Joke’s on You: An Examination of Humor as a Cultural Divider/Queer Uniter
By: Megan Marie Metzger
March 20, 2014
Q: How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? A: That’s not funny.
Feminists have long suffered a reputation for being
humorless sourpusses. This is likely based upon their inclination
to object when confronted with a brand of humor that may pass as
funny to some and racist, sexist, classist, homophobic,
transphobic and/or ableist to others. In an article for Hypatia,
Merrie Bergmann questions “what reply is adequate to attempts at
appeasement like: ‘What's the matter? Can't you take a joke?’ or:
‘It's all in fun. Where's your sense of humor?’" (Bergmann 1986,
65)
The culture of comedy during the 1960s and ’70s thrived on
this offensive humor. Stately white masculine older men, “good
old boys” like Rat Pack head honcho Frank Sinatra,
“Quintessential American” Bob Hope and randy TV personality
Richard Dawson made jokes at the expense of women, people of
color and gays and lesbians, usually to their faces, and instead
of showing anger or hitting back with an equally biting retort,
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the butts of the jokes were encouraged to keep their mouths shut,
smile, and be a good sport. Relax, it’s just a joke! they might say,
dismissing any opportunity to voice dissent. Some complied with
this bully brand of humor to dominate entertainment. Others
refused, and instead of laughing, they talked back, creating
their own space and making their own work, denying permission for
others to other them.
First, this paper will establish what it means to be a
spoilsport or killjoy by employing works by Sarah Ahmed and Audre
Lorde. Next, it will examine the Be a Good Sport Culture as referenced
by Sarah Ahmed in her essay “Queer Feelings” that permeated
throughout popular American comedy, specifically in the 1950s-
1970s. Lastly, with selected passages from Eli Clare’s memoir
Exile and Pride (1999), this paper will show how artists like
filmmaker John Waters and comedian Margaret Cho work to
reappropriate and queer the culture of humor, using laughter not
only to elicit pleasure, but to overturn the exclusionary
normative order.
Laughter is usually perceived as a pleasurable human
reaction that operates in a variety of ways; sometimes it’s a
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social lubricant, a way to ease tension after an awkward moment.
As an audience member at a stand-up gig it’s a signal that shows
you’re in on the joke, part of the crowd. A hearty belly laugh is
said to relieve anxiety or stress, the best medicine, as the
cliche goes. But what happens when you’re targeted to be the
source of laughter, the butt of the joke? Laughter becomes a
knife that cuts you to your core, that divides you off from the
rest of the group. We aren’t laughing with you, we are laughing
at you, because you’re something worthy of a ridicule. You’re a
joke. In playgrounds, kids who find themselves at the mercy of
cruel jokes are encouraged not to let the bullies see them cry.
As Sarah Ahmed writes in “Queer Feelings,” pleasure can be
“‘good’ only if it is orientated towards some objects, not
others.” (435) In humor, one person’s punchline can be another
person’s trigger. Sarah Ahmed continues, observing that
sometimes, “in mainstream culture... pleasure is a matter of
being a ‘good sport’.” (435) Being a good sport implies not
provoking the joke teller to ask the questions Bergmann
mentioned. Good sports must convey that not only can they take
the joke directed at them, but that they are complicit in its
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negative, hurtful connotations. This allowance, this permission,
allows the good sport to continue to play the game.
Usually, those who refuse to comply and vocalize their
objections to material they find insensitive and offensive are
often branded as a “killjoys.” No fun. In "Killing Joy: Feminism
and the History of Happiness," Sarah Ahmed cites Marilyn Frye
(1983) who explained that oppression requires that “you show
signs of being happy with the situation in which you nd fi
yourself: ‘It is often a requirement upon oppressed people that
we smile and be cheerful. If we comply, we signify our docility
and our acquiescence in our situation...anything but the sunniest
countenance exposes us to being perceived as mean, bitter, angry
or dangerous’ ” (2010, 582-583).
