Dyspeptic Mr Isherwood
Am I the only reader puzzled by Charles Isherwood's dyspeptic take on The Little Dog Laughed and Regrets Only?* Of Julie White's Hollywood agent in Little Dog, he writes,
At the performance I recently attended, virtually every one of those [homophobic] lines got a laugh. As they were meant to. For the character’s noxious vocabulary isn’t meant to mark her as a bigot. The epithets, generally employed in acerbic monologues addressed to the audience, are meant to establish her as a funny gal, if maybe a little soulless. It seems for most people they do.
"Funny gal"? I don't think so. "Shameless" would be more like it. The audience laughs because Diane's promiscuous insults reflect impatience, not malice. They're funny pretty much in the same way that Archie Bunker's insults were funny. They tell us that Diane's bloodstream runs with iced vodka.
Is Mr Isherwood unacquainted with the glee of slipping perfectly horrid remarks into everyday conversation? With the right friend, of course.
As for Regrets Only, Mr Isherwood is looking through the wrong end of the telescope. I've promised not to discuss the plot of that show here, but I can say that "clever antigay jokes" appear to be the last thing on Paul Rudnick's mind. I should have said that the play demonstrates the importance, to everyday life in affluent Manhattan in any case, of hairdressers and florists, many or most of whom just happen to be gay. Does Mr Isherwood think that it's shameful to be a hairdresser? That hairdressers per se reflect badly on gay men? The longer I look at his essay, the more that seems to be the case.
In the film Flannel Pajamas, the mother-in-law says to the husband, "I want you to know that I believe every negative stereotype about the Jewish people." This zinger comes out of the blue, and I was not the only person in the theatre who laughed, even though there was nothing funny about the context. What an outrageous thing to say! And how gratuitous! The humor runs very deep: the Jewish husband has been very naive about the consequences of marrying a Catholic girl, and this is his wake-up call. (He sleeps through it.)
* "Anti-Gay Slurs: The Latest in Hilarity," in The New York Times, 17 December 2006.
