A good friend complained that the semi-regular “twice as gay” movie trailer mash-ups struck him as homophobic or anyway tiresome. My intention, so far as I can make it out, was always simply to juxtapose incongruous words, so that the texts combine to say things that obviously couldn’t have been the original intention, leading hopefully to that strain of cognitive dissonance that results in laughter.
But using “gay” as a punchline is a long, ignoble tradition. I never felt it was the punchline, it was never the last word, but a lot of the words that did come later were either offering an unlikely candidate for gayness, or offering a fairly predictable one (there doesn’t seem to be a third option) and then saying something outrageous (again, hoping that the misuse of the text, bending it from its original meaning, would be funny). There was definitely a pursuit of the snigger, since the particular incongruity being produced had a sexual component. I never find the use of the word “gay” in old trailers comical in and of itself.
To some extent the jokes that can be made out of old trailers depend on the text in them, and since trailers with statements like “as kid Galahad” and “as Frankenstein’s monster” keep turning up, and I’m always happy grinding a joke into the earth through overuse, I kept doing these mash-up. But I can’t disclaim my authorial role in putting the things together. I once, while working on some collages, accidentally laid the word GEEKS, taken from a newspaper headline, over an image of starving British POWs and the shocking juxtaposition made me laugh and then feel guilty but I knew better than to put that out into the world.
It’s generally better not to make a joke than to offend someone you like, or to risk being completely wrong about the effect you’re going for or achieving.
I now wonder if describing the late Bernard Cribbins (above) as “glamorous” is also obnoxious in exactly the same way. Again, the logic is just to follow a descriptor with an unlikely subject. I quite often mismatch gendered pronouns with a gendered subject to produce the same surprise effect. Is that transphobic, I wonder? Is using that kind of incongruity inherently bigoted or heteronormative, even if only slightly, because it’s based on the assumption that such a “mismatch” is in fact a mismatch, a deviation from a presumed norm? I always felt it was a mismatch WITHIN THE TERMS OF THE ORIGINAL TRAILERS. I’m making them talk about stuff whose existence they were never designed to acknowledge.
I’m not calling for anyone to reassure me that the old “twice as gay” things were fine — that doesn’t interest me. But does getting any kind of laugh by distorting the text depend on a normative attitude, and does that attitude originate with the reader’s worldview or the worldview they interpret the original trailers as depicting? In other words, is suggesting that Rhett Butler may be weird (somewhat) amusing because we think it may be true or because that’s not what a 1939 trailer would say about him?
And is this tired gag more or less funny when the word “gay” is replaced with other terms? Is it all about the snigger-factor?
shadowplay 
