Nobody Expects the Politically Correct Inquisition

(I should have written about this a week or two ago, but don't worry -- more of the same kind of material will circulate for as long as Trump is President.  P.S. And I was right: today one of my liberal friends liked a post about Putin defending Trump, which had the added remark: Putin's standing up for "his girlfriend.")

The above cartoon began to circulate after Mike Pence walked out of a football game to make known his displeasure to NFL players taking the knee during the national anthem.  Liberals made much of the fact that the action was planned in advance -- like the players' protests weren't -- and cost the taxpayers perhaps a quarter of a million dollars, which is chump change in the Federal budget.  The same complaint could be made about any president's official visits to disaster sites, or other symbolic gestures, but of course when it's Not Your President or Vice President who's doing it, it's completely different.  The Democratic outrage that ensued was a bit odd, considering how many of these people claim that they regard Pence as a lesser evil that they can deal with when Trump is impeached.  I regarded it all as yet another distraction from the actual purpose of the protests, by making them all about Trump.

But then several people I knew, liberals all, passed along the cartoon above.  It too is far from the worst thing in the world today, but it infuriated me anyway because of the people who thought it was funny.  As with Stephen Colbert's "cock holster" quip, it's not really funny; there's no wit about it, it's just a crude and juvenile homophobic taunt, which means it's not the sort of thing liberals should be spreading.  But evidently they thought it was so hilarious that they had to share it.

Ordinarily I respond to homophobic rhetoric on the Internet with sarcasm -- how nice of woke liberals to show their superiority to Rethuglicans by indulging in homophobic attacks, that sort of thing -- but not this time.  I was direct: it really pisses me off when liberals show how woke they are by indulging in homophobic or misogynist attempts at humor -- which generally fail, as this one does. If you spread crap like this around I don't want to hear any bullshit about how much you care for equality and everybody getting along together. You're not an ally.

A few weeks earlier, Mel Brooks complained in an interview with the BBC that "political correctness is 'the death of comedy'.  He said Blazing Saddles, his Western spoof about a black sheriff in a racist town, could never be made today."  This is bullshit.  Blazing Saddles couldn't have been made just a few years before Brooks made it, not because of "political correctness" but because of the Hollywood Production Code, which was the result of the movie industry appeasing religious (especially Roman Catholic) reactionaries.  (I imagine that it couldn't have been made before the Code was adopted either, because of its flamboyant profanity.)  And even after the Code was replaced with a rating system, Brooks encountered resistance to making and releasing the film.  As I recall from the commentary track on one of the DVD versions, some of the actors Brooks wanted refused to speak the naughty words, and others were understandably uncomfortable about spewing racial slurs on camera.  ("Understandably," because of the well-known tendency of audiences to confuse actors with the roles they play.)

Contrariwise, movies full of racial slurs and profanity are reasonably commonplace today, especially when black filmmakers produce them.  But has Brooks never seen, say, Pulp Fiction, which contains plenty of both?  The racist material in particular seems to be there more simply for the taboo-breaking frisson rather than any dramatic or, as in Blazing Saddles, satirical reason.  I don't believe that "political correctness" is preventing such movies from being made.

Brooks went on to declare piously:

But there is one subject he insists he would not parody.
Referring to World War Two, he said: "I personally would never touch gas chambers or the death of children or Jews at the hands of the Nazis.
"In no way is that at all useable or correct for comedy. It's just in truly bad taste."
However, he says that is the "only thing" he would avoid. "Everything else is OK."

This is passing strange, because one of the sources of Brooks's notoriety was Blazing Saddles' predecessor, The Producers, about a couple of sleazy Broadway impresarios who stage a musical, written by a diehard Nazi, celebrating Hitler.  It's just in truly bad taste.  I've never been able to get through the entire film myself, not because I'm offended but because it's not all that interesting: as in Pulp Fiction, the "humor" comes from the breaking of the taboo.  Brooks has never disowned The Producers, and indeed in his dotage made it into a very successful stage musical.  At any rate, he has his own personal "political correctness," the line he won't cross.

Even more obnoxiously, Brooks tried to exalt comedy, especially his kind of comedy, into a virtually spiritual vocation exempt from criticism.  "Comedy has to walk a thin line, take risks. It's the lecherous little elf whispering in the king's ear, telling the truth about human behaviour."  Numerous critics pointed out that Brooks was wrong about the jester's traditional role here.  I certainly agree that comedy, like art in general, can and should take risks, even if it offends; but those who are offended can and should speak up.  Traditional racist, sexist, homophobic &c. comedy wasn't meant to take risks, quite the opposite: it afflicted the afflicted while comforting the comfortable.  It couldn't have been made if it had done otherwise.  Because of the ambiguity of art and entertainment, many of such comedy's targets turned it around and found some kind of affirmation in it.  But to pretend that Sambo shows, for example, were intended to "tell the truth about human behavior" is dishonest.

I liked Blazing Saddles because it turned its satire on white racists, but I suspect that many whites liked it because they thought it gave them a license to say "nigger."  As, apparently, many white schoolkids do with Huckleberry Finn, or rap.  I'd hope that it couldn't be made today, though, at least in its original form, because it's too uneven.  (That is typical of Brooks's films, except for Young Frankenstein, which had fewer comic peaks and more valleys as time went on.)  I wasn't offended by the fag-joke soundstage number featuring Dom DeLuise later in the film, but I never found it funny either; it takes no chances, it's a reprise of the 30s-style Hollywood fag jokes itemized in Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet.  The closest it comes to edginess is having some of the rugged cowboys saunter off arm-in-arm with the queeny chorus boys, and that's not close enough.  (Heathers, and numerous other later comedies, came closer.  Colbert's "cock holster" line and the Pence/Trump blowjob cartoon fall even shorter.)  I think that Richard Pryor, who co-wrote it, probably deserves more credit for Blazing Saddles's virtues than Brooks does, if only because on his own Brooks never again reached those heights.

