Comedies about cross-dressers continue to fascinate filmmakers.

By Jay Boyar
Sentinel Movie Critic

Check out the top two spots on the American Film Institute’s list of the best-ever comedies and you’ll find they have something in common.

No. 1, Some Like It Hot, and No. 2, Tootsie, are both films about cross-dressers.

Coincidence? Maybe, girlfriend.

But Hollywood’s continuing fascination with drag comedies including the recent Connie and Carla and the upcoming White Chicks — suggests there’s something else going on.

“It’s a form of escape and release for a lot of people,” says Darnel Stevens, who performs in drag as Darcel Stevens at Orlando’s Parliament House, where he serves as host and entertainment director. “We try to take everyone’s troubles away and invite you into our world.”

Comedy may be a matter of taste, but some form of drag seems to tickle almost everyone’s funny bone.

“There is the great divide between males and females,” says Michael Freeny, a sex therapist of 25 years’ experience who practices in Winter Park. The comedy comes, he says, in how drag performers “either can or cannot carry off” the impersonation.

One of the great show-biz ironies is that even homophobic types often get a kick out of drag. That’s especially true if the female impersonation is not so precise that it’s sexy and, therefore, potentially threatening.

“If you’ve ever been to a transvestite show,” says Freeny, “the most beautiful women you’ve ever seen aren’t.”

Aren’t women, that is.”And that is very distressing to homophobic men,”he says.

Not distressing, however, are the likes of Milton Berle, America’s Uncle Miltie in the early days of television. Berle had only to put on a dress and some lipstick to elicit belly laughs from the vast American public.

More recently, Australia’s Barry Humphries, as the flamboyant Dame Edna Everage, has been enjoyed by all sorts of people. So have the occasional drag sketches on England’s Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Canada’s The Kids in the Hall and our home-grown Saturday Night Live.

“There is no [sexual] attraction level there,” says Donald F. Reuter, author of Fabulous! A Loving, Luscious, and Lighthearted Look at Film from the Gay Perspective. “The sexuality is taken out of it completely.”

On the other hand, not all gay viewers are comfortable with all forms of drag.

“The drag culture for gay men is one thing,” Reuter notes. “But the putting of a hirsute, macho-male type in a dress because it’s funny is almost like the minstrel show thing.

“I think gays are being made fun of.”

Fabulous ’50s

Connie and Carla is different from most drag comedies because the main
“drag” performers are actually women.

Played by Nia Vardalos (My Big Fat Greek Wedding) and Toni Collette (Muriel’s Wedding), Connie and Carla are a dinner-theater singing duo from Chicago who find themselves on the run from mobsters. They end up in the Los Angeles area — specifically, in heavily gay West Hollywood — where they masquerade as female impersonators.

Because they’re actually women, Connie and Carla are extremely good at, so to speak, impersonating women. They easily land jobs singing at a gay bar and quickly become a sensation.

Although our heroines are not, technically speaking, female impersonators, the movie taps into drag culture and features several men in female garb. But whether it’s men impersonating women or women impersonating men impersonating women, the source of the humor is often the same.

“A lot of this drag iconography is based on a really, really small group of females,” says Reuter. “We’re talking that ’50s female ideal — ’50s into ’60s.”

In other words: big hair, full breasts and tiny waists.

“That was the period in straight, mainstream culture that was exaggerating the female,” adds Reuter. “Men were men and women were women — and women looked like Marilyn Monroe, even though they didn’t.”

“In comedy,” Freeny reflects, “you definitely have to go for a clear
stereotype. If you had a modern, androgynous character, the comedy would be lost.”

Divine comedy

If the traditional drag image has been relatively consistent, gender-bender film comedies have changed through the years.

“It’s interesting because you can trace so much of our culture — not just gay culture but just culture in general — through these movies,” says Reuter.

Cary Grant appeared stiff and uncomfortable in I Was a Male War Bride, when he donned a skirt and a horsehair wig , a 1949 comedy whose title tells you pretty much all you need to know.

Not so the stars of La Cage aux Folles, the 1978 French hit about a drag
performer and his partner. It was popular enough internationally to spawn two sequels and a 1996 American adaptation, The Birdcage, which features Nathan Lane as the frock-wearing counterpart to Robin Williams’ more conventionally dressed character.

A few years earlier, however, Williams had put on the dress for Mrs. Doubtfire of 1993.

In several films by director John Waters, notably including 1988’s Hairspray, the male actor/icon known as Divine played female roles. But in those films, the female impersonation isn’t acknowledged in the plot. We’re simply asked to accept him as a woman.

“You don’t even think of that character as being a man,” says Reuter, who notes that the same is true in the current Broadway hit based on that film. “Although, I would imagine, it wouldn’t be nearly as entertaining if it were actually played by a woman.”

Outrageous variations

Then there’s Victor/Victoria which, much like Connie and Carla, tells the tale of a female performer who pretends to be a man impersonating a woman. The 1982 American film was based on Germany’s 1933 Viktor und Viktoria, which earlier had been remade in 1936 as First a Girl.

“Certainly, an attempt is made in that film,” says Reuter of Victor/Victoria, to address “the gay issue” that’s at the heart of much of drag, but that is often unacknowledged in earlier movies. “They have James
Garner completely at odds with himself because he’s attracted to a man” —
or, rather, to a woman (Julie Andrews) who seems to be a man.

The variations are apparently endless. Coming up in June is White Chicks, in which African-American brothers Marlon and Shawn Wayans play undercover agents who infiltrate the debutante world as white women.

And let’s not forget The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, the 1994 drag film from Australia. Or the even more extravagantly titled To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, the 1995 domestic release that features the outrageous trio of Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze and John Leguizamo in ladies’ clothing.

For Stevens, To Wong Foo has much to say about such issues as diversity, family and the power of illusion.

“That movie had a lot of different messages going on,” he offers. “Of
course, you have to put a grain of salt in it because they have to make it
movie-wise.”

If the classics Some Like It Hot (1959) and Tootsie (1982) deserve their spots atop the AFI list that may be partly because they manage to be hilarious while saying something significant about gender differences.

“Most movies with drag as some part of the plot — a major plot or a subplot — they’re probably not trying that hard to get anything out of it except a cheap laugh,” says Reuter.

But in Tootsie, the cross-dressing Dustin Hoffman learns essentially the
same lesson that his brothers-in-skirts, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, learn, with a little help from Marilyn Monroe, in Some Like It Hot.

After walking a mile in the shoes (especially the high heels) of women,
and after suffering a series of casual indignities at the hands of thoughtless men, our heroes learn to treat the other gender with respect.

“That’s the type of movie that works on many, many levels,” Reuter says. “It’s about getting respect for who you are and not the way you look.”

Jay Boyar can be reached at 407-420-5492 or mail.

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