Saturday Night Live & Guest Host Jimmy Fallon Do Three Minutes of the Most Retrograde Gay Stereotypes Imaginable, And No One's Calling for Anyone to be Fired

Now, I don't think anyone should be fired. I think that there should be some level of free space in free speech. I think low-level transgressions should not be punished, except with criticism and argument.

Nevertheless, given the contretemps about Phil Robertson, and the firing of Justice Sacco for a misinterpreted joke, it's instructive to note what you're permitted to do if the Enforcers of Political Correctness decided you have the status of being permitted free speech, because you're On Their Team.

And this is what you can get away with if you are deemed to have that status.

The entire sketch is bad. Let me repeat: I do not think anyone should be fired for not being funny. A failed joke is not a crime.

But the sketch is unfunny, like so much of Saturday Night Live for the past three or four years. It is desperate. It resorts to the hoariest, easiest, cheapest sort of stereotypes of gays to gin up some scattered laughs.

And do note the New York City crowd -- quite a Tolerant and Enlightened group, if they do say so themselves -- is willing to laugh along with 1950s-era gay slurs so long as People They Like are doing them.

The sketch ends with a "message" -- Ebenezeer Scrooge became a cranky old bastard because he denied his sexual identity all his life -- but no one could possibly be fooled by this. Porn-ish magazines of the 50s -- the ones with titles like "Confessions of a Bad Girl" or "Back Seat Tease" -- typically featured eight pages of Girls Doing Naughty things but then attempted to avoid condemnation by the censors by including a couple of paragraphs at the end in which the Bad Girl learned the errors of her ways and started going to church and got married and otherwise repudiated her former Bad Girl-edness.

Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls features an absurdist spoof of these "Lessons The Transgressors Have Learned" wrap-up, for example. I guess the idea that a few minutes of bombastic moralizing makes up for 90 previous minutes of sex, enormous naked breasts, drug use, and decapitations.

See, it's not porny-- it's really a Morality Tale (TM)!!!

This tactic -- indulge the thing you're forbidden to do for a long time and then quickly say "but that's how I learned my lesson" -- fooled no one, including in the 50s, and still fools no one.

I think it's pretty clear from the Saturday Night Live sketch that society is still groping its ways to find the "rules" about speaking about homosexuality. I'm certain that just about every writer and performer on the show is left-liberal, and just as pro-gay as GLAAD, and probably celebrated the suspension of Phil Robertson.

And yet, when they have four minutes of a show to fill, and don't have any better ideas, this is how they fill the time: Four minutes of a stereotypical hyper-exaggerated queen, who finds "love" at the end of the episode by hooking up with a hot young hustler who will ignore his advanced age in exchange for upkeep and money.

Saturday Night Live isn't funny, but it is fairly savvy about what it can and can't get away with. It has almost never been what anyone would call a politically incorrect show -- in fact, it's usually been pretty politically correct in how it handles controversial issues.

And here is Lorne Michaels, and the cast and writers of the show, and NBC's standards & practices censors, and incoming Tonight Show host (and general Good Guy) Jimmy Fallon, deciding that some truly retrograde gay humor can still fly with even a left-skewing audience.

And yet we're also told that Phil Robertson should have known how horribly offensive his actual beliefs were (and how horribly offensive that whole Bible is), and should suffer actual economic consequences for expressing them.

I support the free space -- the license -- given to Saturday Night Live. I endorse the left's decision to not boycott SNL, and I second GLAAD's decision to not demand that Jimmy Fallon be fired as host of the Tonight Show.

But I also demand that that free space be granted to other people, not just those the media has decided are permitted a wide berth as regards to anti-gay speech.

Such as Alec Baldwin, who, as far as I know, is still a Capital One pitchman.

By the way, Saturday Night Live continues to be amateurishly awful. I watched a few minutes of it, and it was so dispiriting and upsetting that I mistakenly thought I was watching a colorized version of Schindler's List.

I checked the TV Guide listing: It's no longer labeled "Comedy." They now call it "Variety/Grim Spectacle."

That said, even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while. And the last sketch of the show -- a cute and funny parody of "Baby It's Cold Outside" -- is a gem.

posted by Ace at 12:13 PM

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