george-1032

So I'm straightening up my apartment. The TV is playing an episode of the Dick Van Dyke Show, the one where Ritchie is getting bit in the head by a giant woodpecker. The game warden comes in, I'm actually in the next room from the TV, and when I hear his voice is say, "Oh! Oh! That's THAT guy! The "Who's the Funnyman" guy!" I waited for the credits, saw it was Cliff Norton, and Google brought me here. (People only seem to remember it on Captain Penny in Cleveland. Didn't it run anywhere else? I was born in Cleveland and moved to Chicago in 1963. I never saw it in Chicago or anywhere else.) So this is how my six-year old mind remembers the show. They were short, four or five minute episodes, about the same running time as the sort of cartoons they showed on local kids shows in those days. They would start with Norton adopting the guise of some sort of "man", a milkman, maybe. His efforts would quickly fall apart. He would then start reminiscing about some "uncle" who had also tried to be that type of "man". It would then segue into a repackaged, silent movie from thirty-five years or so earlier. Of course the silent movie was about a milkman. Norton would provide the narration of what was going on in the movie. Then the silent movie would end, Norton would have a quick tag to sum it all up. The End.

When "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry" came out in the summer of 2007, it jogged my memory about a movie called "The Gay Deceivers" that was out when I was in junior high and which I was too young to see. Netflix didn't own a copy, but evidently they keep track of who inquires on movies they don't have and send it out when they get it. So boom, "The Gay Deceivers" arrives by surprise in my mailbox six months later. Regarding the review headlined, "Offensive and Unfunny", I'm going to say just one thing, in my campiest voice, "Oh Mary, lighten up". (How dare they make a movie in 1969 that offends my 21st century sensitivities!) Yes, some of it is hard to watch, maybe for me especially. It was made about the time of my sexual awakening, and some of the stereotypes depicted underscored for me why I had grown up with so much internalized homophobia. But they were making a farce and all they had to work with was how gays were perceived at the time. It's a little too much to expect them to have transcended the thinking of the time in which it was filmed. But on the other hand, some of it is still laugh out loud funny. Especially the scene where Michael Greer makes breakfast. I laughed, then I turned to my partner of fifteen years and said, "I suppose as a gay man I ought to be offended, but it's just so silly!"