LGBTQ Nation
When comedy came out of the closet: comedian Bruce Vilanch on the rise of queer representation in TV
by Greg Owen
Thursday, November 3, 2022

“I’m not a historian. I write what I observe,” out comedy legend Bruce Vilanch tells LGBTQ Nation.

Maybe it’s an effort at humility or avoiding a distraction from his brand because he thinks historians aren’t funny.

But the great ones, from Herodotus on down, share a deep interest in the customs and people they observe, and that describes Vilanch to a T-dance on a Sunday afternoon at The Abbey in West Hollywood. He’s a watcher.

That includes television, where – besides appearances on the big screen, Broadway, and in bathhouses (where he reported for the Chicago Tribune in 1975) – Vilanch has made his biggest impression. He’s earned Emmys for Oscar telecasts, starred as a Hollywood Square, and written for some of the most iconic variety shows in the business, from Donny and Marie to The Star Wars Holiday Special.

He’s also worked or rubbed shoulders with practically everyone in the business (and beyond), from Bette Midler to Diana Ross to Cher to Elton John to presidents and princesses. And he’s helped raise millions for AIDS and other LGBTQ charities.

Vilanch’s time in television coincided with a sea-change in LGBTQ representation on the small screen, and he spoke with LGBTQ Nation about all that he observed.

His t-shirt that afternoon read, “See You at My Intervention,” and the conversation began with a plug for his new musical, Here You Come Again, featuring the songs of Dolly Parton and hints of a new book in the works.

***

LGBTQ Nation: What’s the book about?

Bruce Vilanch: About 4000 pages.

LGBTQ Nation: You just wrapped the premiere engagement of Here You Come Again in Wilmington. How was the show received?

BV: It’s a big hit! Audiences like it. What is wrong with them?

LGBTQ Nation: That song was huge when I was growing up.

BV: It sounds like the title of a porno movie, but we went with it anyway. We thought there was enough recognition.

LGBTQ Nation: Has Dolly seen it yet?

BV: We downloaded it every night for her. She liked what she’s seen. She won’t see it live until Nashville, which will be in May in Patrick Cassidy’s theater. So then she’ll show up, I think, with her tits and all those things she puts in the window.

First on our list of subjects was Batman – William Dozier and Lorenzo Semple Jr’s candy-colored TV version of the comic book classic that aired on ABC from 1966-1968.

Homoeroticism pervades the story, featuring a swarthy, mysterious leading character and his handsome “ward,” Robin. But the producers brought the camp to the concoction, featuring an all-star line-up of outrageous villains and incredulous storylines.

LGBTQ Nation: When did you first see Batman?

BV: When I was in college. We would gather around to watch. We were stoned. And it was like, well, it was low-camp. It was intentionally bad, ridiculous, and over the top. And for me, and for like the gay guys who I knew, it was about looking at Tallulah Bankhead and Eartha Kitt, Julie Newmar, and Ethel Merman as Lola Lasagna.

LGBTQ Nation: What was the gay quotient?

BV: The gay quotient, that was pretty gay. All that stuff was perfectly gay but gay like Butch Romero? I don’t know if we knew about him at that point. Well, my age group had known about him. People who’d been in Hollywood for years, of course, knew about him.

Cesar “Butch” Romero, a bona fide Hollywood leading man, played the first on-screen version of Gotham City’s malevolent Joker.

LGBTQ Nation: What’s Romero’s backstory?

BV: Cesar Romero. He was a beard. He was everybody’s escort. He was a big queen, and it was well-known, and he was a confidante for many women who needed to have a movie star take them places. You know, who wouldn’t try anything with them? And I think a lot of guys, I think that they respected his secret because everybody has secrets of one sort or another. And so much was back then. Secrets were traded, and secrets were currency.

LGBTQ Nation: Another Batman villain was Liberace, who played identical twin brothers, one evil and one a famous concert pianist. The character wasn’t gay, but Liberace was.