In the 18th Century, when the United States of America was
in its infancy, white women of a higher class were relegated to
the private sphere. Women were limited access to certain parts of
the public sphere at particular time, and almost never without a
male companion or chaperone. Any woman seen out alone at night
was often assumed to be a sex worker (Gilfoyle, 1992). This
indoctrinated [white] women to be seen and not heard, to be
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polite, to keep their mouths shut and their thoughts to
themselves. Feminism has worked very hard to reverse this and
speak up, to rock the boat. Radical feminists rallied against the
system and urged women not to give a shit what the patriarchy
wanted from them, to not live a life based on winning men’s
approval. Often, identifying as feminist, while it should be an
imperative, isn’t an easy road to take. Ahmed avers “to be
recognized as a feminist is to be assigned to a dif cult fi
category and a category of dif culty. You are already read as fi
not easy to get along with when you name yourself a
feminist.” (2010, 583)
Of course, in any assemblage, even those that rally to enact
social change, the regimented social hierarchy perpetuated in the
United States’ dominant cultural hegemony rears its ugly head.
Ahmer notes:
Within feminism, some bodies more than others can be
attributed as the cause of unhappiness. We can place the
gure of the feminist killjoy alongside the gure of the fi fi
angry black woman, explored so well by writers such as Audre
Lorde (1984b) and bell hooks (2000). The angry black woman
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can be described as a killjoy; she may even kill feminist
joy, for example, by pointing out forms of racism within
feminist politics. She might not even have to make any such
point to kill joy. (2010, 583)
In “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” Audre
Lorde observes “black and third world people are expected to
educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to
educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the
heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their positions and
evade responsibility for their own actions.” (1980, 115) The
feminist killjoy, and more specifically, the figure of the “angry
black woman” for women of color, encumbers the marginalized butt
of the joke to be put in a position where they have to explain to
the offender why their words were not okay. Further, only
assigning white, cis-gender, straight men of means as the only
individuals capable of using humor to offend is highly reductive.
The job of being a bully is equal opportunity. Lorde cautions
feminists, writing “Ignoring the differences of race between
women and the implications of those differences presents the most
serious threat to the mobilization of women’s joint power.”
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(1980, 117) Yes, comedy culture is male dominated. Popular TV
shows, even those with a “progressive,” neo-liberal slant like
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (1996), which was created by female
comedian Lizz Winstead has long been plagued with complaints that
it’s a “boys club”1 with a meager percentage of female writers.
Comedy “legends” like Jerry Lewis and Chevy Chase have long
challenged that women aren’t funny. And, as well all know, as
evidenced by the work of American women like Wanda Sykes, Sandra
Bernhard, Maria Bamford, Gilda Radner, Whoopi Goldberg and Tig
Notaro, that’s total bullshit. Despite the different voices heard
in mainstream comedy, individuals and those who are at risk of
being compartmentalized because of the color of their skin, where
they live how they look or who they love are relegated to the
good sport role.
“Good sport” culture permeated popular comedy in 1960s-1970s
America. Humor found on network television, mainstream cinema and
on the Vegas strip consisted primarily of gags whose content
worked to pit and reinforce the “other” against a jeering
hegemony. In Wallowing in Sex: The New Sexual Culture of 1970s American
1 By “conventional” we can fairly assume Levine is implying white, middle-class, able-bodied US citizens with “traditional values.”
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Television, Elana Levine analyzes various genres’ treatment of
sexuality on TV in the wake of the civil rights, gay pride and
women’s liberation movements in 1960s-’70s United States. On
programs like the wildly popular CBS game show The Match Game
(1973), Levine observes that “television’s sexual humor defused
much of the sexual revolution’s revolutionary potential,
reiterating the centrality and normality of conventional2
heterosexual monogamy.” (2007, 171) Despite battles women, people
of color, the disabled, immigrants and those who identify as
queer fought for equality and visibility, on TV, they were still
humorless shrews or ditzy bimbos (depending of course on their
age and level of “attractiveness”), still silly n-words, still
helpless cripples with funny shoes, still sissies and fairies and
ugly bull dykes.
