A Sharry Flenniken Surprise

While rooting in old “National Lampoon”s for the last piece I found a throwaway comment from an editorial by P.J. O’Rourke which only seemed to highlight the distinction of Sharry Flenniken’s piece “A Child of Divorce”. I’ve aided the O'Rourke's comment to the original entry. But I was stunned to see Sharry Flenniken had at some point come along and made a comment herself about her cartoon. If I were more technically aware I probably have would been alerted when she dropped by, and my cluelessness would not have seemed like rudeness for not thanking her at the time.
But still, I must say thanks to Sharry Flenniken, wherever you are. And to everyone else, why not go and have a look and see yourself.

157: John Hughes - Homo Fashions

in "National Lampoon" September 1978

Yes - this by that John Hughes who directed all those teen films in the ‘80s.

To say that high fashion has adapted male working class styles is a little disingenuous. What Hughes really means is that gay fetish-wear has emphasised a new flamboyant performed machismo though its acquisition of heterosexual fashion props. This piece almost acknowledges outright the base sexual impulse but instead retreats to just being about fashion. So the joke becomes more about presenting dull working clothes wrapped in a lot of high-powered promotional fashion-spiel.

However since Hughes uses the words “homos”, “fags” and “Queers” it’s fairly certain that within the ambit of this piece that homosexuals aren’t worth much. I also get the vague impression that Hughes (or the “humorous” “utterances” of this written performance, if you want to get a bit more lit-crit – or even if you want to give some benefit of the doubt to Hughes) feels bothered and pestered by gays and wishes they would stop invading the straight world of regular guys without permission for homosexuals’ weird (sexual or non-sexual) ends.

National Lampoon was edited by P.J O’Rourke in the late 70s. John Hughes was one of the newest and most prolific writers at "National Lampoon" at this time. Between the two of them they largely defined that period’s reconstructed trad-hetero post-frat-boy ethos (and hence much of the popular early 80s humour that followed), often featuring many nasty throwaway remarks about fags.

156: Incredible Hulk parody

from “Mad Magazine” January 1979
written by Lou Silverstone, drawn by Angelo Torres

Here we have some pertinent excerpts from a parody of “The Incredible Hulk” TV series. The mild-mannered nebbishy David Banner is the necessary alter-ego of the non-stop rage machine that is The Hulk. “Mad” takes this one step further by running a series of gags making him so un-masculine as to appear possibly gay. However their idea of gay (and this is by the late 70s mind you) is an uninspired representation of a transvestite in an old lady’s clothes. By this time it really can’t be denied the “Mad” crew of writers were a rather middle-aged bunch of old farts.
This strip also highlights the strange belief American have that “Bruce” is an essentially gay name. The TV producers had indeed changed the TV version’s name from “Bruce” to “David”, possibly because of homosexual overtones. Here though, they undercut this assumption with the gag about the athlete Bruce Jenner.

155: Village People parody

Saturday Night Live 14 April 1979
(transcript from http://snltranscripts.jt.org/78/78qrock.phtml)

[Pop music impresario Don Kirshner (Paul Shaffer) sits in a TV control room, woodenly reading off cue cards, addressing the camera.]

Don Kirshner:
I'm Don Kirshner and welcome to Rock Concert. I first met the Village Persons two years ago when their lead singer, Lyle Manning, provided the floral arrangements for my daughter Karen's bas mitzvah. Today, thanks to the brilliant disco production of Giorgio Morali and to their manager Maury Mineo, they have become a vibrant force in the music industry. Now, to introduce them from the perspective of a young person who can enjoy their music without understanding its homosexual connotations, here is my daughter, Karen Kirshner.

[Applause for Karen Kirshner (Gilda Radner) who enters and sits next to Don -- she, too, reads the cue cards woodenly, sounding exactly like her father.]

Karen Kirshner:
I first saw the Village Persons perform at L.A.'s famed Roxy Theater where they debuted their hit single "Health Club Man." Tonight, thanks to my good friend Herb Karp at Polysutra Records, they're here to perform their new hit, "Bend Over, Chuck Berry." Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome The Village Persons.