BV: Liberace was Liberace no matter what he did. You know, of course, he was like beyond gay. Because one of the things about gayness, with Liberace, there was no sexual component in the gayness. He was a great, huge flamboyant stage character. A lot of these guys who were gay and fey and had these huge flamboyant stage personas that they were selling it was divorced from sexuality. It was about performance art. And it didn’t occur to me that Liberace had a huge dick and I would one day want to sleep with him. But that’s another story.

In 1968, NBC brought Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In to television. Producer George Schlatter’s irreverent take on the counterculture featured an ensemble cast including breakouts Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin, and one token, though unacknowledged, gay cast member.

LGBTQ Nation: Let’s talk about Alan Sues on Laugh-In. Among his recurring characters was Uncle Al the Kiddies’ Pal, a perpetually hungover children’s show host; Big Al, an effeminate sportscaster, obsessed with ringing a bell; and a manic drag version of cast member Jo Anne Worley.

BV: Well, that was pretty gay. He was in that group of eccentric comedians like Rip Taylor, Paul Lynde, Billy De Wolfe, Edward Everett Horton, and Richard Simmons, who were all gay in life but had big personalities that the audience would kind of nod at, because maybe they had an uncle who was like that. Or maybe they had a pastor who was like that. Those who got it got it. And those who didn’t just think they were fun characters.

LGBTQ Nation: You mentioned Paul Lynde, who played Uncle Arthur on Bewitched at the same time Alan Sues was on Laugh-In. They weren’t out, but they were both a visible gay presence. Is that fair to say?

BV: Yeah, I mean, in the sense that anybody was before Stonewall. Stonewall is a handy demarcation, but it didn’t change things overnight. But in the 70s, things began to get loose in that people began to identify themselves as gay and not just eccentric or flamboyant. And the last gasp of all of that was all those guys I’ve mentioned. They are fabulous characters, but their sexuality never came into it.

After Stonewall and through the 1970s, television comedy’s closet door creaked open. In 1971, Nielson’s Number 1 rated show, All in the Family, featured a gay storyline. In 1972, the short-lived sitcom The Corner Bar was home to TV’s first recurring gay character. And in 1976, cult favorite Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman featured not a dissembling pair of brothers sharing the house next door but longtime companions Ed and Howard.

BV: We were shooting Donnie and Marie in the same building. I must have seen them at the taco truck.

LGBTQ Nation: Another gay baby step in the ’70s was Three’s Company with John Ritter, who you worked with.

BV: Yes. That was John pretending to be gay so that he could live with two girls. It’s like a variation on Some Like It Hot, but it wasn’t as severe. He didn’t have to dress up. I wrote something on Love Boat where he did have to dress up as a woman to pursue his runaway bride.

On Three’s Company, he occasionally had to put on kind of f**gy mannerisms to convince Mr. Roper that it was real. I was never offended by that because it was a plot device. But back then, we had not gotten rid of some of our own self-loathing. Or I had, I think, I had self-loathing. I just thought that stuff was funny, like a straight guy having to pretend to be a fairy. I mean, I thought John was funny. But I’m sure at the same time, there was a segment of the audience that was on Roper’s side.

Later that same year, in the fall of 1977, ABC premiered Soap from Golden Girls producer Susan Harris. The world was introduced to Billy Crystal as Jodie, the first gay ensemble character in American TV history.

LGBTQ Nation: Let’s talk about Soap.

BV: It’s historical now. It’s the first gay character on television. But the thing about Soap was it was a parody of soap operas. So everything was larger than life. So he was gay, but because he was gay, he had to transition into a woman. It was all this stuff that didn’t make a whole lot of sense in the real world.

I don’t know that Susan Harris was looking to score historical points with it, although I’m sure, somewhere in the back of her mind, she thought, well, ‘This will be something they’ll talk about.’

But when Billy was playing it, it represented, at the time, a real career risk for him because it would type him as the gay guy for people who didn’t know him. He was looking for a big acting career in movies, so it was a brave move for him to play because nobody had done it before. If it was a plan to get the public to go with the idea that somebody was gay, it was a genius plan because it worked.