Within the opening seconds of a 1976 episode of The Match
Game3, celebrity panelist Pat Morita is immediately poked fun at
by the show’s fellow entertainers for his Japanese descent
2 Mr. T and Tina (ABC) was the first US television show to feature an Asian-American actor in the title role. The show was canceled after airing for one month in the 1976 fall season. (Source: IMDB.com)3 Dawson played Cpl. Peter Newkirk on WWII POW sitcom Hogan’s Heroes (CBS) from 1965-1971. (Source: IMDB.com)
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(Japanese-American Morita was born June 28, 1932 in Isleton,
California). As he introduces the celebrity players, host Gene
Rayburn remarks he and Morita didn’t get a chance to meet
backstage before the show. “I didn’t even get to give you a
kiss,” Rayburn says, speaking into his curiously thin and long
microphone. “What’s the matter, don’t you like Japanese people?”
asks panelist regular Brett Somers. The crowd responds with
laughter and Rayburn continues with the gag. “Alright, I’ll kiss
you.” As he leans in, he complains about Morita’s thick,
masculine mustache and opts to kiss him on the cheek. After
Rayburn’s peck, Morita sticks out his tongue, and smacks his
face, feigning a giddy lovestruck teenager. The crowd erupts
approvingly with wild applause. Richard Dawson, another Match
Game mainstay, interjects with a combination Pearl-Harbor-gay-
panic gag: “The only thing is, December 7th you wanna attack
Pearl Bailey.” Rayburn and Dawson continue to lob racist jokes at
Morita; when Morita plugs his upcoming series, Mr. T and Tina4,
4 During his tenure on Family Feud, Dawson garnered the nickname the “Kissing Bandit” for sneaking a kiss with every single female contestant. To Dawson’s credit, when ABC executives chided Dawson for kissing non-white women and urged him to stop, citing viewer complaints, he refused. “It's important to methat on Family Feud I could kiss all the people. It sounds crazy but when I first came here [to the US, Dawson was born in England] Petula Clark was on a show with Nat King Cole and he kissed her on the cheek and eighty-one stations
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Rayburn asks “Are you Tina?” Morita replies in a clipped British
accent: “No, I’m Mr. T. It’s because I drink it all the time I
guess.” Dawson slants his eyes, crosses his arms and in a poor
Asian accent, remarks “very interesting.” “Hahaha, that’s good!”
chuckles Somers, while the camera pans to Morita smiling and
nodding, his mouth closed, to show that he is a good sport who
can take a joke. This exchange all takes place in the first two
minutes of the show and is just a small portion of the jokes
Morita cheerfully endured at the expense of his Japanese heritage
during the episode’s twenty minute run.
Watching this clip I can’t help but wonder what the late,
great Pat Morita would have said to Richard Dawson, also
deceased, if, instead of smiling and going along with the jokes
at his expense, Morita opted to fight back with a wicked, witty
retort--to not be a good sport. Would Pat Morita question Richard
Dawson’s masculinity by mentioning the fact that while Morita and
his family spent actual time in an internment camp during World
War II, Dawson, the privileged Hollywood actor, merely played a
in the South canceled him. I kissed black women daily and nightly on Family Feud, and the world didn't come to an end, did it?” (IMDB.com)
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WWII POW on TV5? Would he call out the ribald and aging Richard
Dawson for being a “dirty old man” who insisted on groping and
kissing every unwitting female contestant on The Match Game and,
later the Family Feud?6
No mention of Match Game should ever exclude show fixture
Charles Nelson Reilly, a gay male icon who, as AV Club critic
Robert David Sullivan notes, “was a role model for a lot of
youngsters who didn’t yet realize they needed one.” ("10 Match
Game Episodes That Hit Viewers Right in the Blank", 2014) Reilly
never directly acknowledged his homosexuality to the public until
much later in his life, as part of his autobiographical one-man
theatre show Save it For the Stage (2000). In 2006, the year before
his death, Reilly adapted the play for film, calling it The Life of
Reilly. In it, he recalls the story of meeting NBC president
Vincent J. Donehue, when he was a young, struggling New York
actor. Reilly paints the picture of himself, young and hopeful,
walking into the NBC executive’s tony corner office with the
5 Because, duh, there is obviously no such a thing in this world as a gay male trucker!6 I put this use of ironic in quotations because if Joyce was poking fun at gay panic, then this approach mirrors present-day “hipster racism/homophobia,”which often succeeds in a completely misappropriating what it means to actually be ironic.
