat dudes. But I wonder what would happen if Borat trained the cameras on a cross section of the audiences delighting in his easy evisceration of the all-American boob. Do the millions of people in on the Borat joke really think theyre immune from even the smallest trace of bigotry? Unless they are among the unlucky few who meet Mr. Cohens next alter ego, they may never have to acknowledge their laughters unfunny origins. When we are done laughing at Ms. Whites nasty cracks and Borats victims, and clucking at Mr. Richardss freakish tirade, we should recognize the uncomfortable truth of that peppy homily sung in the Broadway musical Avenue Q: Everyones a little bit racist sometimes. The New York Times Company __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
