“Physical Culture”, body-building, call it what you will. Is it just a desire to build up a more manly physique to attract the ladies, or does it shade over into something more insidiously homoerotic? All those 1950s muscle magazines featuring glistening, toned, scarcely clad young men, and the 1998 film “Beefcake” would argue that the intent was more homosexual than advocates would admit. Of course the most famous body-building course, aimed at the boys who just wanted to look a bit more manly, was Charles Atlas’s, with his adverts about the wimp on the beach getting sand kicked in his face. So a few parodies of the format of the ad and the other appeals of muscle.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus, 16 November 1969
0.38 – 0.55
This animation by Terry Gilliam is a spoof of Charles Atlas. However the line, about “a body that is the envy of other men” produces this camp poof. The snide tones and a limp wrist are universal. The “duckie” I think is more English, but the blonde bouffant hair and striped suit are more American clichés of the time.
Playboy, November 1977
Lou Brooks
This one, since it is a cartoon, can more accurately follow the original cartoon style of the Charles Atlas adverts. The parody follows the format, but each panel is rather more subversively coarse than the original. The pay-off of the strip is the homoeroticism of body-building, confirmed by the final line in which the bodybuilder reveals his name is Bruce.
This is obviously the cartoon I was trying to remember in this earlier Al Jaffee cartoon about the gay appeal of bodybuilding
Graham Chapman as Biggles Michael Palin as Algy Terry Gilliam as Ginger
Biggles is the archetypal English adventure hero, a proud icon of military glory to inspire the best in our Empire’s youth. In WI and then WII, Captain W.E. Johns’s fighter pilot showed the Boche, Hun and Jerry what for. The English are noble, the English are best, and wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest. Here the Python team are spoofing an icon of their own childhood (and Michael Palin in particular was fond of committing various Biggles parodies). The nonsense about letters and antler hats, pantomime Princess Margaret, and foreign royalty borrowing household tools seems rather Palin/ Jones, though the sudden bursts of abuse seem more Cleese/Chapman territory :” Fairy! Poof's not good enough for Algy, is it. He's got to be a bleedin' fairy. Mincing old RAF queen!”. But the joke here is about how the fine upstanding Biggles handles his modern concerns about the sexual orientations of his close comrades Algy and Ginger. And also subverting the signifiers of homosexuality at the same time. Algy’s portrayal is just as we remember from the books, but when he comes out of the closet, Biggles immediately does the decent thing and shoots him dead. Ginger (ginger beer rhymes with queer) is possibly one of the most screaming portrayals committed to screen at that date, in the most outrageous costume and the campest queeny denial.
The Album of the Soundtrack of the Trailer of the Film of Monty Python and the Holy Grail 1975 Michael Palin as Interviewer Graham Chapman as Carl French
0.00 – 2.41
Interviewer: Mr. French, you're one of the film world's most arrogant queens. I mean not just homosexual or Gay or anything, I mean you are a raving queen. Carl French: Well, yes. Interviewer: I mean, a real screamer, a real "Whoops! Get her! Don't mind me dear!" limp-wristed caricature. Carl French: Is that not in order? Interviewer: No, no, that's fine. And I understand that you married the beautiful black heiress Hueyna Tanoy partly for the publicity but mostly to cover up the fact that you prefer going out with Little Boys. Carl French: Look, really! Interviewer: Carl, you're an offending little poof, a mincing gay-bar loiterer, a winnet-covered walking perfume shop and an evil perverter of innocent little boys! Carl French: What!? Really! Is this part of the interview? Interviewer: No, no, I just wanted a few contacts. Carl French: Well, shouldn't we be talking about the film? Interviewer: We’ve been off the air for ages. Now, where'd you find them? Carl French: Look, I think we are still on the air. Interviewer: Oh, sod the fucking air! Can’t you still get locked up for that sort of thing. Carl French: What about the film? Interviewer: Just a few addresses, please... Carl French: Look, we’ve got James Dean in it, in a box! Interviewer: I-I can turn the microphone off if you... Carl French: And bits of Jayne Mansfield...
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Apparently the first half, the stuff about keeping a dead Marilyn Monroe in a box, originated in a sketch by Douglas Adams. As per Monty Python, one bizarre concept leaps into another, switching from the weird film into the strange abuse. And abuse it intentionally is, not what one usually expects in the course of some film PR. Chapman’s performanceplays it as un-gay as possible, a perfectly stolid character, even as the interviewer moves beyond abuse, into baroque invective, and then realms of scandalous sexual criminality. Yet there’s also a freedom, since this sketch would probably not have passed on television or on cinema. As a LP sketch it can ascend to new heights of bad taste, and just let the abuse flow, matched by Palin’s escalating shrieking hysteria, as he skips in and out of mocking faggy voices. And then the final twist, which isn’t a million miles away from “Nudge Nudge”’s “What’s it like?”