LGBTQ representation in TV comedy foundered in the 1980s, while AIDS devastated the gay community and Nancy Reagan stalked the sitcom stages with her “Just Say No” campaign. By the end of the decade, though, two unlikely sources ushered in a mini Golden Age of gays on the airwaves: the new FOX TV network, and Canada, home to the sketch comedy show Kids in the Hall.l

LGBTQ Nation: Were you a fan of Scott Thompson’s Buddy Cole on Kids in the Hall?

BV: Very extreme character. I mean, he did the most extreme stuff, you know, Queen Elizabeth farting for three minutes. And the half-man half-chicken are some of my favorite things from that show.

And Buddy Cole, it’s a fabulous comment on all lounge singers and a certain kind of older queen who’s seen it all. He’s probably not as sophisticated as he’s putting on that he is, but that’s his character. And it’s kind of like Auntie Mame on Ativan. A slower version of Auntie Mame.

On FOX, Rupert Murdoch put two gay executives, Jamie Kellner and Garth Ancier, in charge of the upstart network, programming The Tracey Ullman Show with Francesca’s two gay dads; The Simpsons featuring iconic cameos from Harvey Fierstein and John Waters; and almost all-Black sketch show, In Living Color, with Damon Wayans and David Alan Grier as two Men on Film.

LGBTQ Nation: They played Blaine Edwards and Antoine Merriweather.

BV: It was hysterical. For the first time, it was two Black queens carrying on, which I thought was bold. Black guys have a much harder time of it because the Black community is so built around a church. That permeates everything. When AIDS hit, it was hard to raise money in that community because they viewed it as the devil’s work. And the big leaders came from the Church, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton, back in the day.

So these two guys, saw the world through the movies. And it was their reaction to this world that often didn’t include them. But they certainly were caricatures. We were laughing at ourselves, at a stereotype, which we all know to be accurate. And didn’t see anything wrong with that. Now, of course, it’s a whole other world where you’re not allowed to find any of that stuff amusing, or you’ll be canceled at sunrise.

LGBTQ Nation: In 1997, three years into her sitcom Ellen, and after much speculation, Ellen DeGeneres came out simultaneously as the first gay lead of a show in the history of television, and as gay herself.

BV: You can never take it away from her. No matter what is said about her later, she was politically very, very important. But when Ellen came out, the show changed direction. Because the show was about a girl looking for a partner. And when she revealed herself to be gay, suddenly she was looking for a woman. And while they overlooked the fact that she was out, they didn’t want to follow her romantic exploits with women.

And that was what killed the show, and she predicted that, but they brought her back for a lot of money, and then wound up ditching her six months later.

LGBTQ Nation: The same year Ellen got dumped, NBC premiered Will & Grace.

BV: She paved the way for Will & Grace, and it became a genuine, genuine hit. With that show, people began, I think, to look at the whole gay thing differently, because we made fun of ourselves.

And at the same time, we were in the culture. We moved into the mainstream. We were not depicted as criminals, or people who were going to commit suicide, or any of the things that had been just objects of fun.

They were real people, and they had real relationships. And had big guest stars! So there’s more room for people who are just generally crazy and their gayness is part of that. They don’t exist because they’re gay, but because the character is gay.

LGBTQ Nation: Will & Grace has been off the air since 2010, and there hasn’t been a gay TV comedy blockbuster since. Do you think gay comedy has gotten less funny now because of gay mainstreaming?

BV: I don’t think it’s less funny, I think it’s just different. But the last few years, it’s upended everything. Comedy is a landmine. And I think the jury is still out. You discover what you can get away with by not getting away with it. By somebody saying, ‘That’s not, you can’t do that!’ I mean, the world is full of scolds, and it’s all become high school and everybody’s taking you to Student Council. So I think we’re in a transitional period. The next generation will probably speak louder, younger people who are a whole lot less flustered than we are. But then along comes George Floyd and #metoo, and suddenly, they’re all flustered on totally different issues.

LGBTQ Nation: Do you need a victim to make something funny? Does somebody have to be the object of comedy?

BV: That’s comedy generally, obviously. There’s nothing funnier than watching pomposity be deflated. And there has to be somebody pompous. It’s the old banana peel thing. You know, you get a snooty high society lady on Park Avenue slipping on a banana peel, it’s hilarious. Because she’s undone. And so that’s ancient. That goes back to the Greeks.

