The "gay" Dilemma: If it's a joke, what does it mean?

I have used the term "gay" perjoratively many many times, in precisely the way it is used in The Dilemma. I have also had conversations like the one you recount between Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen's characters. I uses to defend both, now I can only defend the latter.

Using "gay" the Dilemma way doesn't mean I think you're homosexual, but it does mean you (or a given situation or inanimate object) carry some stereotypical traits of gay people. I'm not calling you gay, I'm just implying that you are not manly, for want of a better word. Your lack of manliness may come in many forms: perhaps you have behaved "like a woman" (which is also a stereotype), perhaps you have overthought a problem or perhaps you have chosen the less fun option (getting to work early is gay, ironing is gay etc.). Even though, when I use the term, I know those traits aren't true of gay people as a group and even though everyone else, including any gay people in range, might know that too, it would be perfectly reasonable for a gay person not to want me to make the association because to some extent it perpetuates the stereotypes. Public argument from some prominent gay people indicates that this is the case. Making this kind of potentially offensive joke you have to carry the potentially offended people with you and we haven't. So we should stop.

"Gay" use the Rudd/Rogen way is completely different. I am suggesting you are a homosexual. This is not inherently offensive to you or to gay people, it's just that people don't like having their sexuality misclassified. I can definitely see how a group of gay friends could have a conversation like the Rudd/Rogen one but reversed: "You're so straight", "No I'm not!", "Yeah you are, you're just dying to marry a nice Catholic girl and live in a house with a white picket fence.." etc.

I don't understand this mentality that everything in (the trailer of) this movie that has been labeled a comedy either correctly or incorrectly must be, or presumptively is, "funny" in some sense. My analysis would focus on what it says about the character.

While I can't think of one or two words that have a slang meaning that is totally different than its originally intended use, I know there are a lot of words out there that kind of just do have that (or maybe I'm just imagining this...as I can't seem to recall them right now, but maybe later).

Anyway, I think "The Simpsons" also uses Flanders in this same kind of context.

He's someone who is pretty much representative of the crazy right (buying cable and then locking every channel out; and the no-gay thing), and would be in that chaperoning-the-dance category, and The Simpsons also use him for a kind of homoerotic subtext.

He has sayings like "I've pulled a few boners" and the like, and also there's one episode where he is wearing a spandex outfit and is shaking his butt around and saying "it feels like I'm wearing nothing at all" and Homer is later distracted by the memory and says "stupid sexy Flanders"; or maybe the episode where Maude dies and the last thing Flanders says to her is "no foot longs" about the hot dog she goes to get for him.

So, I suspect what the joke was intended to mean was for the hypocrites, like Flanders, who are against gays, yet who seem be gay.

Perhaps I gave bad examples above.

So, the translation of the joke is:

Gay as in someone who is a hypocrite because they are against gays but seem to be gay themselves (as in Flanders "no foot longs" thing).

So, I think the gay in the film might have actually been directed at a hypocritical mindset about someone who is gay but against gays.

I know; complicated stuff.

This is the kind of humor that is on sit-coms, where you have to go through a whole coded language to figure out one of the jokes.

That's an indication that the movie is going to have sit-com humor.

It probably won't be as bad, but maybe pretty close.

"..as the Supreme Court recently ruled, multinational megacorporations like NBC Universal Globochem now have all the free speech rights of individual US citizens, without the regulations or responsibilities!"

This brings me to my biggest beef with those who lament the legality of corporate entities purchasing political influence. Which is the more fundamental problem: the fact that corporations are able to buy political favors or the fact that the favors are available for sale in the first place? It seems that the problem lies merely with who's doing the buying. March behind the banner of "public interest" and all moral taint washes away, right?

I have an unsolicited suggestion for you, Jim, that I hope you won't take personally. In your last two posts, you trail off rather awkwardly into politically charged tangents whose only purpose, as far as I can tell, is for you to exhibit your political prejudices. You fire off a quip but don't bother to stick around to lay substance to your reasoning, probably because you don't want to digress further from the main topic (which is a good indication that the digression was short on relevance to begin with).