If you were wondering, a “winnet” is the ball of unremoved specks of shit that dry onto the hairs around your sphincter. Share this information with your colleagues at work.
Wow, this gets though a lot in an awfully short time. Pay no attention to the subtitles.
Besides all the usual sharp Pythonesque nonsense subverting high culture and parodying the media, this is inspired by contemporary revelations and innuendoes about a long dead composer. From a period when Ken Russell films were big stuff, his 1970 film “The Music Lovers” was not shy about Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality – although it has absolutely no relevance to John Cleese’s summary. And it allows for slightly salacious comments through the sketch, ie, “contains material that some people might find offensive but which is really smashing” and “the naughty bits, which were extremely naughty for his time”
So Eric Idle’s opening salvo, “Was he just an old poof who wrote tunes” undercuts all the traditional respect and typical dignity of the arts documentary format.
“Hello Pianist” is an obvious play off the camp salute “Hello sailor”.
Particularly unexpected is Michael Palin’s gossipy hairdresser Maurice (and compare his previous outing as a hairdresser climbing Mount Everest). The campness is out of all proportion to the normal documentary manner, although tangentially related to Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality. A gay hairdresser is an acknowledged cliché, and rather more than Graham Chapman’s David Unction, deliberately exaggerating the stereotype is part of the joke. So this is a Pythonesque poof since it is a comic collision between disparate styles. The actual performance is just a great gawping mouth, with lots of eye rolling and delicately held hands. The alliterative slang is a new one to me though (25/11/09 Turns out that it's a variant on Polari, camply referring to things like "Lily Law".)
“Monty Python’s Flying Circus” 21st December 1969 Graham Chapman as David Unction
3:36 – 4.42
Of itself there’s not much to this early gay cameo in the firsts series of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”. It is made ever so slightly more complicated by the directions from the original script:
“Cut to effeminate announcer sitting at continuity desk. Any resemblance to Mel Oxley should be accidental. His name is David Unction.”
Mel Oxley was a real in-vision continuity announcer of the period. So this is intended as a parody of a particular person, besides encapsulating a certain sort of oleaginous showbiz, exuding smarmy false sentiment. A particular brand of desperately up-beat and insincerely ingratiating mannerisms – bright, bright, lots of smiles, etc – has gay connotations. Make of the twinkly sign what you will. Although the “Old Queen” is a more explicit attack on the figure being parodied.
6.00 – 6.24
Here the team ramp up their caricature a bit further. The appearance of an actual muscle-mag is deliberately surprising, and possibly a first in a comedy programme. And now David Unction has become a forthright queen. The “You Fairy” attack from the Viking brings forth a wheedling bitchy manner, flaring nostrils and a snide cry of “Hello sailor!” Is anything very advanced or complicated one with all this? Well, no. It not much more advanced than thinking that presenting a homosexual on screen is enough to be funny of itself.
One final complication in all this is that Chapman, an actual gay man, is playing this character. Of course at this time there is a tendency for gay men to play gay stereotypes on film and stage. Only no one actually will admit they’re gay. And Chapman at this point in his career was no different. You can see him play a theatrical queen in 1968’s “How to Irritate People”. He also played a similarly bitchy, quasi-hysterical camp photographer in the 1970 film “Doctor in Trouble”. A year or so later Chapman would donate funds to the establishment of “Gay News”, and would give a lengthy interview in one of the early issues. It’s notable that Chapman pretty much stopped performing these sort of roles after that.
By Terry Gilliam In “Fang” 1962 (the humour magazine of Occidental College, California) reprinted in "Help", February 1963
“The National Lampoon 1964 High School Yearbook” was written in 1974 at a remove of some 10 years, and was attempting to remember all the jokes of that period, while also layering everything with a retrospective irony. This cartoon is a contemporary instance of someone having the same idea for a joke. Gilliam uses the most famous version of the insect spray slogan, “Quick, Henry, the flit!”. Attending university in the early 1960s means Gilliam would have been the right age to remember “flit” used as a slang term for a homosexual or effeminate boy.
