The new queens of comedy
May 31, 2018 5:49 PM   Subscribe

 
Old here. We've been " creating" a gay paradigm publicly since Paul Lynde was unleashed on Hollywood Squares. It's probably a thing by now. You are assimilated already. Roll with it.
posted by halfbuckaroo at 6:06 PM on May 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


A danger with camp is that it's very *very* easy to portray camp with a really ugly underbelly of misogynistic nastiness, though. Also I feel like this is somewhat missing the history of the openly queer comedy scene within the queer community. Back in the 1980's you had people like Kate Clinton being openly queer in their comedy, as well as the sort of openly-closeted humor like Paul Lynde or the sort of thing pointed out in the Celluloid Closet.
posted by rmd1023 at 6:10 PM on May 31, 2018 [6 favorites]


This post was sponsored by my deep and abiding love for Cole Escola.
posted by sevenyearlurk at 6:17 PM on May 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


Back in the 1980's you had people like Kate Clinton being openly queer in their comedy,

Lea Delaria, Jamie Anderson, and Karen Williams are some other out comedians who were popular on the women's music circuit as well.

Jamie Anderson is both a musician and comedian. Others include(d) Lyn Lavner, Romanovsky & Phillips, the Topp Twins from Australia.

That's just off the top of my head, without googling.

There's probably a FPP in there.

There was a big split, though, between the out queers and the mainstream queers. All the people I named were within the women's/gay culture movement. There wasn't yet space for out queers in mainstream culture, though there was shockingly plenty of room for obvious-but-not-out queers like Paul Lynde.

I haven't read the article yet. Bad Orlop! Will do so now.
posted by Orlop at 6:24 PM on May 31, 2018 [3 favorites]


Thanks for the list of additional comedy folks - I had a Kate Clinton album and saw her live a few times, so she's the first one who came to mind. (Lea Delaria did once yell at me in a Cambridge ice cream store down the street from a lesbian bar, though, because I used one of her flyers to write a note on)
posted by rmd1023 at 6:38 PM on May 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


Percy Dovetonsils
posted by robbyrobs at 7:12 PM on May 31, 2018


I like this cause its a list of nearly everyone I like
posted by The Whelk at 8:04 PM on May 31, 2018


....Forgive the question, but I'm sincerly confused: the inclusion of Paula Poundstone among the list of "many of the most successful queer mainstream stand-up comics from the ’90s" is puzzling, since it's my understanding Poundstone identifies as asexual. Am I maybe working with too narrow a definition of "queer", perhaps?
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:17 PM on May 31, 2018


Asexuals are pretty routinely included as part of the queer community (lgbtqia, the a does not stand for ally) although I can’t speak to whether Poundstone would identify as part of the queer community herself.
posted by zebra at 8:31 PM on May 31, 2018 [4 favorites]


Gotcha - thanks.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:42 PM on May 31, 2018 [2 favorites]


... Topp Twins from New Zealand ...
posted by Richard Upton Pickman at 9:24 PM on May 31, 2018 [1 favorite]


The Topp Twins are from New Zealand. If you're looking for old school Australian lesbian comedians, may I recommend Sue-Ann Post?
posted by misfish at 9:25 PM on May 31, 2018


A danger with camp is that it's very *very* easy to portray camp with a really ugly underbelly of misogynistic nastiness, though.
That is probably very true. But I have enjoyed a lot of camp comedy over the years, and still adore characters played by people like Kenneth Williams. John Inman’s Mr Humphries from Are You Being Served? still cracks me up to this day. The double entendres employed by this older comedy is something I have copied in my own jokes today.

This is where I was going to link to the 1997 episode of What A Performance where Bob Monkhouse introduces the audience to some of the old “Queens of Camp Comedy” (IMDb) that has been floating about YouTube for a while now. But sadly, ITV has taken it down to protect its copyrights. I still recommend looking for it. Not all queer/gay/camp comedy is from the last decade at all.
posted by Martijn at 2:48 AM on June 1, 2018 [1 favorite]


"Stand-up comedy has regularly trafficked in homophobic jokes for cheap laughs — and as of late, transphobic ones — making comedy shows a hostile environment for queer people."

Emphasis added because I am baffled by how someone could get the idea that transphobia in comedy is anything new.
(Also, as with many uses of the term transphobia, transmisogyny would be more accurate).
posted by ITheCosmos at 3:37 AM on June 1, 2018 [2 favorites]


This article is nice for contemporary queer comedy but does erase the pioneering work that happened in San Francisco in the 1980s at the Valencia Rose and in 90s at Josie's Cabaret and Juice Joint, the venues that launched such comedians as Tom Ammiano, Scott Capurro, Lea DeLaria, Margaret Cho, Marga Gomez, Karen Ripley, Karen Williams, Danny Williams, Doug Holsclaw, etc.

In 1995 Lea DeLaria wrote about sharing a dressing room with Whoopi Goldberg at Valencia Rose in 1983.

Here's Marga Gomez on Valencia Rose.

Donald Montwill, who worked at Valencia Rose and Josie's, has a quote I really like which I found in an old SF newspaper article and incorporated into an article I wrote: "One of our goals was comedy that doesn't diminish people or cause pain."
posted by larrybob at 10:54 AM on June 4, 2018


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