This is what derailed the topic a bit, for context. The topic had some momentum.
I would just like to add, because it’s been on my mind, another example of a similar situation being portrayed in a feature film, but in a very different context. “The Crying Game”. If you haven’t seen it, I wouldn’t like to spoil anything, but I’m afraid that the very fact that I’m mentioning it in this context is a huge spoiler already (although I could tell almost as soon as I saw the character). Although I don’t think it surprises anyone these days; but as I understand it, it was a shocker of a plot twist. I just checked and the film is from 1992, so yeah, I can see that. I watched it much, much later.
I’ll leave you with a defining scene:
(Hi, young Jim Broadbent!)
So, what LSL6 does for laughs, this one does for real (not in this linked scene, this linked scene is perfectly ok to watch). I found it hard to watch. I think it’s a good film, but I only watched the whole thing once and I think it’s enough. I don’t even give a damn about his tormented psyche about having been attracted to what he perceives as a man; the fallout of the whole thing is, to her, emotionally violent to breaking point.
One of those “great films I never want to watch again” things.
This might be somewhat disjointed and far too long but I need to write this.
There’s nothing more humiliating for a man than emasculation. If his manhood is put into question, his entire being is put into question, his power is being stripped away from him. An implication that a man is, in fact, not a man is so effective it’s been used ever since the dawn of time as one of the most devastating insults. Masculinity is dominance and strength, and everything else is feminine, submissive, and weak.
That’s a very binary way to see things but that’s unfortunately the world we live in. It’s divided in a neat half that we all have to subscribe to, unless we want to suffer social consequences. There’s a masculine dominant man who finds a feminine submissive woman to perpetuate the cycle of life with. Queer people, however, mess with that system entirely, questioning gender as the system knows it. Now we can have feminine submissive men! And it’s not even seen as shameful! O tempora, o mores!
I wrote about the ancients earlier because one of the emasculating things for them was homosexual behavior. Only one party in the relationship was still seen as a Fully Masculine Man, even if there were two men involved, and it was the dominant one, who usually also had a wife and children because that’s what being a Fully Masculine Man is all about, isn’t it? A respectable man could never be caught being a passive party or else his (perceived) inherent masculine power would be put into question. “You’re gay” is still thrown as an insult to this day as a result of this: to be gay is to give up on the traditional role of Fully Masculine Man.
We, trans people, fuck a lot things up within this hierarchy because we add an additional complication that is “you are not defined by your genitals, actually!”. That messes with the Penetrative Masculine Man and Penetrated Feminine Woman norm. That’s a huge wrench thrown into the gears so in order for the machine to still work, you take the wrench out and declare it was never there, or that it was actually just another gear, just very weirdly shaped and overall defective. By that I mean we’re either considered fake (last time I checked, I’m real) or a “defective” version of the gender we were assigned at birth — still that gender, just desperately trying to “be something else” to escape our “failure”. Or, y’know, we’re delusional, but that still ties back to the previous point anyway.
The thing is: there’s a reason why the “joke” is always “a man kisses a trans woman, is extremely disgusted about it” and almost never “a woman kisses a trans man, is extremely disgusted about it” (I know plenty of instances of first and none of the second, someone correct me if I’m wrong): the first one is a perceived act of emasculation. The “joke” is that there is a (please forgive me for using those words, I really hated typing them) “failed man” who “chose to relinquish power” kissing with a supposed heterosexual (therefore, Fully Masculine) man. No matter how you spin it, that’s the essence of the “joke”. You can’t make it any less transphobic/transmisogynistic by claiming “well, it makes fun of the guy!” because it still requires to see the experience of kissing a trans woman as a humiliating experience only due to her transness. It still requires, whether it’s acknowledged or not, to not see the trans woman in question as a woman because why would you react like this if you kissed a pretty woman? Would this result in puking or compulsive teeth brushing? Why not?
