Nearly four years since their last new appearance in 2007, the Ambiguously Gay Duo returned to Saturday Night Live this weekend—a little more fleshed out than usual. That’s because the wildly popular sketch, which focuses on a crime-fighting pair of men with homoerotic tendencies and a penchant for “accidental” gay puns and innuendo, went into unexplored territory on Saturday when one of the villains’ “flesh rays” malfunctioned and converted the cartoon to live action.
The seven-minute scene featured Jon Hamm and Jimmy Fallon as Ace and Gary, respectively—and, in a brilliant decision, cast Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert, the original voices of the Duo, as the villains. Throughout the sketch, there’s the typical sex-position stretching, butt slapping, and interesting take on the Bat Mobile.
It all just toes the line of being offensive until you step back and realize that SNL’s doing what SNL does: satire. Not only are the writers spoofing the inherently homoerotic nature of superheroes in tight spandex, junk-baring underwear, and “closet”-like secret identities, but they’re also making fun of the stereotype that gay men are obsessed with sex. Moreover, all of the villains try to hide or cover up their own homosexual proclivities, including dying their balls or looking at gay porn, which is a pretty direct satire of gay-rights opponents who turn out to be gay themselves.
There’s been some debate about whether this sketch is uniquely offensive given the additional live-action component. On Gawker, a commenter deemed it the “modern-day equivalent of the minstrel show” because none of the actors making fun of gay people are gay themselves. And Queerty accused SNL of bi-phobia, citing one of the villains’ lines that “Nobody’s bi—that’s just a gay guy that occasionally bangs a lady.”
But I disagree on both counts. I read the line about bisexuality as a winking joke, an acknowledgement of the silly fact that in both straight and gay communities, bisexuality gets a bad rap for being fake.
To call the Ambiguously Gay Duo a minstrel show is more than a stretch, mostly because it puts this parody on the same level of offensiveness as the overtly racist blackface shows that often used slavery as a punchline. Plus, the label insinuates that everyone involved with the SNL bit is a bigot, which, given the pro-LGBT advocacy we’ve seen from the likes of Hamm and Colbert, is simply false.
Decide for yourself whether the new Ambiguously Gay Duo merits discussion about homophobia or, as Ace and Gary would put it, just a long, hard laugh.
– Photo NBC