457: Gay Boxing 3: I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again

I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again – 19 Apr 1970
Written by Graham Garden and Bill Oddie

http://www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com/comedy/Im-Sorry-Ill-Read-That-Again/710-Harder-They-Fall-April-19-1970-show-9360.html

You can play the episode online or download a copy at the link above.
“The Harder They Fall, the More They Hurt Themselves” runs for the last 10 minutes of the programme

Prior to this sketch, Terry Southern had executed several variations on the idea of a gay boxer in the film and book versions of his “The Magic Christian”

The radio sketch programme “I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again” drew its humour from silliness, puns, running gags and characters, sarcastic topical comments, and mild sexiness. This was matched by the enthusiastic performances of its cast, which were equalled and sometimes overpowered by the responses of an overenthusiastic audience. Each show usually ended with a longer 10 minute sketch parody.

“The Harder They Fall, the More They Hurt Themselves” is a parody of boxing match has as its centrepiece John Cleese’s camp old queen of a rookie boxer, Butch aka “Sugar Puff Robinson”. This is an obvious play on the name of the famous boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, as sugar puffs are a breakfast cereal, but in English slang “puff” or “poof” or “poufffe” was a then-popular term for “homosexual”.

5 years have passed since Julian and Sandy on “Round the Horne”. Julian and Sandy employed the private slang of Polari, and the writers and cast were unsure as to what they would be able to get past the BBC censors. So even as people were laughing at those sketches, they may not necessarily have been entirely sure what they laughing at, but were just caught up in the entertaining hysteria. The gags in this episode of “I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again” aren’t intended to go over anyone’s head or appear to worry much about the censor. Cleese’s character makes numerous sly sexually appreciative comments about wrestler’s glistening bodies and his camp innuendoes (“You can call me anytime”) get strong laughs. Broad acting, broad gags, broad laughs.

Bill Oddie as boxing trainer: All I want is a raw youth I can get to work on.

Cleese: Mm, don’t we all. Oh, I say. Quiet, plebs. Hello boys. I’m butch. Sorry -“Butch”.

There’s a heavy dose of effeminacy gags about and wearing women’s clothing: “If you touch my earrings I’ll wince”

Mention of a fighter’s purse (his prize money) gets a “Goody, it’ll go with my huge handbag”

Graham Garden as the promoter: Jack will be your second

Cleese: Don’t you believe it!

In this extended sketch, Cleese takes the camping-it-up spotlight from Tim Brooke Taylor, who as noted all over this blog, was the go-to-performer for mincing about for this generation of Oxbridge comedians.

Cleese’s comment “I’m as rugged as the next man” elicits a quick fey fairy cameo from Tim as The Next Man, and then a quick spat as to who saw all the men first.

Tim BRooke Taylor now admits, “The one thing I do regret is the large number of gay jokes. At the time it was liberal to be able to do ‘poofter’ jokes at last – ‘Round the Horne’ did them brilliantly. But it went on too long and I remember thinking, ‘if I do this in a ‘whoops’ voice it will get a laugh.’ I’m happy to say I gave that route up eventually.” – “The Clue Bible” by Jem Roberts.

268: Fag Rock 3 - The Goodies

The Goodies
“Superstar”, 7 July 1973
Written by Bill Odie and Graeme Garden, with Tim Brooke-Taylor
“I don’t want your love” by Bill Oddie and Michael Gibbs

Barbara Mitchell as "Isabel Chintz"
John Peel as Jimmy Saville, the host of "Top of the Pops"

The Goodie’s comic satire of the contemporary music business. The first half isn’t germane to my purpose. Watch it if you like, I’m not the boss of you, see if I care, but you won’t get credit either way. The basic set-up is that The Goodies decide that popular music is becoming too sexual. The upshot of assorted auditions is that only Bill gets signed to an agent. The agent establishes Bill’s image as a virile famous pop star called “Randy Pandy” (a pun on the children’s character Andy Pandy, and the word randy, meaning horny). Fearing that the British public maybe in danger of getting bored with him, she decides he needs an image change, and that he will play the lead in a new rock musical, “St Augustine Superstar”.

ISABEL: You are gonna star in a new rock musical. And this is it: Saint Augustine - Superstar.
TBT: That sounds rather nice.
ISABEL: Don't you believe it. He's Saint Augustine.
TBT (horrified): Him!
ISABEL: Oh yes yes yes. He's pure, he's good and he's holy, but above all he's unbearably sexy.
TBT: No he's not.
BO: Yes he is!
TBT: Not.
ISABEL: He's got all the girls screaming for him...
BO: Yes! Yes!
ISABEL: So what does he do?
ISABEL: He goes into a monastery.
TBT, GG & BO: He WHAT?!
ISABEL: Yes, along with all the fellas, you see what I mean?
(She nudges Tim suggestively.)
GG: Oh, come off it. Saint Augustine wasn't a.... nancy.
ISABEL: He is in here. To an extent.
TBT: How much of an extent?
ISABEL: A large extent.
BO: Yeah, yeah, but what about me groupies, miss? I don't want...
ISABEL: Oh, don't worry, hun. This way you get everybody going for you. See, the butch fellas like you 'cause you're not after their sheilas, the sheilas like you 'cause they want to convert you, and you even score in the twilight zone.


