COMEDY

60 GENDER AND SEXUALITYignoring taboos’ (Wilson, 1979: 131). Yet while sexual content incomedy may be pleasurable because it outruns censorship, it is alsoimportant to acknowledge the extent to which sexual themes play a partin establishing or consolidating norms of sexual behaviour. Wilsondiscusses the use and effect of incest jokes, for example, and concludesthat ‘Humour that dismisses incest and other socially disapprovedrelationships as “laughable” may be seen to illustrate and reinforce sexualconvention’ (Wilson, 1979:177). Similarly, as US comedian JoanRivers testifies, we may view comedy’s representation of male andfemale gender roles, especially in narratives that conclude in marriage,as confirmations of culturally orthodox views of the nature of men andwomen. Jimmy Durante’s crack, ‘my wife has a slight impediment inher speech. Every now and then she stops to breathe’, or GrouchoMarx’s ‘women should be obscene and not heard’, are both midtwentieth-centuryverifications of the patriarchal view of women asincessantly verbose in violation of their ideal role as sexually attractiveobjects. Comedy therefore articulates sexual politics from a number ofcontradictory positions, including liberation from censorship,exploration of desire, and insistence on conservative categories ofgender.CROSS-DRESSING: AS YOU LIKE IT AND SOMELIKE IT HOTA familiar motif in the comic exploration of sexuality is the crossdressing‘progress narrative’. According to Majorie Garber, atransvestite progress narrative is a plot that requires one or more of itscharacters to disguise their gender ‘in order to get a job, escaperepression, or gain artistic or political “freedom’” (Garber, 1992:70).There are many examples of this in comedy, including the playsCharley’s Aunt (1892) and La Cage Aux Folles (1978), the movies MrsDoubtfire (1993), Tootsie, Victor/Victoria (both 1982), and Some LikeIt Hot (1959), and the cross-dressing comedies of Shakespeare, As YouLike It, Twelfth Night, and The Merchant of Venice.In As You Like It, cross-dressing allows the play to develop aheightened eroticism and an inclusive attitude towards sexuality, andeven the title suggests a relaxed attitude to sex—the ‘it’ presumably areference to all kinds of appetites, not only sexual. ‘It’ is a good word touse in relation to the sexual tensions of this play, as they are at onceindeterminate, elliptical, and absolutely central to the plot. As You LikeIt is the story of Rosalind and her companion Celia, forced by the