447: Charles Atlas

“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

331: Gay Biggles 1 - Monty Python

30 November 1972

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.

293: Terry Gilliam - Quick Henry, the Flit!

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.