Normally I’d put a whole disclaimer about how I might be making things too deep but good gods, that type of a “joke” is literally getting my trans sisters (and otherwise feminine siblings) killed because a man couldn’t stand a perceived slight to his masculinity. I’m glad you acknowledge it didn’t age well, saw it as weird, and let it be a part of your horizon-broadening journey but let’s not pretend that making fun of Larry in this situation is making fun of prejudice in any way. I hate this “joke” regardless of who makes it and what the intentions are because there’s still the same thing at the core of all of this.
I’m actually turned off by a lot of jokes that involve suffering and/or humilliation (and boy, there’s a lot of them) for precisely that reason. The day that I asked myself “hang on, what am I actually laughing at?”, a lot of things stopped being funny.
Indeed, according to Wikipedia, for The Crying Game,
Theorist and author Jack Halberstam argued that the viewer’s placement in Fergus’s point of view regarding Dil being transgender reinforces societal norms rather than challenging them.[21]
…and I think the same can be applied to Larry. Unfortunately, the fact is, even if something isn’t meant to be malicious, it can still hurt very badly. As always, “I didn’t mean to hurt you” is taken to be more important than “you got hurt”. And then there is all the defensiveness when this is brought up… yes, it gets ugly really quickly. Unless the offended party just shuts up and takes it in stride, which would be terribly convenient for everyone else. I think a leeeeeetle bit of inconvenience is definitely warranted, though.
Sign your name in the registry on the desk to get a towel from Gary. (Oh boy, gay male stereotypes.)
Rosé (Oh boy, ethnic stereotypes.)
Cavaricci (Oh boy, lesbian stereostypes.)
Thunderbird (Oh boy, BDSM stereotypes.)
Shablee (Oh boy, trans stereotypes. Look, I know nobody comes to Larry games for tasteful jokes, but…)
Merrily (Oh boy, airhead stereotypes. At least she’s not blonde?)
In fact, this is not the only uncomfortable realisation I had when revisiting the Sierra catalog. Back when I played Police Quest 4 and SWAT, Darryl Gates was just a name that meant nothing to me. Now… I don’t think I want to play them ever again, especially after realising how much they portray the worldview of that person (at the time, as a kid, it didn’t really sink in).
I wonder how I’ll feel next time I play LSL6. I’m rather curious to find out. It may turn out to be much less funny than I remember.
I’ve seen it said that the very widespread “vomiting in disgust after realizing someone is trans” transphobic trope in the 90s/2000s should usually be understood as a direct Crying Game reference/parody. Not sure whether this is true or not (I was either not born yet or still a tiny kid at the time), but seems plausible. Also doesn’t make it not transphobic, obviously.
It requires him, the character, to not see the trans woman in question as a woman[1]. Not us, the viewers/players. I think it’s possible to find humor in something happening to the character that he’s bothered by, even if we think he shouldn’t feel that way.
or at least not as an attractive one: we can imagine the same joke being made if we see him wake up next to someone who’s severely unattractive but still undisputedly female ↩︎
In a world where it’s still common for people to openly talk about being disgusted by trans people’s bodies, and where the idea of trans women as a deceptive sexual threat is still actively wielded against them, and where both of these attitudes are driving very harmful public policy in the US and UK and many other places, I think that on balance there’s a very high bar you’d have to clear to get most trans people to find this sort of situation funny on net.
I mean, I can hypothetically imagine ways of playing a scene like this that could be funny, either by critiquing the history of transphobic depictions in media, or by meaningfully critiquing the absurdity of the way that transphobes think and feel about trans people, but I somehow doubt that this sex comedy game from 1993 does either of those things.
I want to challenge some of the ideas being talked about here (not dismiss them). I’ve never seen The Crying Game, but it was so well regarded, with many awards and countless nominations… that of course it would be a target for parody.
For me, I find the scene amusing. The humour isn’t that he feels disgust at the realization that he kissed a transwoman (who cares, really), it’s the overreaction that’s funny (this is what I believe @vaporware was talking about). I worry that some might see the basis of the joke as simply despicable social commentary, but not see the actual humour at play. I think this might be a good example at where possible division occurs.
