Fig. 01: Margaret Cho Gay humor is persistently themed on the edgy or grotesque. When society considers your very existence to be an obscenity, you come to see pushing the envelope as a good thing. Thus gay men have no reason to be assuaged from jokes about uncut cocks or abortion; aside from an already-established gay fixation with the female body, gay people are also head-over-heels for comedians who talk about sex, bodily functions or with extreme condescension for certain kinds of people.
Gay men are especially drawn to women talking about their vaginas, the sizes and shapes of their vaginas and things they like to put in their vaginas. The inherent comedy in vaginas may be partly because gay men think “va-gin-a” is a funny-sounding word, but they also think that a vagina is a funny-sounding concept to be repeated as many times as possible and in as many forms: vadge, vageen, vajayjay or hot pocket, and for men, there’s the “mangina” and the “mussy.” So when Margaret Cho gave an entire 6-minute monologue about the vagina-washing nurse in the hospital where she was being treated for kidney failure, every gay man instantly fell in love.
They also love when Margaret Cho makes fun of her Asian mother’s accent. That is because the second thing that gay men love in humor is racial stereotypes.
To enjoy racist jokes and not be an asshole, you need an “in” in the form of a person who is allowed to tell racist jokes because she or he is not white or has some other excuse. Since Margaret Cho is Asian, for example, her Asian jokes are OK. Since Lisa Lampanelli has sex with black people, she’ll tell you it is OK for her to tell jokes about them (as Strom Thurmond and most white male slaveholders who had sex with black women would have concurred). It is OK for Sarah Silverman to tell racist jokes about all kinds of races because she’s Jewish, which is kind of like a race, or at least it used to be. (See Fig. 02 for full explanation.)
Gay men are allowed to enjoy the racist jokes because everybody knows they are Democrats.Fig 02: Matrix determining the social appropriateness of potentially-offensive jokes. When it comes to jokes about sex, though, the one speaking must be female. The reason for this is that when straight men tell jokes about sex or vaginas, they just sound like frat boys or jocks – who evoke bad memories for gay men, as well as for everybody else who isn’t a frat boy or jock. Besides that, gay men eventually get sick of hearing persistent off-color humor from each other. That leaves them with female comedians, to the benefit of Kathy Griffin and Mo’nique. Stuff Gay People Like (SGPL: ABOUT) is a regular column. Visit the Facebook Page.
By Matt Pizzuti