Starts at 1:55


So in this parody, glam rock isn’t about sexual liberation, it’s only calculatedly marketing sexual ambivalence for commercial reasons. While you can make some sort of argument that there is a degree of social comment in all this about music and sexuality - that the music titillates its audience of young girls under cover of gay insinuations - really, it’s an opportunity to make jokes about behaving camply. Which is the major problem with many of The Goodies’ attempts at satire - their idea of what is funny is too similar to what the audience for an ITV sitcom would also find funny. It doesn’t go against the grain enough, and so as time moved on, The Goodies got left behind. Hell, we’re only watching it for historical reasons. Earlier in the same episode there are jokes about money-grubbing Jewish lawyers with comically large noses. It’s all that sort of level. In the same way, later on, it’s funny to call someone a “Superpoof”, but for somebody to think you’re a poof is deeply annoying, and hence also funny. Camp men showing their attraction is also amusing. Between the three different gays played by Tim, Graeme, and Bill, you get them dressed up in leather, furs, and shiny materials. And the need to put on gruff voices, and prove you’re not really poofs.
You also get a parody of “Jesus Christ Superstar”, the film version of which had come out only a couple of months earlier the same year. It’s more a parody of the “Top of the Pops” than the musical. So here’s Bill in outrageous costume, pouting, pawing with his limp wrist, skipping about on the stage, and then stripping down to his undergarments. The Mincing Monks are neither subtle as a joke nor as a performance (though they are played by The Fred Tomlinson Singers, for Monty Python trivia fans).
Youtube is not the finest medium, and so I can’t tell whether the final joke of Tim and Graeme, still dressed as gay men, being chased off by police and sailors, is because the mob fancies them, or because they want to beat them up in frustration and disgust.
There may be little bits cut out of this. Apparently the Australians censored this quite heavily. Gay jokes were not popular in Australia in the mid-70s. When Dick Emery went on tour, some parts of the Australian media said he was disgusting for playing a homosexual.

161: Gay Ad - Butch Tobacco

from “The Goodies” April 9, 1972
starts at 4:46

Like the last “Goodies” gay ad, this offers much the same idea again. A generic commercial ideas of heterosexuality is deflated at the last moment. It’s the same idea as Beyond the Fringe’s “Bollard” sketch, only in reverse. There the models were presented as camp from the start, and so the twist was to see them pretending to be butch. Such an overly performed version of straightness easily topples into campness. It is homosexuals who fetishise and obsess over every detail of displayed manliness, motivated either out of paranoia so to hide their unmanly homosexuality, or to ape and accentuate a macho appeal. The stereotypical idea of the gay male model was exploited in Ralph Steadman’s cartoon. In the end it all becomes an idea of male attractiveness performed to other men which as in this instance literally excludes women. In these two “Goodies” sketches there’s also the possible idea that gays are silly, not just for their effeminate dress and manner, but also because it’s laughable that anyone would want to turn away such enticing, attractive willing nubile young ladies.
“Butch” is not an improbable name, since most ‘70s products aimed at straight men relied on blatantly, indeed even ludicrously, blockheaded appeals to machismo.

115: The Goodies - "A Cactus in My Y-Fronts"

“The Goodies – Almost Live”, 2 November 1976

Starts at 6.10

“The Midnight Cow Person” – Tim Brooke-Taylor

Another gay cowboy joke. “Midnight Cowperson” with its pre-Politcally Correct phrasing is a reference to the film “Midnight Cowboy”, in which Jon Voight played a hustler who make occasional forays into homosexuality.

This was originally performed on the 11 November 1973 episode of “I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again”. It was sung by its writer Bill Oddie (the short bearded one). That version has shtick missing from this, where cowboy yodelling becomes a chorus of camp “Ooooohs!”

The song is torn between two different sets of gay clichés and just silly jokes about sitting on a prickly pear and animal gags. The pear/ bottom gags, one could possibly see as deferring any real gags about sodomy or sexual interest. Its all about a comic painful incident rather than any real suggestion of S&M. The frilly pink comical cowboy outfit is slightly at odds with all the fetish gear mentioned in this song, but that’s just one of those confusions which comedy writers in the 70s have difficulty coming to grips with. Predatory or pouffy?

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

My name is Two Gun Pierre
I wear rose buds in my hair
And a chi-chi pink bandanna round my neck

I came down from Tennessee
With a cowboy on my knee
And a pair of leather chaps around my legs ... hold on boys!

I was down in Cripple Creek
I was dying for a leak
So I dropped my pants behind a cactus there

When I fastened up my belt
I can't tell ya how I felt
But I knew the meaning of a prickly pear ... ouch!!

Oh I've got a cactus in my y-fronts and a vulture round my head
I've just been kissed by a Tennessee miss and I wish that I were dead
I've a jockstrap made of leather and pants of PVC (ee - ee - ee - ee - ee - ee)
The cactus in my y-fronts make a loser out of me!

In Californ - i - a
Where the rustlers are so gay
I bought a gentle gee-gee name of Jacques

But he livened up a lot
When he felt my prickly spot
And that buckin' bronco broke my buckin' back!

So I walked up to Nevada
Where the gals try so much harder
And I met a beefy belle called Caroline

But when she felt my prickles
She cried "Oh Lord, that tickles!"
And now she's run off with a porcupine

Oh I've got a cactus in my y-fronts and a vulture round my head
I've just been kissed by a Tennessee miss and I wish that I were dead
Do you like my high heeled horseshoes, I got them from Paree (ee - ee - ee - ee - ee - ee)
The cactus in my y-fronts make a loser out of me!

Oh I've got a cactus in my y-fronts and a vulture round my head
I've just been kissed by a Tennessee miss and I wish that I were dead
I've got sequins on my saddle and I smell like a jasmine tree (ee - ee - ee - ee - ee - ee)
The cactus in my y-fronts make a loser out of me!

Well I'll be hornswaggled! What are you gonna be?!