I've never found him funny. Then again, I've also never understood the uproarious crowd laughter in a 1960s live recording of "Little Boxes." Maybe it's the generation I was born into.

I can tell you from personal experience: A person who grew up in economic scarcity should not marry (probably should not even date) a person who grew up in economic plenty, however you define "scarcity" and "plenty" (it's as much a state of mind as anything else). A person who grew up in scarcity will always be nagged by the persistent fear of "losing everything" and will never be satisfied with any salary, any number of material goods, any amount of savings, any amount of debt except zero, and will be hypersensitive to anything that might suggest that his or her partner isn't doing 110 percent to prevent the unpreventable financial disaster that he or she believes is always lurking around the next corner. A person who grew up in plenty will never worry about money in this way. These attitudes are a poisonous source of conflict.

That is, to acknowledge that there are two parties with rights in the matter, the fetus (with its right to life) and the pregnant woman (with her right to liberty), and that whether abortion is permissible should be not a matter of legality or illegality but rather a matter of balancing these two parties' rights against each other and figuring out which one prevails under which circumstances.

The debate is not advanced productively by the way both pro-life and pro-choice forces reject the notion that the other party has any rights in the matter at all, and treat a fetus as if it were just a blob of inanimate tissue, or a pregnant woman as if she were just a mindless mobile incubator.

It's also not advanced productively by the mealymouthed euphemism "a woman's right to choose." To choose what? An outfit? A dinner? A 401(k) plan? Feh. If you don't believe there's anything wrong with it, you should at least be able to say the word.

"Well, would you consider it to be funny if the parodies were demeaning the stuggles faced by Jews, African Americans, and other 'minorities'?" I don't know about you, but I thought "Undercover Brother" and "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka" were pretty damn hilarious. And these trailers are much less potentially offensive than those movies.

My vision does not stop with discrimination against blacks. You said, "What if blacks or Jews blah blah blah," and I immediately thought of two examples that play on black stereotypes in mocking but not-really-demeaning ways (and the only reason I didn't do the same with Jewish stereotypes is that I couldn't think of any examples at that moment). The point you're missing is that these trailers don't play on gay stereotypes at all! They simply assemble a series of images and exchanges of dialogue under the premise, "Hey, what if R2D2 and C3P0, or Marty McFly and Doc Brown, were actually gay, and nobody noticed . . . until now?" I'm sorry, but that's funny. And it's funny not in a "Hey Biff lets go bash sum fags huhuh huh" way, as you seem to be reading it, but in a "The joke's on the viewers who missed something that was right under their noses" way. The characters aren't even being shown to behave in stereotypically gay ways (which, I'll grant you, could be offensive); instead, their words and expressions are being reinterpreted along the lines of the same in-the-closet tropes that gays themselves invented to hint at homosexuality in films and plays in ways that sophisticated viewers would catch and unsophisticated viewers would miss! (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, read some of the interviews with Ian McKellen on X2, in which he talks about the mutant teen's "coming-out" conversation with his parents.)

This is gentle, sly humor that works without involving stereotypes at all, whereas a movie like Undercover Brother, while not hateful, flat-out would not work without stereotypes. So there's no reasonable argument that these trailers are more hateful and harmful simply because they allude to homosexuality.