It’s hard to remove that from the culture because it’s a human thing. So it’s a tough one to answer. Because it’s one of the pillars of comedy and obviously there has to be a funny way of looking at things that other people don’t have. That’s comedy.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

The post Unpacking The Comedy Closet With Bruce Vilanch first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

LA Magazine
Oscars Dirt: Veteran Writer Bruce Vilanch Tells All (and More)
By Andrew Goldman
April 13, 2021

The 1989 Oscars, infamous for their 11-minute opening production number that saw Snow White dueting with Rob Lowe on “Proud Mary,” ended the career of the show’s producer, Allan Carr. That year’s ceremony, however, proved a more auspicious beginning for first-time telecast-writer Bruce Vilanch, who would go on to work on 24 more shows. “They gave me a T-shirt that said, ‘I wrote everything but Snow White,’” Vilanch, 72, says. The humorist started as a writer for the Chicago Tribune before Hollywood came calling. Over the years, he’s written not just for the Oscars but also the Tonys, Grammys, and Emmys, making him a kind of awards-show éminence grise, if someone as blond as Vilanch can technically be considered such a thing.

Here, he talks to Andrew Goldman about past Oscar ceremonies and offers a few COVID-era what-not-to-dos for the first-time producers of April 25’s Oscars.

Listen to the full conversation with Vilanch on Los Angeles‘ podcast The Originals.

A big part of the job of an Oscar writer is writing the bits that the stars say while presenting. Would you get a lot of pushback from stars?

You get notes, and everybody gets into the act. I mean, I literally got a call once from a guy who was Goldie Hawn’s yoga trainer, who said, “She left a script at the studio, and I took a look at it. You know, she’s not going to say this.” This actually happened.

Who was particularly hard to write for?

Keanu Reeves was hard to write for because there’s no stage personality there. Johnny Depp was the same thing. I mean, when actors inhabit characters, it’s on the page and that’s their job. But they’re not like Shirley MacLaine or Billy Crystal or Bette Midler, who strut out on stage every night and have the stage persona. I had a bitter failure with Keanu, who’s a really terrific guy. We thought we’d give him a Bill and Ted kind of thing to do. It was ridiculous. He tried to sell it. It just didn’t work. Forty years later and I’m still apologizing to him.

Oscar telecast history is filled with jokes that don’t land. In your role as a writer, were you ever able to prevent a disaster?

Well, one obvious one comes to mind. We had a joke [for host Billy Crystal] about the rumor about Richard Gere and a gerbil.

Oh my God. I can’t believe you considered doing a gerbiling joke at the Oscars.

Well, there was a movie that year called An American Tail about Fievel the mouse. And the joke was “Richard Gere was going to present this award with Fievel, but Fievel backed out.’ Richard was on the show presenting something very serious like a documentary, so he’s sitting out there, and we’re backstage looking at the monitors. And when you’re sitting at the Oscars and you see a guy coming up the aisle with a camera, you know something’s going to happen involving you that you don’t know about. So Richard sees the camera and he’s terrified. And so Billy just looks at him and says, “We can’t. He’ll have a heart attack. Look at him, he’s pale already.” So we cut the joke. I wish I could say that I said to cut it, but Billy said it.

The Oscars have been experimenting with having no host at all because it seems that despite how high-profile a gig it is, it’s hard to find someone willing to host.

It’s impossible.

Why?

Because if you’re big enough to host the Academy Awards, you can only get in your own way. Things that you would do on some other show and not get noticed . . . everybody notices it when you do on the Academy Awards. David Letterman did not need to host the show, and he was living with it for years afterward.

Is there somebody elusive that producers are always going after to host who’s never said yes?

Tom Hanks. I think he once said they’ll never nominate me again if I host the thing. I don’t think that’s true, but I just don’t think he wants to do it. One year Billy was very sick—had like severe migraines—and we were worried about whether he would make it. Tom was the standby. He would have come and done it, but Billy rallied and was great.

Do you remember people politicking to host?

Jay Leno wanted it very badly, but I think ABC was not interested in promoting him. Which is weird because Johnny Carson did it [five times between 1979 and 1984].