I can’t speak for all of us , but I don’t think something has to be a social critique in order to be funny. (More often than not, I think “meaningful critique” makes things less funny; I think humor-as-critique works best when it holds its subjects up to ridicule instead of engaging with them on their own terms.)
As Mel Brooks said, “tragedy is when I cut my finger; comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die”: it may not be the most highbrow, but there’s still humor in observing other people’s misfortune from a distance, especially if those people are sleazebags who have it coming. And misfortune is defined through the subjective lens of the person it’s happening to, not necessarily the viewer.
IMO, it’s bad taste to find any of Jim Carrey’s hammy '90s mugging funny.
I agree that the parts where he’s overreacting the most come the closest, though.
In my experience, Ace Ventura is practically the canonical example that trans people cite of how transphobia used to be disturbingly normalized. The framing is clearly predicated on the idea that being trans is a dark secret, that disgust is a natural reaction to learning that someone is trans, that trans people are deceptive, that any sort of mild sexual contact with a “man” (trans woman) confers a stigma that needs to be washed away, and so on. The ending in particular clearly communicates that this disgust is expected to be universal, not just a quirk of one particular character. “Comedic overreaction” is only one small part of what’s going on.
It’s honestly kinda disheartening to see people eagerly minimizing this. At the time, trans people in media were almost exclusively depicted as either deceptive or disgusting or both. Why go digging around to locate some kernel of arguably-not-transphobic humour in there somewhere?
I just really don’t buy that the intended source of humour in these scenes is meant to come solely from “observing the misfortune of others,” and especially not that I’m supposed to understand their misfortune as entirely the product of their own misguided feelings about trans people, rather than the situation itself being intuitively understood as gross by the audience.
I guess I haven’t played Leisure Suit Larry 6 so I can’t comment on it in detail, but in Ace Ventura it really does not seem like the takeaway from everyone spitting at the end is just supposed to be “haha, their misfortune is funny.”
I am very bad at picking favourites, but when forced to name a comedy movie at short notice the first thing that comes to mind is Airplane!. That is not to say that there are no questionable jokes in Airplane!
So you clearly have a funny bone… a very old, stuck in the early 80s funny bone, but still a skeletal appendage exhibiting humourous qualities without question.
@averyhiebert Would you watch it again today for enjoyment?
Well, you don’t have to doubt, you can watch it and see for yourself. Whole scene. Having rewatched it, I find it pretty much meshes with what has been described, but with an overall more cartoonish feel. It won’t change your mind, but it’s not meant to; it’s just so we can switch “I doubt it did it right” with “having seen it, I know it didn’t do it right”, which is preferable.
Of course, no one has to watch it, considering the content. The option is simply here. Upon rewatching (skipping a bit) I find that it is totally obvlivious to her side of the situation - just as it is totally oblivious for the BDSM clichè, and the airhead clichè, and the ethnic clichè, etc. In a sense, it lavishes total respect for the trans character by ignoring her in exactly the same way that every other female character is ignored and reduced to two-dimensionality for the purposes of Larry-inflicted humour. (yet, in all of that context, taking all this into account, the retching still feels like going a bit too far)
Honestly, those comedies are so stock full of things that I laughed uproariously at as a kid and which today I simply find honestly unfunny… I also don’t think it’s a particularly good example. EDIT - On the other hand, maybe that does make it the perfect example?
Yeah, but it often isn’t sleazebags. Still, to each their own. I mean, “roasting” is a tradition and I really can’t get behind that. I can’t find others misfortune to be funny; but that’s a “me” thing that I won’t lord others over, obviously. In practice I just won’t watch certain films, and if I do happen by circumstances to watch them with other people they may feel uncomfortable at me not reacting at what they’re reacting, which is off-putting but still a ways from “guys, you shouldn’t be laughing at this”.