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beautiful view that extended to the Bronx where Reilly grew up.
The actor, in the twilight of his life, known primarily as a
kitschy relic, a “funny uncle-type,” is vulnerable in this scene,
revealing that the young, struggling actor’s hopes were dashed
when Donehue tells him plainly that “they don’t let queers on
television.” He continues “what [Donehue] said didn’t bother
me...his words were inaccurate.”
Charles Nelson Reilly did more than prove Donehue wrong.
Reilly was a frequent guest on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson
(1962), appearing more than 100 times (IMDB.com). Other
television credits included The Ed Sullivan Show (1963), The Ghost and
Mrs. Muir (1968), Love, American Style (1971), Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In
(1972), The Love Boat (1982), and game shows like What’s My Line
(1964), Hollywood Squares (1972) and of course Match Game.
While the object of the game may have been to try and get as
many matched words from fill-in-the-blank phrases, the actual
point of Match Game was to provide answers rife with “sexual
innuendo and double entendres…[that] provided the release to
which Match Game’s ubiquitous sexual tension inevitably built.”
(Levine 2007, 170) The “sexual tension” built on Match Game “was
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nearly always suggested rather than overtly stated [which] was
important to the TV industry’s claims of family-friendly
propriety.” (Levine 2007, 170) Again, much like Levine’s use of
“conventional,” it’s safe to assume that “family-friendly” means
heteronormative, middle-class, white families with “traditional
values.” Reilly not only queers the show with his physical gay
male body (his trademark thick square glasses and silk ascot, his
abrasive high-pitched nasal voice), he affirms his agency by only
allowing himself the power to make him the target of any gay
joke. Instead of allowing other (straight) panelists to razz him
for his sexuality, he queers what it means to be a good sport by
beating them to the punch before they even have a chance. For
instance, on an episode that aired in 1974, Rayburn gives the
clue, “every Saturday night, Frank gets picked up by a BLANK.”
The audience shrieks in anticipation at the potential of a racy
answer. The female contestant sheepishly answers, “a sailor,” and
the audience groans in disapproval. Much to the surprise of
Rayburn and the studio audience, the first panelist, Orson Bean,
matches with “sailor.” Bean quips “he takes him dancing and they
have a wonderful time and he buys him a fried egg sandwich and he
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kisses him goodnight at the door. That’s it. That’s the story.”
Second panelist Brett Somers launches into her answer, explaining
“Orson is wrong...’Frank’ is a girl who is named after her daddy.
And she went out and picked herself up a fella.” Somers then
reveals her card, also a match with “sailor.” With her answer and
explanation, Somers keeps the “naughty” gay double entendre
intact by also “normalizing” it by defining the relationship
between Frank and the sailor as an innocent, heterosexual one.
Onto Reilly, well-aware of what the implications would be if he
too answered with “sailor” decides “to be a little different,” he
says as he makes his trademark nasal “oh huh” while arching his
eyebrows and answers with “a lady of the streets (San Vicente).”
The audience groans and Reilly fights back saying “so he was a
normal guy--is there something wrong with that?!?!” The crowd
goes wild and Rayburn shakes his head, telling Reilly, “oh,
Charles, you’re too much.”
In a 1978 episode, Rayburn asks a contestant, “did you hear
about the Jolly Green Giant’s Halloween Party? He took all the
other giants to the ocean, they stuck their heads in the ocean
and bobbed for BLANK.” The first two panelists answer with
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“sharks” and “whales,” while Reilly answers with “the only answer
that’s correct: watermelons. What do you bob for on Halloween?”
Rayburn answers “apples” to which Reilly replies, “what’s the
biggest fruit you can get--present company excluded? Take it from
me, that’s the definitive answer.”
Unlike the constant reaction cuts to Pat Morita in the
episode where his Japanese heritage was mocked, I saw no similar
filming technique on any of the episodes I watched that cut to
Reilly anytime a joke mocking gay men was mentioned. For example,
on the series’ premiere of the randier night-time version of the
show titled Match Game PM (1975), panelist Elaine Joyce answered
“fellow” to the phrase “Arthur said, ‘my blind date was horrible.
