BEFORE: Bruce Vilanch carries over from "A Disturbance in the Force". A surprising number of other people do too, 9 I think - but since both docs feature montages of scenes from 1970's variety shows, maybe it's not that surprising.
I'll probably be posting really late tonight because I have to work at the premiere of the new "Naked Gun" film, and I probably won't get home until after midnight. Hey, it's a living.
THE PLOT: Explores the history of LGBTQ+ stand-up comedy, considering its importance as an instrument for social change over the last five decades.
AFTER: This turned out to be another one of those films with a gigantic cast - there are still two super-huge ones coming up before I'm done with the Doc Block - I guess the Doc Block's not done with me, either. There are stlll 10 or maybe even 12 films to go!
The point of this film is that queer comedy has come a long way, 50 years ago it was virtually unknown because the whole damn USA got so conservative after World War II - it was everybody's patriotic duty to get married, have kids and find a factory job to work at until they died, or at least until they moved all the factory work to other countries and laid everybody off. Ha ha, true story. But along with that came the imposed shame of being gay and thus people felt the need to either be closeted, or openly gay and sneaking around. I guess maybe some still do, but really it's a whole different world than in was in the 1950's. The hippie decade was followed by the "free love" decade and that was good for gays, but then - boo - Reagan and the conservatives were back in power in the 1980's, and the "Moral Majority" was dictating policy, although I think a couple of those guys got caught with their male lovers, so really, just another bunch of hypocrites.
The pendulum swung back and forth a few more times, and during the AIDS crisis the ACT-UP organization told us that silence = death, so many gay people decided to not be silent any more. The more you try to bottle up something, the greater pressure there is for it to explode and not be contained. So to speak. So the conservative assault on homosexuality kind of backfired, and progress was made, slowly, but that's still progress. Gay stand-up comics popped up one by one, starting with Robin Tyler in the 70's and then Bob Smith and Suzanne Westenhoefer in the 80's, and by the 90's people like Margaret Cho and Sandra Bernhard and Ellen DeGeneres were front-page news.
In 2023 there was a big comedy event in L.A. to celebrate some of the pioneers and mainstays of the gay comic movement - the ones I mentioned above plus Wanda Sykes, Eddie Izzard, Rosie O'Donnell, Tig Notaro, Scott Thompson, Lily Tomlin and more. It looks like they maybe interviewed everyone backstage at the event, makes sense since so many gay comedians were going to be in one place anyway, why not? Others who didn't make it to the event were maybe interviewed later and edited in, but the interview space looks fairly consistent, so probably a room near this event. The problem is, between the interview footage and all the archive footage about gay history, I don't think they included any of the routines from the event? Here I thought the film was going to be just one stand-up routine after another, and instead it's a history lesson with almost NO stand-up. What the what?
Perhaps it was some kind of contract thing - maybe there's another film being made of the concert itself, and that would cover all the routines. Or maybe the comics are all touring with those sets and they didn't just want to give them up for this doc. Or maybe it was like a Woodstock thing, where they weren't paying the comics any extra to be in a film, and then doing their routines here might prevent them all from getting their own Netflix specials, I don't know. But it's kind of weird that each notable gay comic is introduced, and then instead of their routine, we hear their backstory or their coming out story or take a trip through their filmography, but, umm, why not a few of their jokes? You know it's one thing to say that they're great comedians, but you could just demonstrate that very quickly by including footage of them saying something funny. Or do we just have to take your word for it?
Of course, of course gay history is important. The Stonewall riot, the AIDS crisis, Proposition 8, these are touchstone moments in gay history, but you know, none of those things are very funny. I don't think you can make AIDS funny, or at least you shouldn't. So why focus on that here, in a doc that's supposed to be about funny gay people? There are bits of old routines included from archive footage, but from this event in question, we only get the intros and then after the interview and backstory, we're on to the next comic. WHERE are the jokes? Will there be a separate concert film later, available on gay-per-view?