What I'm trying to say is, if you're going to parade your political preferences, don't approach it as a side show. As you said, this is not a movie-exclusive blog. I would love to hear your views on the evils of the Reagan administration that go beyond attempts to be cute (I mean, what the hell is this line supposed to mean?: "...letting the filthy rich suck on the body politic") or why you believe a film like The Corporation offers a substantive, honest treatise of its subject, as opposed to being a shameless propaganda vehicle with a really asinine gimmick for a hook.

Is it a gay joke to make a gay joke? Or is it Vaughn's character making a gay joke so the view will know that he's an insensitive a-hole who talks like many real life a-holes talk?

The main reason I usually find myself offended by "gay" jokes is the same reason I tend to find myself offended by fart jokes: about 98 percent of the time they're tired, unimaginative and unfunny (and that's something particularly damning in a comedy TV show or movie, because I have the crazy notion that something created by a team of writers and actors who are paid to be funny, and who have time to plan their humor, should at least be half as funny as I can be at the spur of the moment).

But building off of Andy Graham's comment above, I don't see a particularly big difference between the gay joke of The Dilemma and the string of jokes from The 40-Year-Old Virgin, or at least the Coldplay joke. Both are about ridiculing something as "unmanly." So if there is a difference, the Coldplay joke is simply set up better, and that leads me here:

Whether this is right or wrong, I think in most cases our moral barometer with jokes is influenced by whether or not a joke makes us laugh. Without going into too distant a tangent: People who laughed at Gran Torino's countless slurs found a way to defend them as reflecting negatively on the character even while those same slurs made Eastwood's character endearing to the people who laughed at his supposed wit. People who didn't laugh found those jokes offensive, either from a position of political correctness or just in terms of their lack of comic ambition (i.e. the jokes were lame and repetitive).

Of the The 40-Year-Old Virgin scene you write that
the characters are "mocking their own sexual insecurities," but I don't think that's true. I think the film is mocking the characters' sexual insecurities, and that's different. I think your reading might be indicative of a response I often notice to comedies (myself included): if a character makes us laugh, we have a habit of trying to give that character awareness, because that makes the humor more rewarding. But that doesn't work with Virgin, which repeatedly establishes that the non-Carell characters are ignorant, insensitive fools who should be laughed at for their ignorance. If these guys spend the movie as targets for mockery it doesn't make much sense to me that in the scene above they would be suddednly self-aware (if still immature). Just saying.

I was already offended that Ron Howard would choose to make a movie with Vince Vaughn and Kevin James in it, so I haven't even seen the trailer.

I suspect people are over-thinking this. In the UK people have been using "gay" to mean some variation of "unimpressive" for years: this meaning was finally "outed" in 2006. In this context "gay" is more or less the same as "lame" and has a similarly mean-spirited, though not necessarily hateful, etymology. Vince Vaughn's character could equally have said: "Electric cars are lame. I mean, not disabled, but my-parents-are-chaperoning-the-dance lame."

What did you think of the South Park episode "The F-Word"?

Kids have used "gay" jokingly, to mean cheesy or unmanly or uncool or even to pointedly signify "actually not at all homosexual" for a long. long time.

Wait, wait, whoa. Say what? I have heard my son, who's a teen, use the expression several times. At NO time was he using it to "pointedly signify 'actually not at all homosexual'." Quite the contrary. He used it in the same way teens of my generation used to use the word "fruity" or "fruit". Which is also a synonym for "homosexual", now isn't it?

My daughter is also a teen, with many gay and lesbian friends. She is vehemently against the use of the word in jokes. (Strangely enough, although she's Jewish, she has no problem with making jokes about Jews.) I have always been against the phrase "so gay", and it's always been because I've heard it as a slur against homosexuals.

I don't know. Perhaps it's a generational thing, and you may be right in that young people don't see it as a slur on gays. But I have my doubts. Andy seemed to peg it pretty well in his description above (and God forbid that anything be "womanly", right? That's the worst thing about gay guys to the straight ones out there).

BTW, in your excerpt with Rogan and Rudd, I think you missed a bit of the point. That monologue is playing on gay stereotypes with its reference to macrameing jean shorts. "Oh, gays are so fruity, they mince and like Liza Minnelli and speak in high-pitched breathy voices." I don't think most gay guys do that, and they've got a right not to like jokes about it. Just as Jews don't like jokes about them being miserly and blacks don't like jokes about eating watermelon and playing basketball, and so on, as Vonnegut might have said.