Kissing her was like giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation with a
BLANK.’” Joyce explained her answer, reasoning that “Arthur was
a, well, he was a trucker so the worst thing he could think of to
kiss would be another fellow.”7 Cut to Richard Dawson, who, in a
feminized voice, turns to Joyce with “don’t knock it unless
you’ve tried it.” Joyce leaps from her chair, mouth agape and
shrieks, “Ugh, my god they’re all around us!” The camera remains
7 Analyzed Match Game episodes were found on YouTube via links provided by the cited AV CLUB web article.
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pointed to the bottom row, the only actual gay man there silenced
from responding to Joyce’s homophobic disgust. In this particular
instance, Reilly was a good sport by omission.
Had the camera dared to capture a reaction from Reilly, what
would we have seen? What barb would the late, brilliant Charles
Nelson Reilly have delivered to Elaine Joyce that would rendered
her perceived disgust (there is no indication given in her
delivery as to whether or not the Broadway theatre actor’s
homophobic response was “ironic”8) as ugly to the 1970s TV
viewing audience as it looks to me when I watch it on my laptop
in the present day?
In the canon of hegemonic American pop culture, Bob Hope is
lauded as a national treasure. In 1997, Congress awarded Hope
honorary veteran status of the US Armed Forces for his work
entertaining the troops during his many USO tours. A 2010
cnsnews.com profile describing a Library of Congress exhibit
celebrating his legacy described “a letter on display written by
feminists who claim they want to stage their own USO. show.
8 See http://bitchmagazine.org/post/kerbloffle-the-olivia-munn-saga
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‘Since this is a counter-USO show, we think that the script
should have none of the sexist scenes in it that Bob Hope
specials have, dancing girls or any portrayal of Women (sic)
being inferior to men (which they aren’t),’ the letter states.”
(“Library of Congress’ Bob Hope Exhibit Showcases Political
Activism More Than Comic’s Legacy,” 2010)
Hope also shares another equally “esteemable first.”
According to a Hollywood Reporter listicle, Hope called a man a
“fag” for wearing a flashy tie during a 1988 visit on The Tonight
Show. “This was the first time GLAAD...successfully pressured a
celebrity to apologize for using a gay slur. At a time when
public support for gay rights was still small, Hope agreed to
record a public service announcement condemning anti-gay bigotry,
graciously paying for it himself.” (“10 Controversial Gay Gaffes
That Shook Hollywood,” 2011) While it was indeed “gracious” for
the privileged, wealthy Hope to spring for his own PSA, no money
could ever erase the sexist bigotry that, no matter how many
honors his country bestowed upon him, was undeniably an integral
part of his lengthy legacy.
Bob Hope’s variety TV specials that aired throughout the
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1970s “frequently had an anti-gay or homophobic cast, as in a
November special in which Bob Hope derided ‘Sissy Power,’ his
derogatory label for gay liberation.” (Levine 2007, 172a)
In “Lucy and Desi: Sexuality, Ethnicity, and TV’s First
Family,” Mary Desjardins examines Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s
public personas as negotiated through race, class and gender.
Ball and Arnaz guested on an episode of The Bob Hope Show (NBC,
1948), lampooning both their real-life professional and personal
relationship and the fictional husband and wife they played on I
Love Lucy (1951). Desjardins observes that, while “Hope’s film
star persona was based on the feminine man...as a variety show
host (not unlike his USO host persona), Hope is transformed into
a sophisticated wielder of sexual and racist jokes.” (1999, 64)
During the episode, both Ball and Arnaz’s real-life personas
and the characters they play on TV are mashed together; instead
of portraying herself as the highly successful television
producer in a male-dominated industry, Ball’s performance leans
more toward the hare-brained, bumbling Mrs. Ricky Ricardo bored
housewife TV character, nagging her husband for a part on his
show. Hope who admits he’s “often wondered what would have
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happened if [Ball] married [him] instead of [Arnaz]...’if I were
the husband in I Love Lucy’” (Desjardins 1999, 62) casts himself in
the Ricky Ricardo role. By casting himself as Ball’s husband,
Hope asserts his superiority, connecting his “racism to
masculinist, heterosexual competition...exposing links between
patriarchal control of gender and racial definitions.”