[Applause. Disco music begins. Dissolve to a mirrored chandelier and pan down to reveal a glittering disco set where the Village Persons gyrate to the beat: a native American Indian in full tribal regalia (John Belushi), a construction worker (Bill Murray), a biker in leather with a thick mustache (Dan Aykroyd), a sailor, a cowboy and the wildly intense, energetic lead singer, a uniformed cop (Garrett Morris).]

The Village Persons:
Bend over ... Bend over and over
Bend over and over and over
Bend over and over and over

Cop:
I went down to the disco to make it with my local deejay
Well, he looks so good in leather and he knows which records to play
Well, I walked right up to him but I didn't know what to say
Uh huh!
Well, he told me he was macho and he worked out down at the gym
Ha ha! Yeah!

The Village Persons:
Bend over, over and over

Cop:
I said, hey, look, you're the boss and the turntable started to spin

The Village Persons:
Bend over, over and over

Cop:
And before too long I was really gettin' in to him

The Village Persons:
Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho!
Bend over, Chuck Berry
Put your guitar away
'Cause they're playin' disco music
From New York to L.A.

Cop:
Not to mention Philadelphia, P-A.

The Village Persons:
Take a look around you
There's no more rock and roll today
So bend over, Chuck Berry
Disco is here to stay

The Village Persons: [posing provocatively]
Bend over ... Bend over and over
Bend over and over and over

Cop:
... Yeah!
So the next time you're lonely and you're crawling on your hands and knees

The Village Persons:
Bend over, over and over

Cop:
And you're checkin' out each young man to find out where he wears his keys

The Village Persons:
Bend over, over and over

Cop:
Come on down to the disco where the deejays aim to please

The Village Persons:
Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!
Bend over, Chuck Berry
Put your guitar away
'Cause they're playin' disco music
From New York to L.A.

Cop:
The places goin' down in 'Frisco Bay.

The Village Persons:
Take a look around you
There's no more rock and roll today

Cop:
Do you hear me, man? Bend over!

The Village Persons:
So bend over, Chuck Berry

Cop:
What would Little Richard say?

The Village Persons:
Hey!

[Song ends. Dancers stop. Applause.]

----------------------------------------

Saturday Night Live has always parodied new trends, and so from its heyday, here’s a pastiche of the Village people. The Village People have been the ubiquitous, maybe even archetypal out-gay stereotype (the leather cop in particular) for clueless sods for almost the last 30 years. See how it’s taken just 10 years for gays to go from being weird unsexual transvestites to growling hairy clones. That straights keep dragging up the leather cop image for comedy reasons gives you some idea as to how hard this hits a nerve about homosexual sex. But anyway, here we have a parody of the Village People from when they first fresh and new.

However, given the background of these performers and writers this sketch is acting out some fundamental assumptions about the importance of popular music in the lives of this particular generation. The careers of these writers and performers take in either the early ‘70s Woodstock parody “Lemmings” or else “The Blues Brothers”. If these people lived a rock n’roll lifestyle, then it was because rock n’roll was part of their cultural DNA. The promotion of rock n’ roll was a crowning part of their generation’s cultural achievements. Furthermore, rock n’roll is unremittingly heterosexual, and had become a young person’s music of choice to get laid to. Disgust about disco being “fag music” is really petulant irritation from a lot of straights who are suddenly find they’re not where the sexual action is. That the Village People seemed to be promoting and attracting a particular gay aesthetic only confirms that the order the heterosexual baby-boomers had made for themselves over the last 10-20 years was not the only story. For those who were a little older it means that they’ve got a sudden glimpse as to their irrelevance. For younger mainstream blue-collar music fans disco is an affront to their heterosexual hopes and assumptions. Watching documentary footage of rock fans torching disco records in “Last Days of Disco” can give you some idea as to the extent of their outrage.

So therefore in this parody, you not only have the performers ridiculing disco, but also heralding the possible death of straight music. If Chuck Berry introduced rock n’roll with “Roll over Beethoven” then here the SNL stars can lament the death of rock n’roll with the image of Chuck Berry being sodomised by disco, as the Village Persons also sing about the easy availability of gay sex. That disco music was about gay men and sex can’t be denied. But the typical straight boy trick of deriding something they don’t like as “gay” or “faggy” is suddenly undermined by the fact that the matter under scrutiny unabashedly proclaims its gayness. All that these satirists can do is outrageously emphasise the homosexual overtones, demonstrating how this music can never hope to appeal to the bland tastes of mainstream music-buying America, hence the intro by the unhip Kershners. All they can do is try to make homosexual expression and need for sex funny. And it is the fact that it has been a taboo until recently but is now broadcast on national television that makes it outrageously funny to most of the audience. These are fag jokes that your uncle would never make, so be hip with us is the invitation of SNL.

