Rainbow-Tinted Goggles: Comedy
What do Rifftrax, The IT Crowd, and Saturday Night Live have in common?
They all treat being trans* like a joke.
Of course, it's not unusual for comedians to make jokes. That's what they do. But there's a difference between having an actual punchline and slapping a laugh track after a statement of fact.
Rifftrax was discussed in-depth last semester, so we'll just have a brief overview. Their riffing of the movie "Twilight" included the line, "Ah, high school cafeterias. What better place to see a pre-op transvestite in a hairnet." A nonsensical phrase at best, the spread of misinformation at its worst. (Protip: transvestites don't get operations, ergo there is no such thing as a pre-op transvestite.)
The IT Crowd, a British sitcom, at least had the decency to make their transwoman character look like most transwoman (i.e., like a woman), which is further than most media go. But that didn't stop her existence from being a punchline.
The plot is as follows. The character Douglas meets a woman named April and takes her out to dinner. At dinner, April makes a confession: she is a transwoman. Actually, she says "I used to be a man," which is not the way most transwomen refer to themselves, but we're getting off-track. Her statement is greeted immediately by a laugh track.
Again, announcing that one is transgendered qualifies as a joke. Full stop, no actual punchline required.
Douglas's reply of "I don't care" is met with even bigger guffaws. It would seem the idea of a heterosexual man willingly entering into a romantic relationship with a transwoman is laughable.
The episode goes downhill from there, as April's transsexual status becomes a running gag. A later scene reveals Douglas misheard April, thinking she was "from Iran" rather than "used to be a man." Upon realizing she is a transwoman, Douglas breaks up with her. April's response is to punch Douglas so hard he goes flying into a desk. According to The IT Crowd, transwomen are super-strong monstrosities whose masculine rage is barely contained.
What follows is an all-out brawl between Douglas and April, culminating in April being thrown through a window and lying prone on the floor, bleeding and unmoving. This scene of an unconscious or quite possibly dead transwoman is accompanied by, you guessed it, a laugh track.
I probably don't need to tell you the beating and possible murder of a transwoman is not, in and of itself, a joke.
While The IT Crowd is the most brutal offender, the most recent is the show Saturday Night Live (SNL), with their "Estro-maxx" sketch. The sketch presents itself as a commercial for the fictional drug Estro-maxx, and features several male actors pretending to be transwomen. The first laugh track plays when one of the characters announces she is a transwoman. And that's it. That's the joke.
But the skit doesn't stop there. Not only is the existence of transwomen worth a chuckle, but the men chosen to portray them do nothing to disguise their masculinity, sporting men's haircuts, muscled shoulders, and five-o'-clock shadow so severe it has to be called scruff. These portrayals of transwomen further the stereotype that transwomen are "men in dresses," ugly and unconvincing. Is that the joke, then? Some transgender people are better at passing than others, har har?
I wouldn't be complaining if any of these examples were funny. But they're not. Not only are they offensive, but they're lazy, representing the lowest of the low in terms of humor writing.
Something tells me that shouting "the sky is blue" or "water is wet" to a TV audience would not elicit many laughs, but for some reason, admitting trans people exist is a punchline. What's up with that?
*for the purposes of this column, the word "trans" is used to refer to transgendered, transsexual, genderqueer, androgyne, neutroi, and other people whose gender identities fall outside or between the gender binary. The prefix "cis" means "non-trans."
They all treat being trans* like a joke.
Of course, it's not unusual for comedians to make jokes. That's what they do. But there's a difference between having an actual punchline and slapping a laugh track after a statement of fact.
Rifftrax was discussed in-depth last semester, so we'll just have a brief overview. Their riffing of the movie "Twilight" included the line, "Ah, high school cafeterias. What better place to see a pre-op transvestite in a hairnet." A nonsensical phrase at best, the spread of misinformation at its worst. (Protip: transvestites don't get operations, ergo there is no such thing as a pre-op transvestite.)
The IT Crowd, a British sitcom, at least had the decency to make their transwoman character look like most transwoman (i.e., like a woman), which is further than most media go. But that didn't stop her existence from being a punchline.
The plot is as follows. The character Douglas meets a woman named April and takes her out to dinner. At dinner, April makes a confession: she is a transwoman. Actually, she says "I used to be a man," which is not the way most transwomen refer to themselves, but we're getting off-track. Her statement is greeted immediately by a laugh track.
Again, announcing that one is transgendered qualifies as a joke. Full stop, no actual punchline required.
Douglas's reply of "I don't care" is met with even bigger guffaws. It would seem the idea of a heterosexual man willingly entering into a romantic relationship with a transwoman is laughable.
The episode goes downhill from there, as April's transsexual status becomes a running gag. A later scene reveals Douglas misheard April, thinking she was "from Iran" rather than "used to be a man." Upon realizing she is a transwoman, Douglas breaks up with her. April's response is to punch Douglas so hard he goes flying into a desk. According to The IT Crowd, transwomen are super-strong monstrosities whose masculine rage is barely contained.
What follows is an all-out brawl between Douglas and April, culminating in April being thrown through a window and lying prone on the floor, bleeding and unmoving. This scene of an unconscious or quite possibly dead transwoman is accompanied by, you guessed it, a laugh track.
I probably don't need to tell you the beating and possible murder of a transwoman is not, in and of itself, a joke.
While The IT Crowd is the most brutal offender, the most recent is the show Saturday Night Live (SNL), with their "Estro-maxx" sketch. The sketch presents itself as a commercial for the fictional drug Estro-maxx, and features several male actors pretending to be transwomen. The first laugh track plays when one of the characters announces she is a transwoman. And that's it. That's the joke.
But the skit doesn't stop there. Not only is the existence of transwomen worth a chuckle, but the men chosen to portray them do nothing to disguise their masculinity, sporting men's haircuts, muscled shoulders, and five-o'-clock shadow so severe it has to be called scruff. These portrayals of transwomen further the stereotype that transwomen are "men in dresses," ugly and unconvincing. Is that the joke, then? Some transgender people are better at passing than others, har har?
I wouldn't be complaining if any of these examples were funny. But they're not. Not only are they offensive, but they're lazy, representing the lowest of the low in terms of humor writing.
Something tells me that shouting "the sky is blue" or "water is wet" to a TV audience would not elicit many laughs, but for some reason, admitting trans people exist is a punchline. What's up with that?
*for the purposes of this column, the word "trans" is used to refer to transgendered, transsexual, genderqueer, androgyne, neutroi, and other people whose gender identities fall outside or between the gender binary. The prefix "cis" means "non-trans."