(Desjardins 1999, 64) Cuban-born Arnaz is relegated to a second
banana role, playing William Frawley’s “Fred” character. Actress
Vivian Vance, who played Fred’s wife Ethel on I Love Lucy, also
appears, pitting Ethel and Lucy against each other in a rivalry
for Arnaz’s/Fred’s affections. As Desjardins explains, “Hope-as-
Ricky evidences desire for Lucy, Ethel and Lucy are rivals for
Desi-as-Fred, while he and Hope-as-Ricky enact a rivalry over
masculinity. In other words, heterosexual patriarchal
prerogatives are stabilized through the centering of the women’s
desiring of the men and the men’s competition through ‘exchange’
of the women.” (1999, 64-65)
Instead of affecting a Latin accent (which honestly, thanks
for sparing us Bob), Hope plays Lucy’s husband as the white man
that he is. Arnaz’s Cuban otherness is often the target of Hope’s
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jokes; Hope asks Arnaz, “what happened: Did you just come back
from a ‘wetback’ luau?” (Desjardins 1999, 63) These displays of
racism, sexism and patriarchal dominance are played for laughs,
and as Hope’s long career suggests, there was a wide audience for
this brand of offensive humor. Ball’s success as a trailblazer in
her industry allots her no agency to portray herself as such,
even when she was supposedly appearing as “herself” on Hope’s
variety show. Despite Arnaz being born into a wealthy,
influential family, the fact that he was born into a country
where Spanish is the “native language,” he is nothing to Hope but
a “wetback.”
Like the other entertainers who were subjected to being good
sports, Arnaz and Ball were likely complicit in their mere
existence as a worthy subject for a variety of reasons. Given the
history and culture of show business, it may have been impossible
to imagine the field open its doors to people other than
privileged benefactors of the patriarchy. Perhaps Arnaz counted
his lucky stars that he could book radio shows despite his thick
Cuban accent.
Maybe Sammy Davis, Jr., who, in the 1950s, had to sleep in
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separate, segregated quarters on the other side of town because
the place where he and the rest of the Rat Pack performed their
live shows didn’t allow “Coloreds” to eat in their dining rooms,
gamble in their casinos or sleep in their hotel suites complied
with his blackness, his glass-eye, his size, his Judaism as prime
targets for Frank and Dinos and the boys to poke fun at because
he felt it was the only way to “play the game.”
Sammy Davis, Jr., appeared on the Arsenio Hall Show, in
1989, just one year before his death from throat cancer at age
64. He spoke of the racial barriers he helped break by eventually
refusing to work in any clubs that still enforced segregation.
Hall admits his own blissful ignorance by admitting that, upon
reading Davis’ accounts of his time as a young, segregated
soldier serving his country during WWII. “I guess I always
thought that having the kind of talent you have makes living [as
a black man] in America, a little easier. It scares me to read
that they painted you white, that they poured urine in your
beer...did that really happen?” Davis, who grew up in Harlem to
parents who made their careers in vaudeville, admitted he was
protected by his parents and community from the grotesque racial
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inequality that the United States of America is arguably defined
by. In Sammy, Davis writes “I could see the protection I'd
gotten all my life from my father. I appreciated [his] loving
hope that I'd never need to know about prejudice and hate, but
they were wrong. It was as if I'd walked through a swinging door
for eighteen years, a door which they had always secretly held
open.” (2000, 46) Davis, small but regal, explains between
pulled puffs off his cigarette his encounters with racism in the
US Army. Fellow black soldiers would warn Davis “Hey man, don’t
be a[n Uncle] Tom, do what you’re supposed to do.” Davis
continues, as he rose to fame as a major celebrity and
entertainer, he heard criticism from not only whites but “his
people” that his success was synonymous with attempts at racial
assimilation:
They said ‘he wants to be white.’ I don’t want to be white!
If I was white...I think a white Sammy Davis, Jr. [would be]
BAD! [audience laughter] It’s because of what I am. Because
of my innate blackness. MY innate blackness. It’s not
[Arsenio Hall’s], it ain’t Richard Pryor’s it ain’t Sidney
[Poitier]’s, It isn’t Eddie Murphy’s, but it’s mine…
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[Arsenio,] you come out and you do your thing and you do the
humor that is ‘now’ humor and if you’ll deal with a white
situation or a black situation... you do it with humor. I
tried to do it with entertaining. To try to get some doors
open, because all of them were closed back in those days.