I'm glad you spent time and effort to write down your objections to this pejorative term, Jim. I have to say though, I'm disappointed that you did not spend time addressing the prevalent misogyny in The Social Network. I understand what Sorkin and Fincher were trying to portray, characters that were so deeply misogynistic that women are merely stereotypical objects of their affection. I still found it disturbing the lengths that Sorkin and (especially) Fincher were willing to go to. The women in the film fulfill the tropes of female characters. They are alternately frigid, saintly, crazy, dumb, and power-hungry. I have read Sorkin's "apology" and find it lacking. That's just my two cents though.

While I agree that this is not a First Amendment issue, I do understand the outcry over a joke made at the expense, not only of gay people, but of teenagers who might be perceived and taunted as such. On "The Office," when Michael Scott makes some incredibly clueless and offensive joke in order to ingratiate himself with his co-workers, it's okay to laugh because the real joke is that no matter how hard he tries, it's he who will always be the office pariah. But when the point of such a joke is the joke itself, we're beyond such compromises.
I feel the same way about those Tyler Perry timewarp sitcoms. While there might be a modicum of truth in the adage "comedy is built on stereotypes," haven't we progressed to the point where these particular stereotypes could only conceivably be funny when filtered through several layers of irony (like on Ricky Gervais's "Extras")?

Why does this character talk like this? And why does he say that at this time? Is he an outdated and postmodern person? It's a comedy so I assume this character is not meant to be taken seriously. Maybe this joke gets too "meta" on word usage for those of us who like to react instead of think. People need to chill out. I guess if you are offended by the trailer you wont waste your time on the movie. You're welcome. Now shut up.

I have to disagree with your comment that people associating the "gay" slur with "black" or "Jew" are very off the mark, even by an inch. The equating and comparison of these examples is very fitting. If I say something/someone is "gay" I am being negative towards that object/person. That is because I think it is bad to be "gay". Although I laughed at both the scene in the trailer, because of the "parents chaperoning" tag line, and the scene in knocked up, I still felt bad doing both because of the negative connotation of the word and the negative connotation towards the people the word describes. If it became popular for people to declare "that's so atheist" towards anything they disliked, I would be annoyed and deeply offended as an atheist. Just because we am not gay, doesn't mean we can't sympathize on the issue and refuse to continue the insult.

I know we can't directly compare use of the word "gay" to use of the n-word, but the comparison still brings to light some important points. Like, yes, there is precedent for social sanction on words that are too hurtful (to counter people who scream "censorship!" at any criticism of their language are tragically short-sighted). And the appropriation of the n-word by the black community conveniently demonstrates that words like this are context-dependent, so it's perfectly understandable to call a certain use of a word inappropriate, or to call it inappropriate when it's used by a certain group of people. "Gay" is inappropriate when a straight person uses it with any implication of scorn. This includes cases where it's used as mocking shorthand for a bunch of stereotypes, even if it's not insulting anyone directly.

I understand why people think the "ironic/self-aware" use of the pejorative term is acceptable. However, I think its ironic potential is over -- that was funny because it seemed insightful, an observation that the term is sometimes such a ridiculous non-sequitor, or that it's a mask for the speaker's own sexual insecurities. But at this point in the history of language, everyone who cares knows these implications, so this joke is way past prime.

Is the irony of the term "gay" completely played out? No, but it takes the exact right context, and a very careful treatment, to make that humor work. And when it fails, you are indeed left with, as you put it, "the residue of scorn," (i.e. "offensive things are automatically funny"). And maybe the Seth Rogan / Paul Rudd scene had just the right touch at the time, but reading the transcript above, I don't find the "self-awareness" very convincing. There's a little too much "gay joke" and not enough "good point."

The claim of "irony" has made it possible for hipsters to walk around making crude gay jokes about each other, and thinking it's okay (or even enlightened) because they know it's offensive, but insist that they don't really dislike gay people.

words evolve and their meanings change over time...I'm not saying its right to use "gay" like that, but that's how a lot of people use it. Its unfortunate that word has evolved like that, but that's the way it is...I'm not sure how you can judge off a trailer whether or the usage their is approapriate. What if that character is portrayed as an awful person, wouldn't that fit into his profile then?