The aforementioned 70's variety show montage (which also, you doesn't apply DIRECTLY to gay comedy, and also it runs on too long) is followed by a montage of the only three gay men that were prominent on 1970's TV: Paul Lynde, Charles Nelson Reilly, and Rip Taylor. The three-headed queer beast with three different personalities - snide, foolish and way over-the-top zany. According to this metric of sterotypes, there were just no "normal" gays, they were all crude stereotypes whose careers consisted of game-show appearances and variety acts. Rip Taylor existed just to keep the confetti-making companies in business, he'd just throw pounds of it at his audience instead of doing anything actually entertaining. Oh, there were gay actors like Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter, but they were closeted, the game-show trio didn't need to come out of the closet because they were never in it to begin with. Time and Variety magazines had some kind of policy where they didn't consider game-show celebrities to be real celebs, so there was no desire to delve into their personal lives, anyway.
The envelope got pushed further by Scott Thompson from "The Kids in the Hall" who was maybe the first real out guy who seemed like he might be on the verge of normalcy, or at least becoming a household word. SNL had Terry Sweeney, but he didn't go over nearly as well with the public, but nobody seemed to care about gay women, I think SNL had a bunch of them over the years (Danitra Vance, Sasheer Zamata, Kate McKinnon, Punkie Johnson). No other out gay men until Bowen Yang, I think.
I don't know enough about the subject to wonder if there were other people who got left out of this celebration. I'm also not sure if it's OK to have a concert with a line-up that's all queer, it kind of gets a little bit too close to reverse discrimination, no? But of course we should celebrate gay comics who paved the way for others, it's just that when we celebrate them a little too much, it's kind of like inclusive, but then you can't be inclusive without also being exclusive, and this is the reasoning behind shutting down all the DEI programs across the country. Some people are still scared of gay people, I know it's only because they don't think they know any of them but they probably do, but those people are going to be really triggered by so many gay people getting together in one place to celebrate gay comedy. Just saying.
There's also a montage of comedy from homophobic people, in case you're wondering why Andrew Dice Clay and Sam Kinison are in this. Eddie Murphy, too, they replay the most homophobic bits from his early stand-up films, which is unfortunate. It's like going back through someone's tweets from 10 years ago and only highlighting the bad ones - sure, people should have to answer for what they said back then, but also they may not feel that same way now, you have to remember that it was a different time and some people were not educated properly about AIDS and how it was spread and what it all meant to be gay. This was back before gay marriage was a thing, and I guess nobody believed that gay people could form lasting relationship bonds, they just thought everyone was in it for the non-reproductive sex. Yeah, there's a bit more to it than that, you donuts, this much I know.
The movement, of course, has now expanded to transgender comics, gender-fluid comics and whatever Eddie Izzard is. God, I've heard so many explanations from Eddie about why she wears a dress, and that story keeps changing. First she was "a lesbian trapped in a man's body", then she was "all boy and half girl" and then for a while she would toggle between "boy mode" and "girl mode". Well, I certainly can't hope to figure Eddie out until Eddie figures Eddie out, so I don't even bother any more, and maybe that's exactly what she wants.
Directed by Page Hurwitz
Also starring James Adomian (last seen in "Love After Love"), Kate Aurthur, Sandra Bernhard (Last seen in "Hudson Hawk"), Bob the Drag Queen (last seen in "Rough Night"), Joel Kim Booster (last seen in "Unplugging"), Guy Branum (last seen in "Bros"), Billy Eichner (ditto), River Butcher (last seen in "Friendsgiving"), Margaret Cho (last seen in "One Missed Call"), Jim David (last seen in "Radioland Murders"), Fortune Feimster (last seen in "Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar"), Hannah Gadsby, Solomon Georgio, Todd Glass (last heard in "Marmaduke"), Judy Gold (last seen in "Adrienne"), Patti Harrison (last heard in "Trolls Band Together"), Roz Hernandez, Dave Holmes, Eddie Izzard (last heard in "The Song of Names"), Shar Jossell, Matteo Lane, Mae Martin, Roger Q. Mason, Trixie Mattel, Tig Notaro (last seen in "Army of the Dead"), Rosie O'Donnell (last seen in "Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story"), Susan Stryker, Wanda Sykes (last seen in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life"), Scott Thompson, Lily Tomlin (last seen in "80 for Brady"), Robin Tran, Robin Tyler, Marsha Warfield, Suzanne Westenhoefer, KJ Whitehead, Gina Yashere (last heard in "Early Man")