All of them..you had nobody to back you up. Not the
government, not the people, not the city...as soon as I got
my foot in the door I started doing everything that I ever
wanted to do. I went overboard. Off the deep end.
Davis worked tirelessly to forge a niche in show business by
presenting himself not only as a unique and beloved entertainer,
but to show racist America that his “innate blackness” is as
different as any other African American’s “innate blackness,”
that an entire race cannot be reduced to one joke. Davis took the
punches from his co-stars and showed that he was not only a good
sport, but someone who played the game so that others, who often
felt laughed at simply for being who they are could turn the
table on its motherfucking head, making the joke on the
oppressor.
The middle section of Eli Clare’s stark and stunning memoir,
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Exile & Pride (1999) finds the author grappling with the words that
others have used to name his existence as an other, a queer,
disabled body in the grips of a country who has historically
othered disabled individuals to the point of grotesque
exploitation. Clare searches for the language to accurately
identify himself, to establish agency over his naming, and finds
himself mulling over the word “freak.” It’s a puzzling word for
Clare. “Unlike ‘queer’ and ‘crip,’ [‘freak’] has not been widely
embraced in my communities.” (Clare 1999, 84.) Clare continues to
wallow in the word, and shares with the reader the troubling
origin of the “freak” in US culture, a history that “tells the
story of an elaborate and calculated social construction that
utilized performance and fabrication as well as deeply held
cultural beliefs.” (Clare 1999, 86). Amputees, dark-skinned
“natives” and little people became “Armless Wonders...Wild Men
Borneo…[and]...Midgets” (86) who starred in actual “freak shows”
that “carefully construct[ed] an exaggerated divide between
“normal” and Other, sustained in turn by rubes willing to pay
good money to stare.” (Clare 1999, 87)
The story Clare tells is as rich and complex as the rest of
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Exile & Pride. Of course, it’s devastating to think of these human
beings “made freaks, socially constructed for the purposes of
entertainment and profit” (Clare 1999, 89) were thought as not
people with thoughts and hopes and stories were treated like
exotic or scary animals in a zoo, or worse, inanimate objects to
gawk at like paintings in a museum, which “capitalized…on the
ableism and racism, which made the transitions from disabled
white person, disabled person of color, nondisabled person of
color, nondisabled person of color, to freak even possible.” (89)
On the other hand, as Clare reveals, “the people who worked
the freak show did not only live as victims.” (1999, 89) Clare
told the stories of those who “made decent livings; some, like
Charles Stratton, Mercy Lavinia, Warren Bump, and William
Johnson, even became wealthy.” (89) While this is positive it’s
still problematic, because, by using these disabled bodies for
profit, the white abled bosses who employed them “used ableism
racism to his benefit” thus perpetuating “normality” [to be]
defined exclusively in terms of whiteness and able-bodiness.”
(Clare 1999, 91)
The freak show can be considered an analogue of our society,
25
a place where “the complexities of exploitation pile up, layer
upon layer.” (91) “White people and nondisabled people” (AKA
white, cis-gender, heteronormativity) “[use] racism and ableism
to turn a profit” (91) The cultural hegemony and its willing,
complicit subjects work together to “consciously manipulate” (91)
other willing, complicit subjects and “use lies to strengthen its
own self-image.” (91-92) Clare, recalling Foucault’s theorization
of how power is produced and perpetuated, “believe[s the freak
show’s exploitation] exerted influence in many directions.”
(Clare 1999, 92)
Clare’s brilliant, in-depth exploration of not only his
feelings regarding the word “freak” but the actions of other
people who brought him to his conclusions is his journey to the
reclamation of words like “queer” “cripple” and “freak;” slurs
whose original intentions were only to hurt people and put them
in their place. In feminism, reclaiming words like “bitch9” has
9 Lisa Jervis and Andi Zeisler co-founded Bitch Magazine: A Feminist Response to Pop Culture in 1996. When Jervis and Zeisler were asked why they chose Bitch as their magazine’s title, they explained that the word is “an epithet hurled at women who speak their minds, who have opinions and don't shy away from expressing them, and who don't sit by and smile uncomfortably if they're bothered or offended. If being an outspoken woman means being a bitch, we'll take that as a compliment.” (Bitch Media FAQ, 2014)
26
operated to take the power away from the oppressor by
reappropriating the word as a compliment, its charged negative
connotation lessened.
