Early in his chapter about “Camp and the Gay Sensibility,” Jack Babuscio discusses the concept of irony as “any highly incongruous contrast between an individual or thing and its context or association,” stating that one of the most incongruous contrasts of all is that of the masculine and feminine. Considering how far we’ve come in our understanding of gender, it’s clear now that the performances that Babuscio refers to would no longer be considered funny purely based on the androgyny of the actor. Obviously in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the androgynous
character “Z-man” existed for comedic relief as a transgender man. Disclosure, the Netflix documentary about trans representation in the film industry that explains that early trans characters in both film and television existed to be the butt of the joke. It shows how much has changed about camp and the gay sensibility as we’ve given more voice to those who represent it. Yet, Babuscio’s point remains salient; this comedic trope has been prevalent up until very recently.
The example that came immediately to mind in thinking about this relationship of gender
outside of the lens of camp was Jack and Jill, the 2011 Adam Sandler movie when he plays both Jack and Jill. The comedy in this movie is obviously that Adam Sandler is playing a woman who is a bit of a trainwreck and exhibits many of the disgusting traits one might expect to find in a man. The movie just revels in the idea that Adam Sandler could never possibly play a woman, which I think returns back to the fundamental argument of the comedy in the incongruous contrasts of masculine/feminine. Our conception of what a woman is supposed to be like, ruined by the fact that she is played by a man, without the derogatory representation of true lived experiences.
Babuscio, Jack. 1999. “The Cinema of Camp (Aka Camp and the Gay Sensibility).” In Camp, edited by Fabio Cleto, 117–35. Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader. Edinburgh University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvxcrp56.14.
Dugan, Dennis, dir. 2011. Jack and Jill. Sony Pictures Releasing.
Feder, Sam, dir. 2020. Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen. Documentary. Netflix.
Your discussion of the masculine/feminine incongruity reminds me of Bo Burnham’s gripe about celebrity lip-sync battles using that incongruity as a crutch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dg-f9OCn7Cc). I wonder if Tom Holland’s famous Umbrella lip sync, for example, would be considered camp, or if these types of performances lack the necessary earnestness or subversiveness? Maybe this exaggerated incongruity ultimately reaffirms categories by superficially transgressing them, which in its irony is maybe also in a sense campy. It’s interesting to consider where Sandler’s performance could fall here, though I don’t really have an answer!