If you’re not up for braving the crowds and corporations at New York City’s Pride parade today, there is another option: staying home and watching a Pride movie on Netflix. Luckily, Netflix has a great, new documentary that is now streaming, perfect for this very occasion: Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution.
Written and directed by Page Hurwitz, this new documentary is centered on a showcase performance of over 20 LGBTQ+ comedians at Los Angeles’s Greek Theater back in May 2022. Big names in comedy like Lily Tomlin, Sandra Bernhard, Wanda Sykes, Eddie Izzard, Hannah Gadsby, Tig Notaro, Rosie O’Donnell, Margaret Cho, Bob The Drag Queen, and Trixie Mattel, and more all got up on stage with a stand-up routine. Some spoke about their lives as queer comedians, while others told unrelated jokes. But the real meat of the documentary is not the present-day performers, but the queer history lesson that Hurwitz weaves in.
Through talking head interviews and archival clips, Hurwitz walks viewers through a history of queer comedy, starting with the “anything goes” vaudeville days, to the aggressively heterosexual post-WWII regression, to the out-and-proud post-Stonewall movement. Younger viewers may be surprised to learn that, before the days of the internet and cell phone video, many gay comedians in the ’60s and ’70s weren’t afraid to talk about their queer personal livesâin certain spaces. Lily Tomlin, for example, fondly remembers working an LGBT activist show with Richard Pryor, in which he happily admitted to the crowd, “I have sucked a dick,” before going on to berate them for not caring about Black lives. (Hurwitz comes through with the archived clip of Pryor doing that showâtruly a treasure of comedy history.)
Then there are inspiring interviews with Robin Tyler, the first lesbian comedian to do a set about being a lesbian comedian on television in 1978; and with Todd Glass, one of the first major comedians who had already made a name for himself as a “straight” comedian, before coming out as gay in 2012.
Hurwitz also includes the ways comedy has been weaponized against queer people, including a startling clip of a young Eddie Murphy slinging slurs and making cracks about AIDS, in which he implied that gay men deserve to die for their so-called lifestyle choice. It’s certainly not a good look for Murphy, who is currently promoting his own Netflix project, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, coming to the streamer next week.
Outstanding closes out with a section on trans comics, featuring interviews with Eddie Izzard (who also goes by Suzy in her personal life), Patti Harrison, Mae Martin, and more. They all reflect on the harm inflicted by transphobic comedians like Dave Chappelle, who recently got his own Netflix special in 2022. In one tense moment, Martin pointedly says, “My issue is less with Chappelle, and more about the people in charge of platforming his ideas.”
The entire documentary is a powerful and informative reminder as to how crucial comedy has beenâand will no doubt continue to beâto the queer movement. And it’s perfect the example of why it matters to be out and proud.
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