On the fringe of mainstream American popular culture,
subversive, independent filmmakers and alt-comics refuse to
pander to the “good ol’ boy” syndicate who seeks entertainment
that reaffirms and reifies their dominant positioning in the
social hierarchy. They make work that gleefully pokes fun at
their own otherness to expose how ridiculous, ignorant and
grotesque it is for people to live their lives by asserting their
dominance. Baltimore artist and cult legend John Waters rose to
acclaim for his low-budget films that celebrates and beautifies
the transgressive weirdo who refuses to play by the rules that
promise to guarantee a “normal, happy life.” The queer characters
who populate John Waters’ not only don’t want to be good sports,
they would rather eat shit (literally!) than play the game.
Waters’ Baltimore is a dystopian Utopia where the “scum of
the Earth” (the queer, the fat, the disabled, the people of
27
color, the old, the poor, the drug users, the sex-workers) are
the superstars and the racist, sexist, size-ist homophobes
(Desperate Living, Hairspray) heteronormative “goody-goody-two-shoes”
are the losers. Divine, Waters’ drag queen muse, was a morbidly
obese bald gay man born Glenn Milstead when the cameras weren’t
filming. But in Waters’ films like Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female
Trouble (1974), his Divine alter-ego is a beautiful, glamourous,
dangerous, femme fatale and fashion model who embraces a deviant,
filthy life rife with crime and promiscuity. Waters explains his
choices to make the films that he makes, remarking “my idea of an
interesting person is someone who is quite proud of their
seemingly abnormal life and turns their disadvantage into a
career.” (Waters 2011, 98).
Margaret Cho, a Korean-American comedian who identifies as
bisexual, has built her career sharing her experiences struggling
to fit into a world that didn’t want her. Using autobiographical
details of her growing up in San Francisco as the daughter of
immigrant parents who owned a bookshop in the Castro district,
Cho redefines herself not as an exotic other to fetishize or
homogenize, but as an activist and a radical. Her brutally honest
28
material, which includes a “racist-if-anyone-else-did-it”
impression of her mother, succeeds in not only evoking laughter,
but exposing that no matter how hard some people try to
assimilate, to “play the game,” they could fail, even risking
death. In 1994, Cho broke boundaries as the first Asian-American
woman to star in her own TV show. She was the female counterpart
to Pat Morita, and the show was ABC's All-American Girl. Cho’s curvy
body and full face were “too fat for TV, according to ABC
executives. Producers were concerned that Cho was either “too
ethnic” or "not ethnic enough." The anxiety to please the network
mixed with a dangerous crash diet caused Cho’s kidneys to fail,
and she almost died. All American Girl ended up being a mediocre,
watered down appropriation of Cho’s wicked brash wit, and it was
canceled after one season. Depressed, Cho wallowed in booze and
drugs. But, as all real artists do, she turned her pain into
triumph, turning this story into her masterpiece, the comedy
special I'm the One That I Want (2000). It's vulnerable, heart-
wrenching and piss-your-pants funny. After this experience, Cho
has molded her career in a way that pleases only her and her
devoted fanbase. Cho may still play the game, but it’s by her
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rules.10
This paper has worked to present the culture of humor and
mainstream entertainment through a feminist, queer lens. Its
intention is not to show a false sense of “this is where we were,
but, gee, look how far we’ve come!” “Good Sport” pressure still
exists, even in spheres like the alt-comedy genre, where hipster
racism (“I’m just being ironic!”) prevails. The game isn’t over,
but there are new, different and liberating ways to play.
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10 Excerpts of this description of Cho’s film are borrowed from a previously published work by me for The Pitch Weekly (http://www.pitch.com/kansascity/girl-you-want/Content?oid=2188298)
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