Those last two words are an interesting addition. Mind you, Mel Brooks is just one such example - as a child, I absolutely loved Men in Tights and Dracula: Dead and Loving It, and today I just go, “huh? what?” I mean, I was in gales of laughter, GALES of laughter. “Mina? You are in the closet.” But rewatch it today and… I dunno. Maybe it was the humour of the decade. Humour ages with difficulty, some does and some doesn’t.
EDIT about tragey and comedy - There’s this film called Stranger Than Fiction, in which Will Farrell’s character finds he’s a a character in someone else’s (Emma Thompson) novel, though in real life. She’s writing the novel. He hears this strange narration. When he goes to what I think is his shrink (Dustin Hoffman), the shrink tells Farrell to first find out whether it’s a comedy or a tragedy. He says it’s a tragedy, because bad things keep happening to him - but they are bad things that are happening comedically (film-wise), so the audience has been laughing (hopefully) so far, and will laugh at “he thinks it’s a tragedy but it’s a comedy”. Then by the end things start turning around for him, good things happen, and he says “I figured it out! It’s a comedy!”, when of course the audience knows that tragedy will strike soon and this is the build-up.
Funny thing, really.
Like in Silence of the Lambs? I used to think that the criticism was unfair because it was just a trait of the character, and I wouldn’t have classified him as “trans” so much as “delusional” and his delusion happened to be to want to become a woman, but in a different way that I view a trans person wanting to become a woman, because a trans doesn’t go out and murder women to make clothes out of their skin. Anyway, that was my view back then and I’m not sure I still support it. The argument “it’s the character, not the group” is valid, but the argument “this is actively harming the group by reinforcing existing negative perceptions” can not, I think, just be waved aside. Not until we have reached the point where trans people are truly accepted in society as just “regular joes, regular janes, and/or regular jxs”.
Ultimately, of course, it’s not so much the filmmaker’s fault for reflectling society and its characteristics and preconceptions and prejudices (along with other more positive stuff), because that’s what they do. It’s only a handful of artists who try to, and manage to, help change society. Mostly, art reflects life. It’s not art that needs to change, it’s life. If art can help it along, excellent. It art could not do harm, great. But like the black stereotype in Tom and Jerry, you sometimes can’t tell whether it’s going to harm society or not; and in the meantime, you’ve got a good reflection of society, which art (or, ok, entertainment) is also supposed (hmm, tricky word, but let’s go with it, with a few caveats) to be.
Somewhat irrelevant, about comedies and picking favourites and rewatching Airplane when HAL wasn’t even talking to me
Excellent choice! I think the first thing that comes to my mind is Dogma. (the second that comes to mind is The Princess Bride, maybe not strictly a comedy film but it feels comedic. And I am untarnished by nostalgia; I watched it two or three years ago for the first time)
EDIT - It’s weird that I skipped over so many films I love which are blatant comedies. Life of Brian (and the other Python films). Mrs Doubtfire. Analyze This. Cadillac Man. More obvious comedies all. And yet I first think of Dogma and Princess Bride.
I don’t know about Avery but I definitely would, and did rewatch it a couple of years ago! It’s solid gold! The sequel less so.
Also, HAL? About Jim Carrey? I’m very partial to The Mask, does that count in my favour?
Well, the subtle issue with Silence of the Lambs is that there’s a long history (experiencing a resurgence today!) of basically categorizing trans women into “the legitimate, harmless, medically diagnosed type” and “the dangerous delusional pervert type.” So just clarifying that “he’s not a normal, legitimate trans person, he’s a weird pervert” doesn’t help when a huge percentage of normal trans people have historically been accused of being the weird pervert.
Regarding rewatching Airplane!, I find that comedies wear out easily if you rewatch them too many times, but it’s been a while since I watched Airplane! so it might be time for a rewatch sometime soon. I find that I don’t watch a lot of movies in general these days, though.
How interesting, I think that’s an exact fit to how I described my perception of it! Thanks for the food for thought! One doesn’t often realise that one may be merely following social patterns of thought until one either tries to break free or has them pointed out to, er, one.