The problem is that "gay" means "homosexual" but it also means "un-masculine", and the second meaning will always carry a derogatory connotation among most males.

I suppose one could argue that it's also wrong for males to demonstrate hostility toward less masculine males regardless of whether they are heterosexual or homosexual, but the male obsession with establishing one's own masculinity is a natural part of adolescence. I don't believe it's a pure social construct, as some do. I think it stems from our biology, and as such, it will not change easily, if at all.

"But is it really a comedian's responsibility to worry about whom they offend? If so, they wouldn't be comedians anymore -- they'd be out of business."

That strikes me as a pretty misguided view of comedians. Maybe you can't strictly worry about anyone you might "offend" when writing comedy, but everything -- everything, comedy, drama, horror, architecture, giving advice... -- concerns taste. Anything can be done in good taste or bad taste, for good reasons or bad reasons.

Now obviously not everyone will agree on what "good taste" means, which is why comedians can't worry about not offending anyone. But any good comedian has to worry about whether what they're writing is in good taste, as they see it. There was a great scene in "Louie" earlier this year that illustrated this, with Louis C.K. playing poker with his comedian friends. One of them is gay, and he asks him -- seriously, not in a joking manner -- whether his use of the word "f****t" (begone with you, spam filter!) during his sets offends him, and whether he thinks it's offensive to the gay community in general. The scene is both an example of why taste matters in comedy, and at the same time a demonstration of how to craft potentially "offensive" comedy the right way...in my taste, at least.

The scene can be seen here (psst, quite NSFW): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-55wC5dEnc

I have to disagree with your comment that people associating the "gay" slur with "black" or "Jew" are very off the mark, even by an inch. The equating and comparison of these examples is very fitting. If I say something/someone is "gay" I am being negative towards that object/person. That is because I think it is bad to be "gay". Although I laughed at both the scene in the trailer, because of the "parents chaperoning" tag line, and the scene in knocked up, I still felt bad doing both because of the negative connotation of the word and the negative connotation towards the people the word describes. If it became popular for people to declare "that's so atheist" towards anything they disliked, I would be annoyed and deeply offended as an atheist. Just because we am not gay, doesn't mean we can't sympathize on the issue and refuse to continue the insult.

People forget that all jokes need butts. When I see the Anderson Coopers of the world complaining about who should or shouldn't be the butt of a joke, I sort of want to punch him in the face. (Sorry, Anderson.) Somehow, I guess, we want to have comedies that are inoffensive to everyone. But the mechanism of comedy requires a superior and an inferior. It just does. (Even slapstick implies the viewer is superior to the fool falling on his face.) Comedies without this mechanism just aren't funny. From time to time, we're all the butt of a joke, aren't we? If you like to laugh, if you like comedies, you have to realize that you're poking fun at someone, and that this is okay because poking fun is different than condemnation. Lighten up, eh?

This reminds me of Louis CK's great bit on the word "faggot":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-otAJrtY-w

Southpark covered this, in an episode entitled "The F Word." The jist of it is, the kids use the f-word (the one that sort of means "gay") to taunt motorcyclists who are fouling up their town with their engine noise. There's a pretty great scene where the kids are being deposed by some Senate-like committee, and cannot fathom that the adults don't understand that the f-word doesn't mean homosexual. It means lame. It ends with the Harley riders proudly adopting the word as their own, and the cycle repeats. Maybe the joke is played out, but it's still interesting to think about how words evolve in common usage. And sometimes it's funny.

Jim,

I love your column but I find your do's and dont's about using the word "gay" to be, well, kinda gay.

My wife and I watch Dancing with the Stars with our 1 year old and 4 year old. As a fan of the show, I can tell you it is good, clean family television and also empirically gay. It is not just the flamboyant dancing and sequins that make it gay. I'm pretty sure all three judges are gay too (although one guy may just be British which is practically the same thing). The Italian guy is so flamingly over the top that he makes the gay film critics from the old "In Living Color" sketch seem sexually repressed.

With regards to movies, one of my favorite throwaway lines in the "The Hangover" is:

"[answering machine message] Hey, this is Phil. Leave me a message, or don't, but do me a favor: don't text me, it's gay."

