Funny that way

Will Ferrell, left, and Jon Heder star in the figure skating comedy Blades Of Glory. (Suzanne Hanover/Dreamworks Pictures)

It’s official: Will Ferrell has finally bested Matthew McConaughey as Actor Most Likely To Appear Topless. In the new film Blades of Glory, Ferrell squeezes into Lycra unitards that leave nothing to the imagination, lolls around in a dangerously loose bathrobe and flashes his tattoos in a low-slung sarong.

As Chazz Michael Michaels, a dimwitted and swaggering figure skater, he’s considered “sex on ice” by fans and commentators. The joke, of course, is that Ferrell has a body like a loaf of Wonder Bread, and that figure skating is about as macho as Dolly Parton’s wardrobe. Playing opposite Farrell’s Elvis Stojko-esque he-man is Jon Heder as Jimmy MacElroy, a pretty-boy opponent who bears more than a slight resemblance to U.S. figure skater Johnny Weir. The film’s biggest joke is that after the two rivals receive a lifetime suspension from competitive skating for brawling, they find a loophole that allows them to compete as a pairs team. Two guys skating together? Touching each other and stuff? No way! That’s crazy!

Sure, there’s fun to be had in Blades of Glory, a spoof of the admittedly easy-to-spoof silly excesses of competitive figure skating. Ferrell’s likable-dumb-ass shtick is money in the bank; and there’s a hilarious chase scene on skates that has Will Arnett as Stranz (one half of a mildly incestuous brother-and-sister pairs team) skidding, contorting and sliding his way through traffic and up escalators in pursuit of Chazz. But, ultimately, Blades of Glory has a one-laugh premise: real men (read: straight men) don’t skate like girls – and they especially don’t skate together. Like many contemporary comedies, Blades of Glory can’t resist the allure of the homophobic gag.

Even in 2007, post-Brokeback Mountain, post-Ellen and Rosie, when Grey’s Anatomy star Isaiah Washington is chastened by his bosses and sent to rehab for referring to a gay castmate as a “faggot,” making fun of gays is still comedy gold. With so many targets now forbidden from the comedy repertoire (like Jews, black people, women … unless they are horny, fat, black women played by men in padded suits — you go, Eddie!), gay men are one of the last remaining minority groups that can be mocked with impunity. Because what’s funnier than suggesting that two guys with – as Chazz would put it – “matching dongs” are doing it? Such anti-gay humour doesn’t just litter sophomoric gross-out comedies like Little Man, Boat Trip and the Scary Movie franchise, but shows up in the relentless gay-baiting banter between Simon Cowell and Ryan Seacrest on family-friendly American Idol, as well as in popular, mainstream movies.

The most egregious recent offering is Wild Hogs, a boomer comedy starring Martin Lawrence, John Travolta, William H. Macy and Tim Allen that’s steeped in homosexual-panic jokes. In order to rediscover their manhoods, this suburban, latte-swilling biker gang sets out on a cross-country road trip. Hilarity ensues when the four are spotted sleeping side by side at their campsite by a buff cop who turns out to be a creepy, mincing, gay stereotype straight out of Cruising. The nebbishy Dudley (Macy) gets a verbal slapdown from Woody (Travolta) for acting faggy by admiring Woody’s cologne and suggesting that they go skinny-dipping. Then, Kyle Gass, in a gratuitous cameo, prances onstage at a small-town chili festival performing a fruity karaoke version of The Pussycat Dolls’ salacious hit Don’t Cha. And did I mention that there’s a Deliverance joke?

From left, Tim Allen, John Travolta, William H. Macy and Martin Lawrence play friends in the Walter Becker film Wild Hogs. (Lorey Sebastien/Touchstone Pictures)

One or two of these cracks might make sense in a film about a group of uptight middle-aged guys struggling to find themselves, but the entire movie is based on the idea that being gay is freaky and laughable. The film’s mean-spirited and over-compensating fixation on homosexuality verges on obsessive, even paranoid. Not even gay men think about gay sex that much.

It’s harder to take as much offence at Blades of Glory. Ferrell’s portrayal of testosterone-charged Chazz is so broad, it’s far more of a send-up of hetero posturing than a sneer at homosexuality. Still, that subtle distinction will probably be lost on most multiplex audiences. I saw the film at a crowded preview screening, and the biggest laugh came at Chazz’s face curling into disgust when he finds himself holding Jimmy’s crotch during a lift. The guy sitting behind me whooped, “Oooh, that ain’t right!” I don’t think the rest of the audience was laughing at gay anxiety, but rather because of it.

That same gay anxiety was behind the Snickers ad that ran during the Super Bowl in February. Two tough-guy mechanics chomp away at either end of a chocolate bar and end up kissing. Naturally, they freak out and then do something stupidly manly – rip hair off their chests – to compensate. It’s a joke that almost subverts simple, ew-yuck! homophobia into a dig about gay panic: What are these losers so afraid of? Mostly, though, it just affirms the schoolyard prejudice that two guys kissing is gross.

It takes a deft touch to pull off a joke that skewers bigotry by using the slurs that fuel it. Dave Chappelle was a master of this kind of humour, creating characters like a blind racist who doesn’t realize that he himself is black. But, then again, Chappelle also famously suffered a breakdown and fled show business when his increasing fame broadened his audience to include those who didn’t always get the inside joke. He told Oprah Winfrey that the final straw was watching a white crew member responding too enthusiastically to a sketch that had Chappelle in blackface; turns out the man wasn’t laughing with Chappelle, but at him.

Britain’s Sacha Baron Cohen is another comedian who operates on this meta level. His gay Austrian fashion journalist Bruno is so aggressive in his queeniness that he could never be the butt of the joke. Too bad, then, that in his feature-length film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, Cohen (who is heterosexual) used the ick-factor of having two naked men wrestling each other as the centerpiece laugh-getter.

Cohen did something much more sly in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, another Ferrell comedy. In it, Cohen plays a gay, French Formula One driver who gets the good ol’ boys of the NASCAR circuit into a tizzy not because he’s a sissified weakling, but because he’s so much more intelligent, attractive, successful, sophisticated and, yes, manly than they are. Cohen’s audacious performance works so well because it nails something rarely understood about homophobia: the reason some straight men hate gay men is because, deep down, they fear that maybe gay men are superior. Again, though, that clever twist is undermined at the very end of the film, when Cohen plants a lecherous, unwanted kiss on Ferrell’s Ricky Bobby, as if to say, See, gays really are perverts after all.

Perhaps it all comes down to context. Gay life, like straight life, has plenty to laugh at. The difference is that gay life is so rarely seen in mainstream films that every depiction appears to be This Is the Way That It Is, rather than one of myriad portrayals, both good and bad. So when Hollywood makes fun of gay men, it looks like a bully. In the absence of blockbuster gay-themed movies created by gay comedians, or, more crucially, when gay Americans don’t enjoy full civil rights, it’s just not a fair fight. Maybe that’s why in relatively open and tolerant Canada, gay comedians like Gavin Crawford of This Hour Has 22 Minutes have more leeway to make jokes about being gay, which are funny precisely because they don’t play into easy stereotypes.

Criticizing comedy for its bad politics is the surest way to be labelled a sourpuss, but I’ll take that risk and just say it anyway: enough with the gay jokes, Hollywood. Prissy queens and flaming fairies are just soooo 1975. In 2007, the only thing that laughing at gay men proves is your insecurity about your own manliness.

Blades of Glory opens March 30 across Canada.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

 

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