In the National Lampoon Yearbook the “Flit” joke is used as an insinuation about the "artistic" Forrest Swisher. Here the joke is in the reveal of panel 6. Not merely a sissy, but an out and out homo. One hand is limp and the other clutches a flower, bouffant styled hair, tight trousers (which in another cartoon of the same period Gilliam calls “fag pants”, as did many other people), unmanly crossed leg stance, heavily lidded eyes, and pursed (possibly lipsticked) mouth. The jumper and shirt combination probably meant something at the time too, I suspect (UPDATE: A lengthy piece on homosexuals in "Life" 26 June, 1964, goes on and on about how tight trousers and sweaters are the urban homosexual uniform). Such a homosexual caricature being unexpected (a) in the context of the insect ad, (b) in such a grotty little hovel and (c) in general.
I feel slight discomfort about reprinting something from university days, to give it a pass as sophomore work. This cartoon has been reprinted several times, not just in Monty Python retrospectives, but also in a 1971 collection, “A Century of College Humor”, before Gilliam was famous. Gilliam was aiming at putting out a nearly profession humour magazine in “Fang”, and was trying to establish connections with Harvey Kurtzman as his mentor. So it’s not merely a throwaway item. And it does reflect the attitudes of the time. Gilliam admits to being a very conformist frat-boy type in his early university days. The attitude expressed in this cartoon also possibly explains a few faggy jokes in later issues of Harvey Kurtzman’s “Help!” when Gilliam was assistant editing, as Kurtzman had not shown any interest in jokes in that area previously.
1965 was the breakout year for “camping it up” and “camping about”. Camp, as both an aesthetic and a particular word, had existed prior to 1965, but it was not a readily identifiable part of the public’s frame of reference. 1964 had seen the publication of Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” which was gradually disseminated through all the trendier magazines, intellectual journals and upmarket rags. 1965 saw the appearance of several mass-market entertainments which allowed critics the opportunity to throw around their new-found familiarity with camp, at ease that the general public would know what they meant, and which also meant they didn’t have to use words which directly referenced homosexuality. In England, there was the success of “Julian and Sandy”, and, in America, there was the film of “The Loved One”. It’s worth noting that in all three cases, homosexuals are complicit in these products, are already part of the in-crowd offering camp to the heterosexual audience. Sontag was a lesbian. The two actors of Julian and Sandy, Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick were gay. “The Loved One”’s director Tony Richardson was bisexual, the co-writer was Christopher Isherwood, and half the cast (Gielgud, Liberace, Tab Hunter, Roddy McDowell) were gay, before you even figure in the main writer, Terry Southern’s fascination with homosexuals as a font of funny.
Anway, the point is that it is soon assumed that camp is gay and gay is camp. And that there is a certain sort of behaviour that sticks out like a sore thumb. Camp men are fashion designers, interior decorators, antique dealers, and vice versa indivisibly.
Monty Python takes a different path. Their use of camp mannerisms is always surprising. Monty Python’s camp men can be and do anything. Surprise is part of the comedy. Unusual variations, such as the camp judges. Eventually camp men in unexpected professions will also become a cliché, as Alan Coren will offer us camp policemen, camp undertakers, camp Biggles. But Monty Python usually does with without the innuendo which others make such a large part of camp comedy.
7 December 1969 Starts at 0.50
16 November 1972 Here you do get camp hairdressers, but performances as part of the larger comic contrast about Mount Everest. A bathetic drop into effete trivial fashionability after the sketch’s misleading opening pretence of rugged manliness. Admittedly as hairdressers, it’s not much more than saying “bitch” a lot
“Monty Python and the Holy Grail” 1975 Compare this eruption of campness in mediaeval times with Hugh Paddick’s turn in “Up the Chastity Belt”
Written by John Cleese and Graham Chapman, “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”, 12 October, 1969
And the final twist from “Monty Python”: keep the format, but just replace it with a nonsensical concept. Of course, what was silly concept becomes reality with the development of “furries”. This is a wonderful encapsulation of the all the clichés of the format. Since Graham Chapman was gay, one can only speculate as to what grievances he was working out in this one.
Carry On Girls” (1973) Jimmy Logan as Cecil Gaybody
“Close order swanning about” from “Monty Python’s Flying Circus, episode #22, 24 November 1970
“Camp Judges” (Eric Idle and Michael Palin) from “Monty Python’s Flying Circus, episode 21, 17 November 1970
"Carry On Abroad" (1972)- Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey and John Clive
“Clarence” (“Hello, Honky-tonk”) and “Hettie” characters played by Dick Emery
There is a minor fashion issue to raise: both "Clarence" and "Cecil Gaybody" are wearing godawfully ugly peaked hats. In "Doctor in Trouble" (1970), Graham Chapman plays a bitchy gay photographer who never appears with his peaked cap. Joe Orton wears his cap. Was "the hat" some sort of signal? A sub-military butch touch, which then goes horribly wrong, all floppy and purple? Or am I just being overly-attentive?