Is that joke acceptable to you? Am I a bad person for laughing at that joke? Should Wal-Mart sell a sanitized version of the DVD where the offending word is removed or replaced so that Bradley Cooper's character instead claims that texting is "silly".

I remember upgrading a cassette tape of Ice Cubes' "AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted" to a CD in the early 90's. I was dumbfounded to discover that instead of merely refusing to sell Ice Cube's CDs, Wal-Mart actually carried a version that edited out offensive content. That someone would bother trying to sanitize gangster rap was surreal. It was Orwellian. It was also pretty gay for Wal-Mart to do that.

Look, just because you breezily dismissed this issue as not being about the 1st amendment doesn't mean that it isn't exactly about the 1st amendment. This IS a bona fide censorship issue. GLAAD needs needs to be focused on making damn sure Adam Lambert can perform in whatever backward country (Malaysia? Indonesia? I dunno, geography is gay.) insists on stopping his show because of his sexual orientation. That is a legit gay rights issue. Censoring Vince Vaughn jokes is political correctness run amok.

PS

One of my buddies once ordered a chef's salad while a group of us were at Hooter's watching MNF. The waitress laughed at him and told him he was gay. It was hysterically funny.

I think you're right in that the joke is already compromised by the "not homosexual..." clarification. If it was just, "Electric cars are gay. My-parents-are-chaperoning-the-dance gay," it might've worked better, or at least been more honest. But you could argue the scene (in the trailer) is just as much about Vaughn playing to his potential clients' insecurities or ideas of manliness (I remember him doing air-guitar or something) as the scene from Virgin is about self-awareness.

A "gay" joke I've heard recently that perfectly defines the word's "new" meaning was in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, where Cera first tells his (definitely non-stereotypical) gay roommate, played by Keiran Culkin, to leave because Cera doesn't want him "gaying up the place" while he has a date over, and then later, when Cera is wearing an apron and cooking something, Culkin tells him, "I can't believe you're worried about me gaying up the place."

Male homosexuality is so mind-boggling to most regular heterosexual guys (that I know) that they need some way to make sense of it (without, you know, having gay sex), and I think humor is good for that. The more gay jokes, the more awareness, as long as the jokes are warm-hearted (Virgin, Bruno) and not bitter, angry or repressed. Which is why, I think, the "Dilemma" joke doesn't work by itself. It's too "I'm allowed to be homophobic without being a bad person! Stop infringing on my heterosexual rights! Ahhh!!!"

"I have used the term "gay" perjoratively many many times, in precisely the way it is used in The Dilemma. "

Well FUCK YOU AND THE HORSE YOU RODE IN ON!

The power of the Heterosexual Dictatorship (Christopher Isherwood's ever-useful term0 lies in its ability to set "standards." We are derided, insulted and dismissed. And when we object we're told how "oversentitive" we are, and that our objectio0ns are a demand for "Political Correctness" -- a crime far more serious in the HD's view than homophobia -- which it resolutely refuses to recognize or do anything about.

Maybe the corpses of bullied teenagers driven to kill themselves might move the HD to tweak its PR strategeies.

But nothing more.

Two points about what I said earlier:

The word I was thinking of was...gay.

I always thought that the origin of the word gay was meant as a perjorative, but I've been reading a little bit on it, and it doesn't seem to be the case: or at least not in the sense that I thought.

So, my thought was that gays should come up with a new word to replace gays, which, if the word gay is not a negative at all, would mean they wouldn't need to; but maybe there is still a kind of negativity about it.

So my comment was meant to (and perhaps still might be, although less so, if it is) mean, if you want gay to not be a negative term, you should probably remove the label.

The other point I made was meant to suggest that the movie had coded language that is prevalent in sit-com shows, which, say, are full of jokes that probably no one is getting. However, I meant to decode the joke as actually meaning "a hypocritical gay in denial that poses as anti-gay", but the movie itself doesn't seem to know its own joke because it says "I mean, not homosexual but..." So, I think the movie is possibly wrapped in such coded sit-com language that the film makers themselves didn't even know what their own joke was supposed to be.

Whoever wrote the movie is too dumb to understand a sit-com joke, but to be fair, sit-coms don't seem to want anybody to get the jokes.

