COMEDY

GENDER AND SEXUALITY 67minstrel shows. ‘Putting on the drag’ originally meant applying thebrakes of a carriage, but once the word had entered homosexual slangthrough the ‘molly-houses’ or transvestite clubs of nineteenth-centuryLondon, it stood to mean the ‘drag of a gown with a train’ (Senelick,2000:302). Early drag acts conventionally concluded with the removalof the wig to reveal the close-cropped hair that acted as a guarantor ofthe performer’s masculinity, a gesture that places great signifyingemphasis on the coiffure, as in the finale of Ben Jonson’s Epicoene(1609–10). In music hall, the term ‘female impersonator’ wascommonly used to describe drag acts, a label that makes the performer’sgender self-evident. For comic drag, whose best-known mainstreamexponents are performers like Danny La Rue, Barry Humphries asDame Edna Everage, and Paul O’Grady as Lily Savage, the intention isto parody types of femininity through a knowing masculine prism thatacknowledges the nature of the travesty at all times. The question ofwhat is being parodied is largely dependent on the performer, butgenerally drag allows the male comedian to exploit his attire to offer adeliberately provoking perspective on women. This amounts to a formof ventriloquism that explores women’s attitudes to sex, women’sconversation, and monologues intended to puncture idealized versions offemininity. In the tradition of pantomime dames, comic drag paints apicture of feminine grotesque, selfdelusion, hyperbolized glamour andsexual outrageousness that would be inappropriate in ‘real’ women(although this is also true of Caroline Aherne’s ‘Mrs Merton’character). Danny La Rue, who was enormously successful in Britain inthe 1970s, with his own nightclub, television series, and appearance atRoyal Variety shows, assumed the persona of a raucous showgirl withlower middle-class manners and a crass addiction to extraordinaryoutfits, high wigs, and sparkling accessories. La Rue’s primetimepopularity and insistence on being a ‘family act’ meant that much of thesexual tension in drag was removed from his show. La Rue was keen topoint out that what he parodied was artifice in women, especially acertain kind of woman he found vulgar. Laurence Senelick sees this as acontradiction, writing that La Rue creates an ‘anodyne illusion’ thatmocks overly sexualized women, while simultaneously placing them atthe centre of a family show (Senelick, 2000:247). Lily Savage, hispostmodern alternative, to whom glamour is distinctly foreign, is a 6′ 2″peroxide blond from Birkenhead, first unveiled in the gay cabaret ofLondon’s Vauxhall Tavern in 1985. Wearily smoking onstage, she isresigned to petty brutality and failure while acknowledging the freemarketnature of sexuality in the underground economy. In both the