Excerpt from The Advocate.com, BY ROBBIE X PIERCE
The guys over at AsapThought, the Youtube channel that describes itself as “Science with a social conscience,” posted a new video that thoughtfully explores the idea of whether gay men are funny and why there are arguably no mainstream gay male comedians.
The video looks at several factors from a sociological point of view to account for what it presents as a historical lack. Obviously there are gay male comedians, from David Sedaris to Simon Amstell to Graham Chapman, but video narrator Gregory Brown (who is gay himself) makes the argument that comedy can be a straight-white-boys’ club that gets easy laughs by othering people. He points at the recent movie Sausage Party, which was written and directed by straight male comedians, and talks about how their humor could have been more nuanced had they included more diversity among the writers.
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| Photo: Gregory "Greg" Brown. From gays historically trying to be taken seriously to straight men having a stranglehold on mainstream comedy, this video presents several intriguing ideas. |
The video looks at several factors from a sociological point of view to account for what it presents as a historical lack. Obviously there are gay male comedians, from David Sedaris to Simon Amstell to Graham Chapman, but video narrator Gregory Brown (who is gay himself) makes the argument that comedy can be a straight-white-boys’ club that gets easy laughs by othering people. He points at the recent movie Sausage Party, which was written and directed by straight male comedians, and talks about how their humor could have been more nuanced had they included more diversity among the writers.
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