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Don't get me wrong. I like a good fag joke as much as the next guy. In fact most of the fags I know tell fag jokes. That's the funny thing about fag jokes-- depending on context they can serve two purposes. There is the old-fashioned sort of fag joke that makes fun of fags. Context: think high school locker room. But there is another sort of fag joke that has been perfected by men within the gay community which, while it may look and sound like a fag joke, actually ends up making fun of heterosexual norms of masculinity. Context: think of the endless jokes that gay comics tell about how much smarter and wittier fags are then bullish, stupid heterosexual men.

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While it may seem counterintuitive there is actually a long history of the second kind of fag joke in Hollywood films. We see it in the movies of Eddie Cantor from the 1930s, of Jack Benny in the 1940s, and Danny Kaye and Jerry Lewis in the 1950s. In all of these films the male lead-- not, coincidentally, Jewish-- is made fun of for being less of a man than the other men in the film. But in the last reel it turns out that their insufficient masculinity is valorized over the pig-headed butch, even romanticized manliness of the other men in the film. And isn't it curious that all of these actors are Jewish? Well, not really-- in US culture masculinity has always been defined as a white, mainstream Christian (esp. Protestant) sort of quality, and Jewish men just didn't measure up to be real men: think Woody Allen.

And Woody Allen is really the current godfather of jokes about the effeminized Jew. No surprise that one of his most famous one-liners is: "I am the only am I know who has penis envy." Of course the point of the joke was to make fun of the very notion of traditional masculinity. In the early-mid-1990s there was a new brand of comic actors-- Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller the most famous-- who were in this tradition in movies like Airheads, Billy Madison, Flirting With Disaster and The Cable Guy. These films were great-- really even radical in how they made fun of traditional ideas of being a man.

But recently some has gone sour. While Adam Sandler has veered off into making more and more films in which he is just a normal guy, Ben Stiller has started making films in which his lack of "real" masculinity is actually the joke. While films like Zoolander were exquisite in their development of Stiller's fag-like persona, in movies such as the 2000 Meet the Parents and the 2004 Along Came Polly, the jokes about Stiller's screen persona were uncomfortably ugly. Now in the just released-on-DVD Meet the Fockers-- the sequel to Meet the Parents, we see the same problem. The first half of Meet the Fockers is an extended series of fag jokes, castrations jokes, and girly-boy jokes, all at the expense of Stiller-- who plays Gaylord "Greg" Focker, a male nurse who is marrying into a very uptight wasp/Italian family dominated by the ex-CIA honcho played by Robert DiNero. And while the second half of the film shows us how much fun Jewish families are (well, those involving Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand) the whole film leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

This is also the case with Without a Paddle-- boy-comedy-adventure movie that is a cross between Deliverance and Dude, Where's My Car. While a great premise, like Meet the Fockers, Without a Paddle is almost entirely predicated on the character played by Seth Green being humiliated and ridiculed for being a fag, weak, too smart, and too short. Without a Paddle might have been a terrific film-- a little routine, but a great chance for on-target jokes-- but it quickly turns into a muddled nightmare of castration jokes, gay rape jokes, and all out fag jokes centered on Seth Green, who is clearly in the running to be the next Ben Stiller only without the richer history of more interesting films and television work.

It's too bad because both Ben Stiller and Seth Green are incredibly talented actors who can do a wide range of performance. So why are they doing this-- well, it is the lowest common denominator. It's also, in the realm of American comedy, funny enough to audiences who don't expect much. But in the end it feels a little creepy and a little cheap. None of which are attractive qualities for fags.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com