Another separate point is I think the word can be used for bullying, or abuse, and I think that may be a problem that needs to be dealt with as something separate from the term (as I think gay might have a negative connotation, and for other reasons about labeling).

To me, I think the most common tactic of bullying is an "everything that everyone else does is meaningless" mindset.

This is what Glenn Beck and all the nutty right REALLY are.

Really, just think of Glenn Beck (or any of them) as having this underlying mindset or thought, and it becomes crystal clear: Beck with his mocking and...well, just go back and look at it with that mindset.

So, as they do not let ANY meaning come into this world (as "everything everyone else does is meaningless") then they are EVERYTHING that is wrong with this world as NOTHING of meaning comes into through that mindset.

They represent the very mindset that will bring humanity to an end.

Once you let meaningless sink in to the culture and that permeates everything, the next thing that happens is probably something like Nazism. Well, at least, that's what happened with the Nazis. They had no meaning, so they used Hitler to come in and be their God, I guess.

So, I think basically that society was built upon this meaning, that what everyone else does has meaning, or self-esteem. You destroy that and you are laying the ground work for probably Nazism or something like that. So, we need to have manners and raise kids to believe that what they do has meaning.

So, I think we should probably teach kids more self-esteem, and I also don't think that what Michelle Rhee, from "Waiting for Superman", is probably the answer, because I don't think it's all about grades. I think if you give kids self-esteem (or meaning) then the grades will probably follow, or at least that should be the primary goal: to teach people to believe that what they do has meaning, which means having manners.

So, I think, that while we teach our kids that, it can't hurt to deal with the crazy right, whose mindset could potentially end humanity if it spreads.

Beyond the obvious stupidity of the "something/someone is gay" joke, which movies can or cannot make as they will (what do you expect from Vince Vaughn, he's the ultimate frat-boy) and can or cannot be funny based on the context, what really annoys me about this is that what they are saying is "gay" is Electric Cars!

Come on. Electric cars rule. And the planet is on its way out. So stop mocking electric cars with your lame-brain college-boy machismo, and pump them up as truly fabulous. Which they are. (I may be indicting myself in this conversation by using fabulous as a descriptor...)

Anyway, Vince Vaughn should start driving an electric car as attrition. And he should be me one, because their awesome.

Thank God for elites like Emerson, Anderson Cooper and the like to tell us, the unwashed masses, what is absurd and unacceptable. It's comforting to know a major film studio will buckle under pressure from the PC police, and I especially love how our ever-weakening country is continuously caving in to the vocal minority. I am thrilled to see activist judges doing what is socially in our best interest as a nation and ignoring all other logical arguments and their own constitutional duty. I am so happy and grateful to all of you for doing all the thinking for me and everyone else out here in the fly-over states. Man, I can't wait for this new healthcare bill to kick in, so's I got even less decisions to make for myself and my family. Even when we go bankrupt, I know you'll figure out a way to take care of me, 'cuz y'all are just so dang smart! Keep up the good work, guys, and God bless...(oops)...I mean, higher power of choice or none bless America!

Since you invoked "The Simpsons", how about this gem from them:

Bully #1 - "Dude, you just kissed a girl!!!"
Bully #2 - "That is so gay!"

"I always thought that the origin of the word gay was meant as a perjorative, but I've been reading a little bit on it, and it doesn't seem to be the case: or at least not in the sense that I thought."

Get yourself a copy of "The Invention of Heterosexuality" by Jonathan "Ned" Katz and learn the truth.

"So, my thought was that gays should come up with a new word to replace gays, which, if the word gay is not a negative at all, would mean they wouldn't need to; but maybe there is still a kind of negativity about it."

It is not for us to do anything. In the immortal word of Carol Burnett "It's you baby -- don't leave it crying in my arms."

Young people still use the word gay as an insult ironically and unironically all the time. Whenever some one would would use gay as an insult in highschool, our teacher would say something like, " DO you mean gay as in defective," and evreyone would just look at the teacher and role their eyes.

Oh, yeah, and another word I was thinking of was bastard.

That word kind of offended me too (as I am one) and then I looked up the word (meaning: contemptible person) and now I use it sometimes (although still in a kind of joking way, as I'm not into name-calling).

