Babuscio, in his paper Camp and the Gay Sensibility, highlights the notion that camp comedy asserts a certain gay sensibility in its development of ironical humour. Mainly, Babuscio argued that camp comedy plays on certain incongruities in its characteristics, whether it be uplifted from its characteristics of irony, humour, theatricality or aestheticisms. This larger incongruence would be inherently bound to the gay sensibility’s oppression in heterosexual society, which represents itself in the subversion and ironical commentary on the norms of society. Overall, camp works as an nuanced reform of conventional society, where gender-breaking characterisations and ironic syntactic approaches are used in order to produce humour.
Babuscio’ account of camp comedy made me think of Edouard Molinaro’s La Cage Aux Folles (1979), a French film where a gay couple must ensure that their son’s wedding goes without a hitch despite of their son’s homophobic in-law parents. The film, I would argue, plays to the strengths of camp comedy quite diligently. The protagonists’ desperate attempts to illustrate themselves as “passing for straight” not only plays for laughs in the androgynous spectacle of the characters on screen, but also to the ironical commentary on the absurdity of their stringently heterosexual society. In these scenes, we watch our protagonists discuss how they will trick their son’s in-laws into believing that they are brothers. Albin, the more feminine one in this duo, realises that he must act more ‘like a man’ in order to convince his own son’s in-laws to accept him as a man – even though this is inevitably what he is (he will later altogether forgo this route, and attempt to cross-dress as a woman in order to assume the identity of the son’s mother). Furthermore, Les Cages aux Folles also subtly satirises the norms of masculinity in themselves when Renato, the more ‘masculine’ one in the duo must attempt (and fails) to avenge Albin’s pride when Albin is called a ‘fag’ by a midget and a giant of a man – in effect, Renato’s failure in fulfilling the masculine norm of providing for his partner makes an ironical statement on that very absurd demand coming from masculine gender norms.
Your choice of a French film, reminded me of the wedding planner, Franck in the Father of the Bride and his overly twisted French accent. His dialogue, lisps and mannerisms can be considered camp, given the incongruity and contrast between his character traits and that of Steve Martin in the film.