If someone hosts only once, is it fair to assume that person wasn’t deemed successful at it?

Maybe. Or it might be that they didn’t like it. These people are so rich and famous already that they don’t need go through all the agita. They don’t need the money. And if you’re going to do it the way a performer does it, you’re going to spend a lot of time on it—time that you could spend making a Marvel comics movie.

You worked on the infamous Anne Hathaway-James Franco show. What went wrong?

The idea was that they were young and that was all that mattered. But they had no real chemistry. When they got together to do the promos for the show, they were edited to look as if they had chemistry, but they had no chemistry.

When you say no chemistry, do you mean that they didn’t particularly care for one another?

I would hate to say that about either of them because I know them both and they’re nice people. But Anne’s a precision instrument. She’s very disciplined and knew what she was going to do each time. And James is freewheeling, so he was not really in his comfort zone. Plus, James had brought in a bunch of Judd Apatow writers who had never been involved with the show before, throwing him stuff.

Even with the best hosts, there’s a point at which the broadcast feels like it will never end. Is there any way to fix that?

Yeah, you have to eliminate categories. But the Academy’s not going to do that. Every year, I say, “When the ratings get low enough, they’ll start eliminating.” There are 24 categories, and only four of them have actors. Part of the reason that people get tired is because they’ve seen awards shows like the Golden Globes where everybody is recognizable. And the Oscar show is full of nerds. Some of them are saying some wonderful, significant things, but people aren’t listening because they don’t give a shit about them.

So what can this year’s Oscar producers—Steven Soderbergh, Stacey Sher, and Jesse Collins—learn from other COVID-19 era awards shows?

Well, the Emmys did it great. The Golden Globes tried to duplicate some of that, but they had some of their own ideas that didn’t work. Their comedy sketches swung wide, with Kristen Wiig and then Maya Rudolph and Keenan Thompson doing that thing. They were both funny premises, but they just didn’t land, especially when they had an audience of 50 first responders. It was a nice idea, but nobody wants to see an audience without celebrities in it. Plus, the show was laden with so much—they were carrying the guilt of the white race the whole show. Don’t do the show that you would normally do; do something completely different. Steven Soderbergh producing is a brilliant idea because he’s a filmmaker, and he’ll do something different with it. Because he knows that he can’t do the same old, same old. Because we’re in an extraordinary year.

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SHOWINGS

EVENT DETAILS

The post COMEDIAN BRUCE VILANCH PRESENTED BY BLACK BOX PRODUCTIONS, OCT 5, 2018, Aventura Arts & Cultural Center Aventura, FL, On Sale ON SALE 07.17.18 12:00 PM first appeared on We Got Bruce!.

LOS ANGELES — Put comedy writer Bruce Vilanch on the spot by asking if he has a political gag suitable for the Oscars, and he makes a game try.

“There’s probably a joke in Trump buying three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri,” Vilanch said, “because that’s all he does is publicize himself. So it seems to me you have a nice, clean shot on the ninth hole.”

He doesn’t have to sweat polishing the riff on best-picture nominee “Three Billboards.” While he’s crafted one-liners for hosts and presenters for 23 Oscar shows, he’ll be watching comfortably at home and with Koosh balls at the ready.

“So you can throw them at the screen when people you don’t like win,” Vilanch said. The ceremony airs at 8 p.m. EST Sunday, March 4, on ABC.

He isn’t playing at being a critic: In his salad days, he wrote film reviews and celebrity profiles for the Chicago Tribune. He and rising star Bette Midler clicked during an interview, and he helped shape her comic stage persona on his way to becoming an in-demand writer for TV shows and big-ticket events including the Tony and Grammy awards and Comic Relief, and for stars ranging from Billy Crystal and Robin Williams to Donny and Marie Osmond.

Admirers sang his praises in the 1999 documentary “Get Bruce!” about his life and work.

“Part of the way that people view me is because of how Bruce has written for me,” Whoopi Goldberg says in the film. “And I’m very grateful for that, because it makes me actually look much smarter than I am.”