I’m worried I’m talking above my pay grade here, and I’ve got some tangents, but these Made Me Think.
more about trans portrayal/jokes in political humor/women portraying males and vv
This reminds me of how on the Daily Show they’d crack about Linda Tripp “IT’S A MAN, BABY.” (Which was about as bad as mocking Monica Lewinsky, but that’s another story.) Or how Will Ferrell publicly said he regrets his Janet Reno impression – so yay marginal progress at least?) Similarly it seems having a male portray Sarah Huckabee Sanders would be awful, even if I have an unfavorable opinion of her.
On the other hand, I really have no problem with a woman portraying Sean Spicer or Ted Cruz, both of whom like to present themselves as alpha male. Here there’s a deliberate attempt to poke fun at people who want to seem masculine, or support some horrible version of masculinity.
The below may be more about LSL style risque humor than humor pointed at trans people, or objectifying them. I doubt many trans people who get through the day care about whether or not people find them “hot.”
LSL really got off the rails – I think one problem is that the game/series just went in for “Let’s have Larry try everything and laugh at him when he hates it.” But some things are potentially more hurtful than others. Mocking trans people seems to be the worst of it & I don’t think there was really an effort on the devs’ part to say “Look, Larry is going too far here.” They just made fun of his leisure suit some more and hoped you’d laugh along. And given the previous entries in the series were just general sexual stuff it seems like they’re saying “let’s spam for bigger wilder grosser laughs with (fill in the blank here).”
I felt this thing (non gender related) happened with David Brent in The Office too. It started funny but by the end I was saying “Okay, I get it.” (I’m reminded of this by @pace’s link to The I Get It Button https://youtu.be/ZEJdn7jlh1I?t=431 but in this case it’s about, okay, we see the joke, we don’t want to hear it again–which is at least as bad as boring the player/reader/watcher.)
That’s what LSL felt like for me near the end. “Well, you have to keep laughing at risque stuff/pointing out Larry is a loser, right?” US Office, which had its flaws, genuinely portrayed Michael Scott as someone who wanted to be less clueless but could say really insensitive things, and I don’t think LSL/The Office UK gets close to that.
I forget the precise trope for this, it’s not quite “too stupid to live” but it is free rein to laugh at the main character and EXTREMELY lazy humor. The word “LOLCOW” may fit but it’s rather old slang, and this sort of thing is bad in any case but it’s especially bad when it involves people who already face discrimination.
The humor in the original LSL is still funny & I’d like to contrast that.
LSL1 risque stuff
There are a few misses (e.g. convenience store owner from India) but stuff like asking you seven questions on what sort of condom you want (which you need) and then having people pop out from behind the racks to yell “PERVERT!” is just funny and it speaks to how we may feel about our own desires and fears, if we have any self-awareness. Perhaps we even identify with poor Larry. That and a flying blow-up doll. Flying blow-up dolls don’t really poke fun at anyone except, well, maybe guys who use them carelessly.
And I liked the big meta-joke of Larry being too clueless to cross a road safely. These are good jokes well above “ha ha ha actually dude you made out with a dude.”
I’ve never found “ha ha ha dude in a dress” jokes very funny, maybe largely because I never thought much of guy styles, and I’ve actually suffered scrutiny for this, nothing along the lines of what the targets of these jokes get.
But I think this clip is one where it does work very well, where the main thing isn’t “ha ha ha dude in a dress” but more “let’s laugh at Americans’ silliness.” It’s worth it to note A Bit of Fry and Laurie sometimes played dress wearing for cheap laughs later on but here the focus is on people you can’t deal with and it’s easy to imagine the male version of Luella would be at least as bad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhcR1g09YxI (And of course they mock macho men’s men a lot too.)
I watched the Tom and Jerry cartoons as a child (in England) and I always assumed that the black lady was the homeowner. I knew black people but I didn’t know anyone who employed a servant, so the context for me was, this black woman is tidying her house and Thomas is her pet cat.