The proof of the comedy, and the satire, is in the laughter -- and people disagree on what to laugh at.  I think again of Ellen Willis's satirical definition of "humorless": it's what you are if you don't think rape, big breasts, or sex with little girls is funny -- but you're not humorless if you're not amused by castration, impotence, or vaginas with teeth.  And if an artist fails to produce the results he or she aimed for, he or she needs to be told.  Yes, comedy should take chances, but taking chances often fails, and while I sympathize with comedians who don't want to be told, they need to know when they fail.  I might watch a comedy about Nazis, the gas chambers, and all the other subjects Brooks rejects -- if it was really funny.  It's a question that can't be answered in advance.  Blazing Saddles only proved itself by being made.  As Joanna Russ wrote, "To apply rigid, stupid, narrow, political standards to fiction is bad because the standards are rigid, stupid, and narrow, not because they are political."  Like comedy, it's hard to do, and not many bring it off.  Nothing is sacred, including comedy.

But Some of My Best Friends Are Cock Holsters!

Just as I was about to let Stephen Colbert's unfortunate "joke" about Trump and Putin sink slowly into the past, various people kept kicking it back to the front of my consciousness.  So, for example, Roy Edroso dismissed US Representative Jason Chaffetz last week as "a little bitch who remained lashed to his great white Hillary whale long after everyone else abandoned ship because pretending to be a tough guy is all he knows how to do."  Edroso got his metaphors a bit mixed up there, but these are troubled times and we've got to do something.  Then, yesterday, Edroso mocked country singer Toby Keith, who performed for an all-male audience in Saudi Arabia during Trump's visit there:

I like to imagine Keith getting a call: "Hey Tobe! It's me, Faisal. How'd you like to pick up a quarter mil easy money? All you have to is change some lyrics -- you know, 'Pellegrino for My Horses, Mango Nectar for My Men.'" Or maybe it's not that kind of relationship, and Keith came wrapped in a rug?

The link goes to a clip from the 1963 Hollywood blockbuster Cleopatra, in which Elizabeth Taylor has herself delivered to Rex Harrison wrapped in a rug, thereby signaling her sexual availability or something.  So Edroso wants us to think of Keith as Faisal's little bitch.

Then this morning liberal tweeter Yes You're Racist invited Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to "eat my entire ass."  YYR is a better person than I am; being rimmed by McConnell would just make me feel dirty.  (Or as the lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel had a character say in one of her early strips, "I thought sodomy meant having sex with a Republican.")

These examples, which of course could be multiplied, are useful partly because they disprove the straight-liberal-guy protestation that calling somebody a faggot is not a reference to gay sexual practices, that they are totally cool with gays boning gays, they totally support gay marriage, they just don't like "Servants of power.  You know - faggots."  But as Colbert and Edroso and YYR show, they equate being a servant of power with being penetrated sexually, which they regard with visceral repulsion.  So how do they think of the women in their lives?  I probably shouldn't ask.

Another reason I almost didn't write about all this was that Brandon U. Sutton wrote an excellent piece about the controversy at Progressive Army.  Sutton said most of what I'd intended to say.  For example:

First, and while this may seem churlish, what Colbert said was not even particularly clever or funny. Arguably, it was barely even a joke, since jokes have a certain structure from which they derive some of their humor. Colbert saying that the only thing Donald Trump’s mouth is good for is as a “cock holster” was just an insult that people found funny.

"Funny" is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but I think he's right.  "Cock holster" is the kind of epithet sixth-grade boys consider hilarious: not because they have any personal experience of fellatio from either end, but because they're extremely anxious about bodies.  Which reminded me of a couple of sketches from Colbert's show during last year's campaign, in which a young boy played Trump's "nickname strategist."  It appears that Colbert took the boy on as one of his writers.

That many conservatives objected to Colbert's insult was unsurprising -- not because it was "homophobic," which they would normally consider a good thing, but because it targeted someone on their side.  If, during the 2008-2016 period, some comic had called Barack Obama a cock holster for Benjamin Netanyahu, would liberal Democrats have considered it just a joke?  For that matter, I recall Colbert himself adopting a stance of unironic submission to then-President Obama, who ordered him to get a military buzz cut to show his solidarity with Our Troops in Iraq. "Servant of power" would have been a perfect characterization for Colbert in those days, and depending on whom he's bending the knee to, it still is.

I don't want Colbert fired.  I just want to name what he's doing.  His liberal defenders have had to resort to right-wing insults against his critics, such as "virtue signalling."  But virtue-signalling is Colbert's stock in trade.  One Colbertista on Twitter responded to me in those terms: "Thanks for another example of our virtue signaling culture where everyone is perpetually offended."  To which I replied, "I'm not 'offended' by his homophobic insults; I'm a faggot, they just roll off. They just undercut his signalled virtue."

But there's another thought: one reason we're not supposed to say such naughty things is that they'll drive gay kids to suicide.  So why does Colbert get a pass on it?  Because he's on Our Side, one of the Good Guys, and anyway, liberals are happy to use homophobic / misogynist rhetoric against their enemies.  (Don't imagine that kids wouldn't hear about what Colbert said, even if it weren't freely available the next day on YouTube.  That's another right-wing fantasy, that children will know nothing of homosexuality if we can just keep Teh Gay out of the media.)  I'm not seriously worried about Colbert affecting youth-suicide rates, of course: I'm just savoring the smell of hypocrisy in the morning.