So, to me, I think that it's kind of the same thing, and if people would just look in the dictionary they'd see that it doesn't mean anything against homosexuals just as bastards doesn't mean anything against "illegitimate" children (that word seems more offensive).

But this is an addition to what I said earlier, which I won't repeat.

if we cant use "gay" then why dont we stop using words like "pus*y" or "b*tch" when referring to someone being weak. isnt that the same stereotype against women? they just dont moan about it endlessly on a PR parade

Jim Emerson wrote: "I have found myself reading about a stupid gay joke that's been removed from trailers for the upcoming Ron Howard comedy "The Dilemma," starring Vince Vaughn and Kevin James.

I saw the trailer in fr...ont of "The Social Network," October 1. Vaughn's character is speaking to some automotive businessmen (is this a follow-up to Howard's "Gung-Ho"?) and says: "Electric cars are gay. I mean, not homosexual, but my-parents-are-chaperoning-the-dance gay."

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper reportedly went on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" and said he was "shocked" that Universal "thought that it was OK to put that in a preview for the movie to get people to go and see it." Universal responded by quickly pulling the scene from the trailer. No word on whether it will remain in the movie, which opens in January. "

COMMENT: I think all this is like that old saw that until you've walked a mile in my mocassins you can't know how I feel.....EMPATHY is what is sadly lacking in America these days. Of course, I will probably get called an EMPATH here by posters who disagree with me, but so be it. I am proud to be an EMPATH. I do care about all people.

NOTE: I applaud AC COOPER for going on the Ellen show and speaking out but i am still at a loss, Roger, why Cooper does not tell his vewers on his own CNN show that he is gay, succcess and happy and content, and also tell some of the people he interviews, who are religious nuts with agendas against gays, that he, AC COOP, is gay, right to their faces. But no, even Anderson hides in the closet on national TV. How can he fight anti-gay BS if even HE won;t come out and say "Hey, motherfkner, I am gay myself, so take your Bible and shove it!"

Capice?

You don't understand, Keith. I don't care what straights think. I really don't. I'm 63 years old and got fed up with explaining things to blinkered straights back in the mid-70's. I reccomended the Katz book not for any "definition" of "gay" it might provide for straights in the penut gallery but as a means of demonstrating politically and historically precisely what is at stake. If you can't figure that out then there's nothing more to say, really.

I'd recoomend Proust too, but he's not one to "flip though."

“God, I love to analyze jokes.”

Me too! Let’s give it a whirl:

"Electric cars are gay. I mean, not homosexual, but my-parents-are-chaperoning-the-dance gay."

How does this quotation work as a joke? Let’s start at the first sentence. “Electric cars are gay.” We have a simple identity sentence: noun – is – [noun or adjective]. Our noun is “electric cars”, which is the plural form of cars which run on electricity. Pretty simple. Then comes “are”: a be-verb, appropriately pluralized to fit the noun. “Gay” is a bit more problematic, there are a lot of possibilities here. Let’s reference our dictionary:

GAY
–adjective
1. having or showing a merry, lively mood: gay spirits; gay music.
2. bright or showy: gay colors; gay ornaments.
3. given to or abounding in social or other pleasures: a gay social season.
4. licentious; dissipated; wanton: The baron is a gay old rogue with an eye for the ladies.
5. homosexual.
6. of, indicating, or supporting homosexual interests or issues: a gay organization.
–noun
7. a homosexual person, esp. a male.
–adverb
8. in a gay manner.

We know in this context that “gay” can’t be a noun because it would have to be pluralized, and an adverb would make no sense, so clearly we’re dealing with Gay: The Adjective. But while using “gay” as an adjective is syntactically correct, none of the given definitions make much sense (OK, maybe #2, but have you ever heard “gay” used to describe bright colors? I haven’t). Our initial reaction to “electric cars are gay” is that it’s just gibberish, and therein lies our first level of humor: it sounds silly. “Electric cars are merry, or wanton, or homosexual, or abounding in social pleasures. Har har, isn’t that weird?” But even the most inept comedian usually elevates his material above a mad-lib, and we almost immediately go beyond the dictionary definition of “gay” to its other colloquial meaning: lame.