The sudden final reference to Little Richard is because he has always been surrounded by gay rumours.

154: Rock Hudson's and Jim Nabors's Gay Marriage

Here’s some cartoon representations of a rather strange gay rumour that started doing the rounds in the US in the early ‘70s. You can read more about it at http://www.snopes.com/movies/actors/nabors.asp.
Rock Hudson we probably all know. Jim Nabors played a gee-golly, hapless accident-prone dork - Gomer Pyle, but also had a successful singing career (English audiences might want to think of Michael Crawford, as both Frank Spencer in “Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em” and also as a world-spanning musical star).
In those distant days the prospect of gay marriage was weird plus unnatural multiplied by ridiculous to the power of impossible, and therefore good for an extravagant laugh, particularly when allied to such high-profile names.

from “When Watching TV You Can Be Sure of Seeing…” in “Mad” October 1972

This is contemporaneous with the original appearance of the rumour. “Rona Boring” would be the gossip columnist Rona Barrett. This dates from a time when insinuations of homosexuality would constitute a major slur. You could argue that “Mad” is satirising the vituperative destructive procedures of gossip columnists. That by sharing this recension of the Hudson/Nabors rumour with its teenage audience its pointing out how stupid this all is.

written by Josh Alan Friedman, drawn by Drew Friedman in Weirdo #9, Winter 1983-1984

This is so very not a secret wedding. I think Rock Hudson’s best man could be Franklin Pangborn, while Nabor’s best man in military uniform is Frank Sutton who played the drill instructor in “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.” That the actors who played military characters should appear in uniform is typical of the “TV Guide”-reality this parody inhabits, where actors eventually become one with their phosphor-dot roles, developing an existence and identity independent of their real lives. Which is also how gossip assumes such power, when you’re only as real as your headlines.

The two Friedman brothers have always been extreme examples of the baby boomer imagination, obsessed by the tawdry trivia of the American entertainment industry, fascinated by the second-rate comics, TV, and films of their youth, yet so enamoured they are compelled to lavishly reproduce them all again in pointillist hyper-realistic style.

written by Josh Alan Friedman, drawn by Drew Friedman in Weirdo #12, Winter 1985

The Friedman’s were so enrapt by this titbit that they returned to flesh it out further a couple of years later in full-page glory. Here they play up the idea of this thwarted love, while also giving us numerous panels revealing what the shared romantic home life of such different men would be like.
Indeed there's a slight frisson in all this since both Nabors and Hudson were alive when the Friedmans were putting these cartoons togther. Imagine the legal steps that a certain dwarven scientologist would take if something equally as insinauating of hidden homosexuality were compiled nowadays.
In this piece. the Hudson leading-man persona naturally slips into this particular romantic scenario, even if it is a homosexual one. The yokel mannerisms from Nabors disconcert for comedic effect, playing off against Hudson's silent movie-magazine good looks. The things is almost but not quite poignant, sympathetic to the plight of closeted homsoexuals, but Nabors is really the butt of the joke, too out of place in all this to be successfully gay. The whole thing though is as freakily verisimilitudinous as a photo-expose from scandal rag.

Lenny Bruce had some routines about Hudson's rumoured homosexuality which I'd already covered at http://ukjarry.blogspot.com/2007/12/24-faggots-lenny-bruce.html

153: Christopher Browne

in “National Lampoon” May 1977

Well, here's a rather genial take on the gay bath house scene. By 1977 it’s a little late in the day though. Apparently the earlier 70s were the real heyday for the bathhouses, but then again people weren’t paying that much attention to gay lifestyles then. Though 1972-73 did see a lot of articles about Bette Midler with references to her career-making shows at the Continental Baths. And if the “Colonial Baths” in this cartoon are inspired by anything in particular it’s the actual “Continental Baths”.