with archive footage of Louie Anderson (last seen in "Coming 2 America"), Lucille Ball (last seen in "Ali & Cavett: The Tale of the Tapes"), Jerry Lewis (ditto), Gladys Bentley, Milton Berle (also last seen in "Albert Brooks: Defending My Life"), Flip Wilson (ditto), Bessie Bonehill, John Boskovich, Rae Bourbon, David Bowie (also carrying over from "A Disturbance in the Force"), Cher (ditto), Harvey Korman (ditto), Kris Kristofferson (ditto), Paul Lynde (ditto), Conan O'Brien (ditto), Donny Osmond (ditto), Richard Pryor (ditto), Robin Williams (ditto), Mel Brooks (last seen in "Bathtubs Over Broadway"), Martin Short (ditto), Anita Bryant (last seen in "Milk"), Harvey Milk (ditto), Carol Burnett (last seen in "Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story"), Nancy Reagan (ditto), George Burns (last seen in "Sid & Judy"), Robert Byrd, Nell Campbell (last seen in "Great Expectations"), Mario Cantone (last seen in "Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project"), Scott Capurro, Tucker Carlson, Johnny Carson (last seen in "Luther: Never Too Much"), Bette Midler (ditto), Lynda Carter (last seen in "Wonder Woman 1984"), Andrew Dice Clay (last seen in "Gilbert"), Bill Clinton (last seen in "Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary"), Madonna (ditto), Ronald Reagan (ditto), Kate Clinton, Norm Crosby (last heard in "Eight Crazy Nights"), Tim Curry (last heard in "The Pebble and the Penguin"), Flotilla Debarge, Ellen Degeneres (last seen in "Nyad"), Diane Sawyer (ditto), Lea DeLaria (last heard in "Cars 3"), Dom DeLuise (last seen in "The End"), Carl Reiner (ditto), Robert De Niro (last seen in "Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple"), David Letterman (ditto), Phyllis Diller, Seth Dillon, Jerry Falwell (last seen in "Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You"), Dave Foley (last seen in "Second Act"), Judy Garland (also last seen in "Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story"), Joel Grey (last seen in "Bob Fosse: It's Showtime!"), Marga Gomez, Greg Gutfeld, Steve Guttenberg (last seen in "Valerie"), Caitlyn Jenner (ditto), Patty Harrison, Sherman Hemsley (last seen in "Landscape with Invisible Hand"), Renee Hicks, Elton John (last seen in "Elton John: Never Too Late"), Christine Jorgensen, Sam Kinison (last seen in "Kevin Hart & Chris Rock: Headliners Only"), Elvira Kurt, Linda Lavin (last seen in "The Back-up Plan"), Vicki Lawrence (last heard in "The Fox and the Hound 2"), Clinton Leupp, Liberace (last seen in "Famous Nathan"), Lipsynka, Brad Loekle, Phyllis Lyon, Moms Mabley (last seen in "Summer of Soul"), Bill Maher (last seen in "Mayor Pete"), Jean Malin, Alec Mapa (last seen in "Queen Bees"), Peter Marshall (last seen in "Tina"), Del Martin, Dina Martina, Armistead Maupin, Frank Maya, Bruce McCulloch (last seen in "Super Troopers 2"), Kevin McDonald (last seen in "The Ladies Man"), Mark McKinney (ditto), Freddie Mercury (last seen in "David Bowie: Out of This World"), Varla Jean Merman, Elizabeth Montgomery (last seen in "Say Hey, Willie Mays!"), Piers Morgan (last seen in "The Accidental President"), Eddie Murphy (last seen in "Claydream"), Charlie Rose (ditto), Al Pacino (last seen in "Gigli"), Charles Nelson Reilly (last seen in "Marvin Hamlisch: What He Did for Love"), Miss Richfield 1981, Bob Smith, Jason Stuart (last seen in "The Birth of a Nation"), Rip Taylor (last seen in "Alex & Emma"), Jane Wagner, John Wayne (last seen in "Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed"), Ella Wesner, Andy Williams (last seen in "What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?"), Karen Williams, Jo Anne Worley, Henny Youngman (last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), and the Village People.
RATING: 5 out of 10 gay comics from the 1920's, when apparently that was a thing.
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