COMEDY

3GENDER AND SEXUALITYI don’t like funny women. I come out of a generation wherethe woman should be beautiful and sexy and a wonderfulflower attached to a man, even though my whole life hasbeen the antithesis of this. To this day, you don’t expectwomen to be funny.Joan RiversComedy treats matters of sex more often and more openly than anyother form. Its festive structure and Dionysial associations afford sexualthemes greater freedom, while also providing a fictional arena in whichtaboos may be openly discussed without fear of social contamination.The unquestioned bed-sharing and co-dependency of partners likeLaurel and Hardy and Morecambe and Wise is evidence of a looseningof the usual rules, just as the enormous popularity of a number of openlygay comedians, such as Julian Clary or Graham Norton, both of whomhave made effeminacy and homosexual innuendo central to their act,seems to be at odds with a society that remains largely homophobic. Ofcourse, comedy places sexual desire and erotic arousal within thecontext of laughter, rendering discussions furtive, titular, and selfconscious,and complicating its aims. Freud writes that ‘the spheres ofsexuality and obscenity offer the amplest occasions for obtaining comicpleasure…for they can show human beings in their dependence onbodily needs…or they can reveal the physical demands lying behind theclaim of mental love’ (Freud, 2001:222). In both cases, sexual themesamuse because some masked or elided aspect of the animal subjectpeeps through the civilized exterior and shows itself to be insatiable.Studies of sexual content in humour, such as G.Legman’s two-volumeRationale of the Dirty Joke (1975) or Christopher Wilson’s scientificstudy of joke function, stress that sexual jokes ‘offer the furtive joy of