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.
John Cleese: Today it’s story time. And you can help me make up the story Cast: Goody-goody JC: It’s all about a wicked baron Cast: Ew, boring. JC: And a lovely young fairy Tim Brooke-Taylor (camp) Oh, what’s his name? JC: (emphatic) A lovely young fairy Princess TBT: Nyaaaa (then blows raspberry)
I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, 4 June 67
Narrator: And here is a fairy story by Hans Anderson Tim Brooke-Taylor (camp): Don’t you mean Hans and his son Narrator: I said a Fairy story (oooohing and mmmming by cast) Cleese: Cheeky!
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As far as gags about “fairies” go this, this is as simple as you could imagine. What is noteworthy is these obvious jokes showstopping reception at the time. “I’m Sorry I’ll Read that Again” was a BBC radio sketch programme that ran for the second half of the 1960s, and was a training ground for the writers and performers of “Monty Python’s Flying circus” and “The Goodies”. It consisted of lots of quick fire gags, puns, silliness, broad performances and as much innuendo as was permissible. The audience was always fairly appreciative, but when Tim Brooke-Taylor says “Oh, what’s his name” it brings the house down. There’s non-stop laughter for 10 seconds, and the cast are unable to deliver the next line except after a couple of attempts. For this contemporary audience this is pure comedy gold, something more daring than usual. That this is not a one-off is proven in the same 7 November 1966 episode, a sketch involving a becalmed ship has quick exchange:
John Cleese: A breeze, a breeze at last! I feel like a new man! Tim Brooke-Taylor: How about me ducky? CJ: Ah, we haven’t had a puff for weeks!
which again gets a disproportionately large and long laugh. So all I can guess is that jokes involving references to homosexuality are just now breaking into mass entertainment. The Satire Boom had died out a couple of years earlier so slightly more thoughtful or sophisticated jokes about homosexuality under the banner of social commentary had likewise vanished. BBC radio had been broadcasting “Round the Horne” since March 1965, so “Julian and Sandy” had been entertaining a large audience for the previous year and a half. In retrospect everyone knows Julian and Sandy are gay jokes, but at the time of broadcast it was only the gay minority of listeners who recognised them for what they were. The rest of the audience seems to have thought they were odd humorous characterisations of a piece with the rest of the programme. But now, for “I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again” jokes about “effeminacy in men” as previously banned by the BBC censor, are permissible and very very successful.
“The Magic Christian” (1969) written by Terry Southern, and John Cleese and Graham Chapman
Adapted from Southern’s short episodic novel of the same name, the film is a series of sketches, in which multi-millionaire Guy Grand (Peter Sellers) employs his money to make people indulge in shocking stunts. So the jokes are two-fold: 1) to demonstrate what indignities people will suffer when offered wads of cash, from minor bribes to a scene of city bankers diving into a vat of ordure sprinkled with pound notes 2) to indulge in stunts which disturb conventional sensibilities - some are intended to be subversive, some are just freak-outs
Vito Russo in his book “The Celluloid Closet” absolutely LOATHED this film: “'fag' jokes fly in a viciously homophobic film". Somewhere I have a “Spitting Image” parody of late Mel Brooks with the tagline “Totally obsessed with Nazis”. It’s not really stretching a point to say the same about Terry Southern and homosexuals. I mean, really, really, really, really, really obsessed. Well, you understand the emphasis. I suppose he should be given some sort of acknowledgement in managing so many ways for homosexuals to be creepy for comedic gross-out purposes. Maybe, homosexuals really were just that odd and perverse to mainstream audiences at the time, and this film reflects that. (To offset this, there is a very affectionate tribute in Southern’s collection “Now Dig This” to his friend the gay poet Frank O’Hara, capturing his camp, sexually mischievous manner. Although that it SHOULD be the camp, impertinent, sexually mischievous side of O’Hara that Southern fixates on and enjoys...?)
0.00 – 3.22 Laurence Harvey as “Hamlet” Here’s an instance of satirical humour overtaken by the events of the day. The joke is the unexpected metamorphosis of a performance of Hamlet’s soliloquy into a burlesque strip. Whether it’s actually gay or not is up for debate. When a man performs a woman’s role, it can’t help but look camp. Besides, there’s the fact that he’s offering his body as an object for desire, topped by the chap with the binoculars trying to get a good look at the end. By the time this was released to the public, cavorting nudity on the stage was very much the thing of the day, with such ultra-hip atrocities of embarrassment as “Hair”, “Oh Calcutta” and “Dionysus 69”. Exploration of homosexuality in Elizabethan/Jacobean theatre also raised its head on the contemporary stage. There had been an all-male 1967 production of “As You Like It”. There had also been an explicitly homosexual 1969 production of Marlowe’s “Edward II”, with Ian McKellen as the lead, and also featuring Peter Bourne (now better known as Betty Bourne of Bloolips). This touring production of “Edward II” aroused a lot of tight-lipped scrutiny from the local moral forces wherever it was staged because of male kissing and unabashed affection. An issue of the early gay lifestyle magazine “Jeremy” had a big feature on the production and interviews with the cast, though no one was questioned or felt up to declaring a personal sexual interest. It also prompted the “Sunday Times” to identify McKellen as one of the actors to watch out for, with a photo-feature of McKellen clad in nothing but some tight leather trousers and sprawling in a chair. Which must have raised a few eyebrows over the breakfast table. (Oh, and I see a BBC recording has been released on DVD earlier this year,) But nothing in this sketch plays off the idea of gay actors, it a subversion of Shakespeare. So given all this, the overwhelming impression made by this sketch, and indeed by most of the bits and pieces in “The Magic Christian,” is not one of major cultural subversion and criticism, but of a camp, self-congratulatory sense of “How naughty we are!”. As the various outrages are played out, it’s sometime hard to distinguish between the filmmakers portrayal of the onscreen audiences and their attitude to the real one watching the film. There’s a constant sense of being nudged in the ribs, and the impression they want that you should just throw up your hands and cry, “Scandalous! Simply Scandalous!”
