If you happen to spot Carrot Top, Pauly Shore or even Jim Carrey shopping at Ann Taylor anytime soon, there may be a logical explanation.
After all these years, incredibly enough, people still think men in dresses are funny.
In fact, dressing in drag has proven to be a real career boost – or should that be bustier?
Just look at Martin Lawrence, who had his biggest hit this summer by impersonating a fat granny in “Big Momma’s House.” Lawrence, no doubt, had been taking notes from Eddie Murphy, who resurrected his career by disguising himself as multiple tubby family members in 1996’s “The Nutty Professor.”
Several of these were male, but Murphy’s scene stealers were his turns as the apron-clad momma (“Her-cul-leeze! Her-cul-leeze!”) and potty-mouthed grandma. Murphy has yet to match that success, but the sequel, “Nutty Professor II: The Klumps,” is one of the summer’s most anticipated comedies.
For official confirmation of the lofty comedic status of men in dresses, one need only look at the American Film Institute’s ranking this summer of the 100 greatest American comedies.
No. 1: “Some Like It Hot.” Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in dresses.
No. 2: “Tootsie.” Dustin Hoffman in a dress.
Scootch on down to No. 67 to find Robin Williams in a dress in “Mrs. Doubtfire.” As for women disguised as men, you must drop all the way to No. 76 to catch cross-dressing Julie Andrews in “Victor/Victoria.”
As the 20th Century recedes in the rear-view mirror, we’re coming to accept a reality that blurs all sorts of sexual, racial and political lines. Yet men in dresses are still considered a hoot.
“Well, it’s time honored from antiquity,” said film critic Dave Kehr, a regular contributor to the New York Times. “It’s always good for a laugh — what can you say? Certainly the Greeks got big yuks out of that with Aristophanes.”
“It goes back all the way,” agreed film historian/critic Leonard Maltin. “Charlie Chaplin did it in his first year in films.”
Chaplin doubled as Nora Nettlerash in the 1915 short “A Woman.” Donning dresses also was de rigueur for fellow silent comedians such as Buster Keaton, Fatty Arbuckle and Laurel and Hardy.
“Every great comedian has done a drag part with the possible exception of W.C. Fields,” Kehr said.
Jerry Lewis showed off his womanly side in one of his five roles in 1966’s “Three on a Couch.”Cary Grant proved a popular female impersonator in the 1949 comedy “I Was a Male War Bride.”
On the big and small screens, you’ve also had the chance to admire lady versions of Bob Hope, Milton Berle, Jonathan Winters, Johnny Carson, Flip Wilson, Tom Hanks (remember “Bosom Buddies”?), the Monty Python gang, “Saturday Night Live” cast members and countless others. Steve Martin may not have impersonated a woman on film, but he’s all dolled up and wearing a blond wig on the cover of his 1979 album “Comedy Is Not Pretty!”
Such movie humor hastended to derive from seeing a male, presumably heterosexual star endure the embarrassment of wearing frilly, girly clothes, usually because the plot calls for the character to disguise himself improbably. That’s a few degrees different from drag-queen comedies such as “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” (1994) and “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar” (1995), in which the characters are acknowledged to be gay.
Still, laughing at Nathan Lane in drag in the 1996 “La Cage aux Folles” remake “The Birdcage” or Wesley Snipes in a dress in “To Wong Foo” isn’t remarkably different from laughing at Lawrence in “Big Momma’s House” — or, for that matter, Dennis Rodman on his friskier days. It all feels slightly naughty in a cute, safe way.
“I think America has gotten too comfortable with drag,” said director John Waters, an expert on the subject given his gloriously tasteless collaborations with the late, great, overweight transvestite Divine. “I think drag queens should be scary, and they aren’t anymore. People love them. Families like drag queens.”
Thus Waters has abandoned the whole men-in-dresses dynamic.
“I think it’s not funny anymore,” he said. “It’s not enough just to be in a dress. Since Divine died [in 1988], I’ve never had a woman in a dress. I’ve had male impersonators. It’s much more scary with people.”
For instance, in “Cecil B. DeMented,” Waters’ new comedy that opens next month, one of the terrorist characters is a young woman who sports an actual beard. (“I didn’t put that on her,” Waters insisted.) She doesn’t make you laugh as much as gawk.
Such a reaction only illustrates the basic unevenness of the comedic playing fields for male and female cross-dressers. Let’s try an exercise:
First, picture Robert De Niro in a dress.
(Snicker, snicker.)
Now picture Meryl Streep wearing a mustache and a suit.
(Ummm . . .)
When girls dress like boys or women dress like men in movies, the reason isn’t usually to have a goofy time but to redress some social ill.
Little Liz Taylor can’t race her horse in “National Velvet” unless she poses as the opposite sex, the frequent resort of young movie heroines who wish to compete with the guys. Barbra Streisand can’t get her education in “Yentl” unless she pretends to be a boy. (OK, that was funny, but for different reasons.)
The past two Best Actress Oscar winners have played women who masked their genders. Gwyneth Paltrow’s cross-dressing in “Shakespeare in Love” actually is used to comic effect, though as in “Victor/Victoria,” much of the humor springs from that extra layer of a woman posing as a man posing as a woman (again, to get an opportunity not otherwise available for females).
Then there’s Hilary Swank in “Boys Don’t Cry,” whose character is beaten, raped and murdered for pretending to be male. The definition of not funny.
To Waters, the future of cross-dressing humor lies in twists on the formula, such as the male actor playing the butch gym teacher whose shorts reveal a surprise in “Scary Movie.”
“I think you have to go further now for it to be new, at least,” Waters said. “New is what I’m after. New is funny.”
The other keys, of course, are in the writing and acting. “Some Like It Hot” and “Tootsie” are classics because they’re as smart as they are rib-tickling, and the performances ring true.
What made Murphy’s “The Nutty Professor” work for Maltin is that “he’s such a brilliant mimic, and he inhabits those characters so wonderfully that whatever rules you may have in your head go out the window.” (Note: Maltin had not seen “Nutty Professor 2” at the time.)
On the flip side, Lawrence isn’t a particularly gifted mimic and “Big Momma’s House” was lazily written, but it still topped $100 million at the box office.
So you’ve got to figure that somewhere out there Jim Carrey is pondering the perceived disappointment of “Me, Myself & Irene,” which followed the truly unpopular “Man on the Moon,” and he’s thinking: Gee, I wonder how I’d look in a tutu?
