Queens of Comedy

...It's not just homosexuals who are defamed here...

...However, according to an astonishingly dreadful new comedy called I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, I simply must be—because I like show tunes and know how to tap-dance a little...

...Gay humor—very low gay humor—has become widely accepted and acceptable because it has been imported into the mainstream not by maniacal Christians hostile to the gay rights agenda, but by homosexuals themselves...

...We have the beautiful lawyer telling Chuck she wants to have a "girls day" with him, and then asking him to confide in her because "we're both girls...

...As for Larry, he yells at his fellow firemen for being homophobic in their rejection of Chuck, even though he knows that Chuck isn't actually gay...

...Since she thinks he's a queer activist—which ensures her a place in the Movie Moron Hall of Fame—she allows him to see her unclothed and to fondle her breasts ("See, they're real," she says...

...Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, a cable sensation a few years back, embraced the notion that gay men have some supernatural ability to match colors and pick clothing...

...Or since Jack Benny tangled repeatedly with store clerk Frank Nelson, who always turned on his heel and responded to Benny's request for help with a lilting "Yeeeeeesssssssssssssss...

...They don't have a clue how to act gay, which doesn't keep their union from becoming a cause celebre or keep them from becoming heroes for beating up gay bashers...

...But there isn't a nanosecond of originality or cleverness in Chuck and Larry...

...the portrait of straight guys is head-scratchingly stupid and obvious, too...

...He really shouldn't...

...We have a costume party with men dressed in fairy costumes, and a climactic courtroom hearing where the lawyer's gay brother rises from his chair and screams, "You go, girls...

...Everybody involved with this movie is in show business, the most gay-friendly profession in the world...

...You haven't seen men mincing like this since the 1930s, when a secondary player named Franklin Pangborn enlivened many a screwball comedy with his patented "pansy" character...

...And the hilarious plays and essays of gay activist Paul Rudnick are exercises in cultural stereotyping, as in his New Yorker piece two years ago offering a new look at the "intelligent design" of the universe: "Day No...

...What's not shocking is that the movie is directed by Dennis Dugan, who was an intensely annoying actor 30 years ago when he played James Rockford's boyish rival Richie Brockel-man on The Rockford Files and is quite possibly the worst director of comedy in the world today...

...But then the Lord God said, 'Wait, what if I make it a sort of rosy, sunset-at-the-beach, filtered half-light, so that everything else I design will look younger?' "'I'm loving that,' said Buddha...

...In the universe according to I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, all gay males like show tunes...

...If a movie written by, directed by, and starring straight people stuffed with the sorts of jokes which pop up every few seconds in Chuck and Larry had been released 25 years ago, it would have been the subject of enraged pieces by militantly gay movie critics in the Village Voice, and very possibly the object of a boycott...

...Therefore, everybody in this movie knows, has worked with, and has palled around with homosexuals...

...Gay males also John Podhoretz, columnist for the New York Post, is The Weekly Standard's movie critic...

...And yet it offers a portrait of gay life that seems to have been assembled by people who aren't quite sure whether that nice young man Paul Lynde is "one of them" or just needs to meet a nice lady...

...This makes it all the more shocking that two of the screenplay's credited authors are Jim Taylor and Alexander Payne, the sophisticated and heartfelt satirists who collaborated on Election, About Schmidt, and Sideways—three of the best and most socially exact comedies of the past decade...

...flit about like Tinker Bell, cry like a six-year-old when confronted with someone yelling nasty things at them, speak the word "fabulous" at every opportunity, and dance naked in the shower to "I'm Every Woman" by Whitney Houston...

...Kevin James is Larry, the widowed family man who eats Duncan Hines frosting straight from the container and worries about his 10-year-old son's preference for musicals over the Mets...

...Now that's funny...

...Chuck falls in love with the lawyer (Jessica Biel) they hire to protect them from the fraud inspectors...

...It's new.' "'You should design a restaurant,' added Allah...

...Will and Grace, a television program written and produced by one gay man, brought Franklin Pangborn's pansy back to life in the person of Sean Hayes's Jack...

...Heterosexual males, by contrast, (a) buy lots of porn, (b) throw hamburger patties on top of spaghetti and call it Bolognese, (c) play lots of basketball, and (d) punch, head-butt, and body-slam people who annoy them...

...Inexplicably, the terrifically talented Sandler loves to work with Dennis Dugan...

...So figure that one out...

...1: And the Lord God said, 'Let there be light,' and lo, there was light...

...But something has happened in the intervening decades...

...But between the idea and the reality fell the shadow—the shadow of the gay cliche...

...Like all comic cliches, the gay cliche is funny if you build on the template and do something unexpected with it...

...Adam Sandler is Chuck, a "male whore" who sleeps with twin sisters seriatim on the same day and needs a bottle of tequila and Cinemax to get to sleep at night...

...I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry grew out of a potentially clever comic conceit: Circumstances compel two aggressively straight New York City firemen to enter into a fake gay marriage, and then force them to make it look real so that they don't go to jail on fraud charges...