0.00 – 1.38 Nosher Powell as the ginger boxer There’s about 3 previous minutes of verisimilitudinous boxing bout scene-setting before this bit, but I’m sure we’ll all prefer going straight to the real action, shan’t we. In this scene, Southern updates his earlier attempt in the book version of “The Magic Christian”. Then, it was just one boxer pretending to fey and effeminate. Here the ante is upped to actual gay kissing. Nosher Powell has a very fey voice dubbed, and does that limp-wrist gesture. And we don’t get to see the kiss, though the direction is slightly more stylised to point up that fact. As in the book, it all ends in an rioting audience when their taste for violence is subverted. Which is apparently the same conclusion as in “Bruno”.
4.42 The discomfort of a stuffy ex-army type suddenly made the focus of homo-erotic attentions. A formal heightening of the oddness of such devotion to the body beautiful by these muscle men, with a little race-discomfort just to add to the mix. As before with the Hamlet sketch, there’s an obvious homosexual, fluttering his tip at the entertainment, and resting his head in a primping manner, just to highlight the faggotry of it all.
7.45 Leonard Frey as Lawrence Faggot (pronounced Fag-Oh, French-style, so a joke that probably slips past most of the audience. Because simply calling a gay character “faggot” - oh, ho, ho, ho - no we’re much more hip than that) revisits his performance from “The Boys in the Band”. Solicitously and disarmingly oleaginous with a few up-market camp insinuations, in an outrageously over-styled suit. All of which must have been even more of an in-joke, as the film version of “Boys in the Band” wasn’t released until the year after this.
2.00-4..5 Two body-builders dancing together. Which is mostly the boxing gag revisited, but in the context of the elite society of the other dancers. And the all-out oddness of Yul Brynner in drag, overdubbed with a female voice singing “Mad About the Boy” to Roman Polanski. And then the final reveal and reversion to Brynner’s gravelly voice. Intercutting between the two, these is something of an intense perversity to this.
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.
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”
How to Irritate People (1968) Written by John Cleese and Graham Chapman, with Marty Feldman and Tim Brooke-Taylor
starts at 2:00
Graham Chapman Michael Palin
Here, to greater or lesser degrees, just before the arrival of the behemoth that is “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”, you get Graham Chapman and Michael Palin camping it up. Suits you? Suits me. Palin is blithely boyish, with a grin locked into his features. Chapman, yer actual homosexual, gives a bravura performance, over-the top and chewing the scenery, flouncy hands, with a pop-eyed and strained-face not dissimilar to Kenneth Williams or others of his ilk. Chapman starts off bouncily emphatic, then determinedly coy, with the punchline delivered as a sudden vertical ascent into a shriek of Annapurnan offense. In real life Chapman was fairly butch (pipe-smoking, mountain-climbing) and apparently didn’t have much time for snidey queens. If only to show what the contemporary popular impression of theatrical homosexuality was that this parodies, here’s a lengthy quotation from Ken Tynan’s 1961 review of Kenneth Williams in “One Over the Eight”. Barely a month or so after this review, “Beyond the Fringe” opened, heralding a new sort of humour. Although “Beyond the Fringe” wasn’t averse to including comedy its homosexuals http://ukjarry.blogspot.com/2007/11/11-beyond-fringe.html
As long ago as 1929 George Jean Nathan was complaining about the influence on the American theatre of the pixie mannerisms imported by English actors. 'What we need,' he said 'are (sic) more actors like Jack Dempsey, who tried the stage a little while ago. Jack may not be much at am actor, but his worst enemy certainly cannot accuse him of belonging too the court of Titania.' Nathan took pains to define exactly what he was attacking: 'It isn't that the actors are biologically queer. It's that they possess or have acquired an air of effeminacy that, however hard or adroitly they try to conceal it, shows itself sooner or later during the course of a dramatic performance. . . .' He was referring, of course, to the phenomenon we know as 'camp', In the province of comedy, with which I am presently concerned, its distinguishing feature is a marked inclination towards the dainty, the coy and the exuberantly fussy. The ability to camp (let us drop those misleadingly inverted commas) is a useful, even a vital, part of comic technique, but it is not the whole of it; and in recent years, I disrespectfully submit, we have had excess of it, our appetite has sickened, and English high comedy has very nearly died. Consider One Over the Eight, which exemplifies the atrophy of latterday English revue. The expressions most frequently seen on the faces of the cast are two in number. The men register: 'How naughty I am!'; and the women: 'How naughty you are!' The atmosphere of arrested adolescence is over-powering. The dance routines are at once inventive and dull; boys in tight trousers smile and spin, sometimes accompanied by spinning girls, who might smile more convincingly if their clothes were more attractive. The star, Kenneth Williams, has a matchless repertory of squirms, leers, ogles and severe, reproving glares, and must be accounted the petit-maitre of contemporary camp. As such, I salute him; but I wish there were more to English comedy than this.