Viewers got acquainted with the distinctively mop-topped, bespectacled man himself in a late 1980s revival of “Hollywood Squares,” in which he and Goldberg traded quips from adjacent squares.

After writing for a quarter of all Oscar ceremonies — this year is the 90th — and winning two Emmys along the way, Vilanch is uniquely positioned to size up the grande dame of Hollywood awards shows, and how it and repeat host Jimmy Kimmel can serve TV viewers and the anxious stars who fill the theater.

One hint: The jaw-dropping best-picture envelope mix-up of last year is pretty much a gift to Kimmel.

___

TIMES CHANGE. THE OSCARS DON’T.

Vilanch says the movie academy has kept the ceremony template intact from the very beginning, “which is to give every award on the air. So you have to figure out a way to entertain the audience while the sound effects editor is thanking his Hebrew school teacher.”

Social media is routinely incorporated now in awards show — think of Ellen DeGeneres’ star-filled selfie at the 2014 Oscars that went viral on Twitter — but Vilanch says the Academy Awards are in a league of their own.

“The thing about the Oscars is it’s the biggest one. … I would love to see them do more to own the past and the history of the movies,” he said, but acknowledges that the passing years stand in the way.

“As you get farther and farther from the Golden Age, fewer and fewer people of the audience, outside of the theater, are getting who you’re referring to. … There will be a component of the audience saying, ‘Audrey Hepburn? Was she the one in the boat with the guy? Oh, she was Tiffany,'” he said, adding, unhappily, “It’s real.”

___

NO EGOS WERE DAMAGED IN THE MAKING OF THIS SHOW

A host who plays it “too inside or too snarky” is courting trouble, according to Vilanch. That includes even being mildly insulting to actors and filmmakers who are on hand to be celebrated, as 1995 host David Letterman found when he turned Uma Thurman and Oprah Winfrey’s given names into silly sing-song.

“Neither of those women were there that night to have their names made fun of. They’ve come a little farther than that,” Vilanch said. “They’re sitting there and it’s like, ‘Really, TV boy? This is what you’re going to do, you’re going to make fun of my name?'”

Audiences in general have become very sensitive to humor they deem cruel or unseemly, Vilanch said. A joke about a heavy-set actor, for instance, likely won’t fly even if it’s delivered by a similarly rotund comedian, he said.

How to avoid putting a foot wrong in writing for a ceremony seen by millions, even in an era of declining ratings?

“You have to trust your judgment, and sit down at your computer wearing a parachute kit. Just in case,” he said. A line might go too far, but if it’s “a beauty, it might be worth it.”

___

SEXUAL MISCONDUCT, THE THIRD RAIL?

For an industry in the midst of confronting alleged misconduct by major figures, how can Kimmel pay heed to the crisis yet keep it from overshadowing Hollywood’s biggest night?

Golden Globes host Seth Meyers handled the issue deftly with quips about Harvey Weinstein and others facing accusations, Vilanch said. But a broad-brush approach may be smarter at the Oscars.

Calling out individuals who are under a cloud and are past Oscar winners is an intersection that could prove embarrassing to the movie academy, Vilanch said.

“The more general, the better. Now that I’ve said that, who knows what Jimmy Kimmel will do,” he said. He lauded the ABC late-night host for “brilliantly” handling last year’s best-picture disaster and suggests Kimmel “can spend time on that, which kind of deflects everything else. … It’s almost like a gift.”

___

PERSONAL BEST

Asked to pick a favorite among the nearly two-dozen Oscar shows he’s worked on, Vilanch settles on one that included the stuff of highlight reels.

It was 1992, the year that Billy Crystal hosted and Jack Palance, announced as best supporting actor for “City Slickers,” did one-armed push-ups on stage to prove he still had it at age 73. Vilanch, his fellow writers and Crystal churned out a series of jokes about the moment to be delivered by Crystal at regular intervals.

“It was so insistent that Billy’s manager came backstage about an hour in and said, ‘How many more of these are you going to do? I’m running a pool in the audience,'” Vilanch recalled. “We won an Emmy for writing that show.”

It also became an Oscar template.

“From then on, every other host was watching the show in the wings, and as things were happening we were writing new jokes,” he said.

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