Welcome back for another review of Saturday Night Live‘s propensity to make jokes about homos. Click here for my reason for doing this and also, please think twice about telling me to lighten up, because I already have.
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Welcome back for another review of Saturday Night Live‘s propensity to make jokes about homos. Click here for my reason for doing this and also, please think twice about telling me to lighten up, because I already have.
This is SNL Homowatch, where I track the number of haha-that’s-GAY jokes that the writers at Saturday Night Live deliver each week on their forlorn (for Lorne? haha) march toward 1 a.m.
I laid (haha x 2) my mission statement out for this project in last week’s inaugural edition, including a “lighten up, Hank, why don’tcha!” disclaimer. So you might want to go back and read that before you give me a freshly made batch of lighten up, dude. That said, thanks to all of last week’s commenters and the linky-linkersons who pointed new readers here.
For years I’ve been vaguely (in a teensy way) bothered by Saturday Night Live’s complete dependence on sketches that make fun of being gay. I don’t know exactly why. I’ve written a little about this before — “enlightened homophobia,” which is probably socially harmless (as is most televsion, really) but nevertheless irritates me. In the 1990s, after her disastrously unproductive season on SNL, Janeane Garofalo was quite free with her gripes about the SNL culture and one of them was that the male writers were obsessed with gay and anal sex jokes. In a 1995 interview with New York magazine she said: