Gerald Nachman
Ever since "Charley's Aunt,"
which was written in 1892, it's been pretty much downhill for
plays and movies involving guys in girls' clothes. They keep
furiously trying to top the classic farce by Brandon Thomas,
and since "La Cage aux Folles" the trend has 
become unstoppable, especially
of late, with fairly discouraging results.
"La Cage" itself has had at least three incarnations -- as the popular 1978 French film (from a play), as a flamboyant Jerry Herman musical that wonderfully transcended the subject matter, and as a pretty good American motion picture comedy, "The Birdcage." The movie was directed by Mike Nichols, written by Elaine May and starred Nathan Lane and Robin Williams. It greatly improved upon the overrated French original.
The prospect of men as women has been breaking
up audiences for centuries now, and I guess if you want to blame
someone you need (as usual) to go back to Shakespeare. Half of
his comedies involve this creaky plot device, which grew from
the fact that it was illegal for women to appear on stage. Like
everything else, I guess it really began with the Greeks, or
even the Chinese, if not before that. Adam probably got a few
cheap chuckles out of the snake by pasting two fig leaves on
his chest. For me, it's the lowest rung on the humor ladder,
well below the pun, even though it has fancy credentials as an
Italian art form called commedia del' arte.
Audiences seem fascinated by the idea of men as women, but I
tend to run the other way unless there's a good dramatic reason
for it. A guy in a dress is a red flag that nothing much else
may be going on, comically. It would take up several columns
to list all the dreadful movies, sitcoms and plays in which men
in drag were intended to provide all the laughs.
By now, there must be many doctoral theses
probing the psychohistory of this stock comic phenomenon, but
as a theatrical gimmick it wore out its frilly welcome for me
a long time ago. Maybe I got all the laughs out of my system
the first time I saw "Charley's Aunt" in 1966. The
play was produced by the American Conservatory Theater in its
first year in San Francisco, with Rene Auberjonois as an uncommonly
funny Fancourt Babberly, the Oxford student who -- for complex
reasons -- dresses up as his maiden aunt from Brazil, wearing
layers of black crinoline that, at one desperate point, he's
forced to plunge into head first. Auberjonois was spectacularly
funny and manic in the role, and no man in a dress since has
tickled me half as much.
Thomas's play later became the hit 1948 Frank Loesser musical,
"Where's Charley?" with Ray Bolger as a dancing auntie.
Before that, in 1941, Jack Benny did the movie version -- perfect
casting, perhaps owing to his reputation for behaving in a semi-effeminate
comic manner on stage, screen and radio: Benny's slight sashay,
that delicate hand-to-face gesture accompanied by his exaggerated
expression of shock, "Well!" and his ineffectual cry
of foot-stamping irritation, "Now cut that out!" Benny,
some comics and critics felt, was really playing a woman in man's
clothing; now there's a switch.
Also, cross-dressing shtick usually palls
for me because most movies and plays with men in dresses lean
too heavily on that device alone to generate laughs -- or occasionally
tears, in such dramatic cases as the current film, "Boy's
Don't Cry," which just won a best actress Oscar for Hilary
Swank as a boy mistakenly raised as a girl.
When confronted with a guy in a dress, whether it's Robin Williams
in "Mrs. Doubtfire," Jamie Farr on "M*A*S*H"
or the Trokaderos comic ballet company, this guy doesn't usually
laugh. An exception was "Tootsie," which provided a
reason for Dustin Hoffman to become a soap opera actress (he
badly needed work), so that Hoffman teetering around in heels
was really icing on the cake. He was terrific as the prissy but
sympathetic Dorothy, but that wasn't why he was funny; he was
funny because of the situations that made him squirm inside his
dress.
For Hollywood, the low-concept notion of
men-as-women seems irresistible, money in the bank. From Cary
Grant in "I Was A Male War Bride" to the classic "Some
Like It Hot" -- which, again, is funny because of the hot
water that Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis keep finding themselves
thrashing around in. It's not simply because they play 
girls. That's worth a few laughs
at the start, but it's not enough to carry a comedy.
Dana Carvey's Church Lady was funny because Carvey is himself funny, and was caricaturing a particular kind of pinched bluenose, likewise Flip Wilson's outrageous Geraldine. They weren't just generic men in drag, as tends to be the case in plays like "Irma Vep" and other connect-the-dots drag-queen comedies; they were very specific female characters.
"Poof" comedy has had a long and presumably honorable tradition in Great Britain, of all places, where it's become almost a separate branch of theater, exemplified by all of those goofy sketches in "Monty Python's Flying Circus" with the Python boys as dowdy English housewives yammering in whiny falsetto voices.
Nothing seems to break up the Brits more than the sight of a man playing a woman (see "The Lavender Hill Mob"), and now the trend has gone worldwide, thanks in no small part to the recent public acceptance -- indeed all out embrace -- of gay humor. Drag comedy belies the British reputation for understated wit and drollery, almost a kind of release from all the sophisticated humor that the English represent, a way for polite lads, lords and ladies to let go of repressed silliness.
Australian Barry Humphreys' huge success as Dame Edna Everage takes the genre to its over-the-top peak, but a little of Dame Edna goes a very long way, at least for me, clever as Humphreys can be, uttering wicked putdowns of the Royal Family and other celebrities, a la Joan Rivers, herself a female impersonator favorite. Watching him clump around as a fork-tongued British dowager in giant bejeweled eyeglasses, looking like a fun-house Barbara Cartland, is good for a few giggles, but after a few minutes I need more to laugh at -- a plot, a scene, dialogue, other characters interacting, something beyond mere costuming.
Laughing at a guy in a dress is autopilot comedy, a term I devised years ago to cover laughter generated by the mere sight or sound of something that's supposed to be hilarious, whether or not it's actually funny. This is a long list that includes all dirty words, pies in the face, people falling into swimming pools, dropped pants, dogs sniffing hydrants, little old ladies who curse, flying fish, spit-takes or vomiting (its '90s form), men with open flies and - oh, yes -- women dressed as men.
© 2000 by Gerald Nachman
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