That the lead character is a Soviet visitor layers a certain irony over the whole encounter, and also allows for an endearing naivety – like a rather more explicitly homoerotic version of the sitcom “Perfect Strangers”. If he weren’t from some insulated foreign territory it’s hard to see how the lead character wouldn’t immediately identify everything that was going on and make good his escape.

The use of the construction worker as the friendly gay guide is a bit of a twist. From the early 70s on, politicised blue collar/construction workers had been stereotyped as reactionary conservatives, known as “hard hats”.

I could be wrong but it does look like all the homosexuals have rather more protuberant and inviting bottoms. That the lead character has nipples when topless is an interesting additional detail too. And am I alone in thinking that the drag queen looks like a combination of Bette Midler and Barry Manilow? As in Dragula, “Merv” is a reference to the closeted talk show host Merv Griffin.

Unlike “Little Annie Fanny”, sex is happening in and out-of-sight in this cartoon. Suggestions of real sex need to evident if this cartoon is going to work, and give a real and comprehensiveimpression of the bath house scene. Since this cartoon relies more on the humour in the situation than on a torrent of gags, it needs the reality of sex to give its events some weight and consequence. Although as far as comedic rapes go, this cartoon ends quite innocently.

152: Jean Shepherd

Life, when you're a Male kid, is what the Grownups are doing. The Adult world seems to be some kind of secret society that has its own passwords, handclasps, and countersigns. The thing is to get In. But there's this invisible, impenetrable wall between you and all the great, unimaginably swinging things that they seem to be involved in. Occasionally mutterings of exotic secrets and incredible pleasures filter through. And so you bang against it, throw rocks at it, try to climb over it, burrow under it; but there it is. Impenetrable. Enigmatic.

Girls somehow seem to be already involved, as though from birth they've got the Word. Lolita has no Male counterpart. It does no good to protest and pretend otherwise. The fact is inescapable. A male kid is really a kid. A female kid is a girl. Some guys give up early in life, surrender completely before the impassable transparent wall, and remain little kids forever. They are called "Fags," or "Homosexuals," if you are in polite society.

The rest of us have to claw our way into Life as best we can, never knowing when we'll be Admitted. It happens to each of us in different ways - and once it does, there's no turning back.

from “Hairy Gertz And The 47 Crappies “in “In God We Trust - All Others Pay Cash”, 1966
…

This is the introduction to an essay that originally appeared in “Playboy” June 1964. However that version didn’t have even a hint of all this stuff about “fags” being failed, infantilised heterosexuals who didn’t have the balls and spirit to be real men. Rather then just being sheer macho disdain, I suppose it’s possible there might be some sort of pop psychology swilling around in all this. And even if you’re never Admiited, there’s always the consolation that you’re not a fag.
Again, I like Jean Shepherd, and everyone should watch the film “A Christmas Story”, but this only demonstrates how even the most hip and counterculture humorists are often mired in their time. Of course the essay then goes on to become a mock-epic deconstruction of a typical men’s fishing trip, but evidently Shep felt strongly enough that he has to add these few new comments. At a time when camp is just starting to make inroads into mainstream comedy, Shep feels the need to bolster up his own brand of playful, forthright but fundamentally boyish nostalgia.

151: Arnold Roth

in “Punch” 26 September 1979

Arnold Roth contributed double-page cartoon reports on many contemporary American events and trends to “Punch” from the late 60s to the mid-80s. Roth has always revelled in a profligacy and inventiveness. Having found a particular topic he would then work out as many variations as possible to fill the allotted space. On a few rare occasions, there is one gay gag amongst many. In this instance, homosexuality is the main theme. However, as on the few other occasions he turned his attention to homosexuals, the results are rather underwhelming. High heels, limp wrists, lipstick, transvestism. Prancing fashion sissies, basically. Which is all hung on a tag about angry gays (well petulant really) which is little more advanced then Private Eye’s “Poove Power” from a decade previous. A shame because I really like Arnold Roth and I was looking forward to finding this. Harvey Kurtzman had already used the "fairy godfather" gag as part of this "Little Annie Fanny" installament. Although the placing of the hands in the Godfather's pockets looks a tad suggestive if not outright obscene - and what is fascinating the guy looking at the fountain?