May 09, 2008  |  By: DALE CARPENTE  | COMMENTS     

WHEN IS IT OK to tell a gay joke? Consider three scenarios:

First scenario: In a magazine interview, a person says: "The one thing I always say that I really, really mean is I should have had a gay son. [My child] doesn't care that Ann Miller can tap without shoes. Doesn't care! This breaks my heart. I've put on the Sirius show-tunes channel in the car and [she] gets upset with me. This is not right!"

Second scenario: In a meeting with an important client, a senior partner in a law firm tells a joke in which he makes light of gay men’s attachment to feminine things. The joke ends with the punchline, “Faggot!”

Third scenario: An interviewer asks a guest who previously starred as an openly gay character on television to turn to the camera and give the audience his “gayest look.”

Based only on the information provided, are these jokes anti-gay? Are all acceptable? Are some acceptable and others not?

From early on, we learn not to make fun of others in a way that is hurtful and demeaning to them. Polite people don’t make fun of others’ physical and mental infirmities, for example. Jokes about mentally retarded people are the sign of a cad, not a bon vivant.

We also learn that jokes directed against some groups of people — like racial and religious minorities — can be especially harmful because of the discrimination, stigma and even violence the members of these groups have historically faced. Jokes at the expense of other groups of people — like politicians or lawyers — don’t raise the same kinds of concerns because the targets of the fun aren’t disadvantaged.

Jokes are often funny when they rely on some generalization about members of the group — some trait or characteristic they are widely believed to share, whether true or not.

But this same reliance on stereotypes can reinforce prejudice. And prejudice is the first step toward harmful discrimination.

What’s acceptable when it comes to gay people? Very few of us would take the extreme position that it’s never acceptable for anyone ever to tell a joke of any kind about gays. Even the media watchdog group, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), is not so humorless.

Jokes about gays are not necessarily objectionable simply because they exploit some kinds of stereotypes about gays. Think of the stereotype of gay men as promiscuous, effeminate and obsessed with couture and entertainment. Those stereotypes were the basis for much of the humor in “Will & Grace,” which was a breakthrough triumph for the equal treatment of homosexuals on television.

AT THE SAME time, there has been a history of anti-gay discrimination, stigma and violence that should make us sensitive to the ways in which we joke about homosexuals.

In the three scenarios above, it’s impossible to know whether the jokes are “anti-gay” without knowing much more.

The audience matters. If I told you that the person in scenario 1 was speaking to a general audience magazine, like Time, you might be at least uneasy that she was exploiting stereotypes of gay men as frivolously obsessed with Hollywood and Broadway. If I said she was being interviewed by a gay men’s magazine, this concern would be muted. In fact, it was Joan Rivers speaking to Instinct, a magazine for gay men.

The identity and history of the speaker matter. If I told you, for example, that the “senior partner” in scenario 2 is openly gay, you’d have one kind of reaction. If I said he was a homophobic straight man who believed he was speaking to other heterosexual men, you’d be more concerned. In fact, the latter was true. It happened in my presence when I was a young lawyer and not yet out at my law firm.

Lots of intangibles matter, too, like whether the joke was told in a mean-spirited way or employed stereotypes in a way that undermined the stereotypes themselves. In scenario 3, the very idea of a giving a “gay look” to a camera is so completely ridiculous that it might be making fun of benighted people who think there is a distinctively “gay look” one can give. In fact, it was Jay Leno on the “Tonight Show” speaking to actor Ryan Phillipe.

The latter cases are the hardest ones to judge. GLAAD objected to Leno’s attempted humor and Leno subsequently apologized. I’m not so sure. It was an awkward moment and not very funny. But bad comedy is not necessarily “bad” comedy.