Now here I’m going to have to simply guess that the reason the gay=lame colloquialism exists is because people naturally associate homosexuality with a lack of manliness, and lack of manliness makes them feel repulsion. “Gay” in this context means “should be manly and isn’t”. This mental association probably only exists on a near-unconscious level, and as language evolves a word’s origin loses relevance to its meaning. None of this is provable, it’s all just conjecture. But Vince seems to have thought this through himself, because his next statement addresses just that.

“ I mean, not homosexual, but my-parents-are-chaperoning-the-dance gay."

So he’s clarifying that his ostensibly nonsensical opening statement actually meant exactly what we suspected it did. I think we’re in the realm of state-the-obvious humor here, where the speaker is telling us something we already know, but framing the statement in an unusual or taboo way. For example, Jay telling Andy in The 40-Year-Old Virgin that he’s psyching himself in to thinking sex is an impossible feat isn’t funny. Jay saying “you’re putting the p***y on a pedestal” is funny.

So what’s intended to be funny about the way Vince is explaining himself? Surely it has to be his ‘my parents are chaperoning the dance’ example. I think we immediately get an archetypal image of a 13 year old boy with no friends and an unhealthy obsession with Star Wars. We don’t like this kid. We think he's weird. We, for a split second, revert to our more juvenile selves and think it would be funny to dump chocolate milk on his head. That guy hangs out with his parents? Boy is he gay.

So that’s it. Vince has basically stated as an axiom that “gay” is a hominem for “homosexual” and “lame”. The basic structure of the joke is “A is not equal to B because C”, where
A = gay
B = offensive
C = pimply nerds are funny.

************************************************

At this point I have to admit that I can draw no conclusion from anything written above. I had no idea where a term-paper-type analysis of a not-so-creative joke would take me, I just sat down and started typing. And now that this much effort has been put forth, it’s time to post.

Sorry.

"is it really anyone's duty to tell the world which gender they're sleeping with?

Yes.

Straights tell us who they're sleeping with 24/7. It's "My wife"this and "My girlfriend" that. Plus pictures of the wife or girlfriend and the kids hung up in the work cuble. And that ain't the half of it.

Straights can't go 15 minutes without telling someone who they're sleeping with.

When WE tell someone who we're sleeping with -- it's a "scandal"!

A few months ago we had two trees trimmed. As my wife and I bundled the branches and sticks together throughout the day, I kept myself amused by going out of my way to refer to those "bundles of sticks" as "faggots." It was the first time I'd ever been able to use the word in context with the dictionary definition and it amused me to no end. I don't think I'd said the word since middle school back when I hadn't really figured out my views on the world or concerned myself with other people's feelings so much (as a teenager is wont to do).

As a teenager in the 90s, I said "gay" as in "decidedly uncool" all the time. That usage dropped out of my vernacular a long time ago and hearing it now from others makes me cringe (though I try to keep the cringe off my face because it'd be hypocritical; I may not say it anymore, but I also know that my friends don't mean it as an anti-homosexual slur either).

Anderson Copper is really "shocked"? People over-use that word don't they? I mean they overuse "shocked".
Consider it--Anderson Copper what saw the trailer or heard about it and...I mean, what did he look like he just saw a ghost? "OH MY GOD", said startled veteran TV news reporter Anderson Copper after hearing the incredible news. Mr. Copper reportedly issued a statement explaining that he's been in war zones, famine and tribal war ravaged Africa and Hurricane Katrina's aftermath and...
Well whatever.

But yeah it is yet another corporate media non-story. Uber-sensitivity to non-p.c. humor in entertainment and abysmal failure to inform Americans on what really matters. Infotainment they call it.

Anderson Cooper has been in war zones, famine and tribal war ravaged Africa and Hurricane Katrina's aftermath -- and yet he still won't come out of the closet.

As for that "Dictionary Definition" it depends on what dictionary you're using. For a really thorough one would tell you that those budles of wood called "faggots" were bundled around gays and lesbians and used as kindling for the main event -- say the burning of Joan of Arc fo example.

Joan, BTW, was obviously transgendered.

People need to watch the South Park episode in which the word FAG is used to describe Harley Riders. Language is meant to change and adapt, because humans do so. People that try to stop it will eventually get run over.