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• Thursday, July 9, 2009 10:32 PM

  I respect you for this review.

  I'm gay. I have no tolerance for homophobia. But I know a joke when I see it, and I think I'm pretty good at telling the difference between a joke for me and a joke at my expense.

  I get a kick out of clips I've seen of the Bruno character, who's here, queer, deal with it. He's funnier than Jack on Will and Grace, if maybe not as funny as Jasper, Brian's gay cousin on Family Guy. It's great to see a character so satisfied with himself, so unafraid, that his lets his bright fushia self shine forth.

  Part of what makes a difference between a homophobic joke and a non-homophobic one is that homophobes rarely know enough about gays to pick out the telling details to exaggerate and spoof. Under the excess, I've encountered enough Brunos in my time to recognize the source of humor.

  Of course, your larger point is that comedy shouldn't have to fit some "accountability test." And I agree. I'm always surprsed when people deride Mickey Rooney's great comic turn in Breakfast at Tiffany's. It's about the best slapstick anyone did that decade (yes, better than Peter Sellers in The Party, which was also rooted in racial caricature), but we're not supposed to laugh anymore because it's "wrong." Are we supposed to think there was a time Rooney actually convinced audiences he was Japanese? Or that his low-down mugging is the same as putting Asians in interment camps?

  We Americans are often too quick to react self-righteously.

  —Christopher1988 Read Christopher1988's other letters
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