Camp TV and Queer Gender

SITCOM HISTORY

Camp, a critically queer mode of production attuned — even in highly appropriative commercialized mass culture contexts — to everyday theatricality, gains incredible momentum from casting, especially those cases when multiple camp actors perform together. In an exemplary instance, Martha Raye, Paul Lynde, Wally Cox, and Charlotte Rae, all luminaries of queer gender, brought their craft to the September 28, 1954, episode of The Martha Raye Show. The combination of these actors in any situation comedy setting in any series would produce queer gender, from the recombination of their respective idiosyncratically characterized personas. However, this episode is extra special to note for its camp self-satire and coupling of Raye and Cox. Lynde portrays a television personality named Royal Gunderson, a newscaster who also hosts a talk show, Gadding with Gunderson, and is hysterically in love with the station's lipstick sponsor (the actual sponsor of Raye's program, the Hazel Bishop company). Cox's character is defined as a "Martha-murderer," a timid person on an absurd killing spree whom Raye, in explanation of Cox's comically-presented fixation on offing one Martha after another, diagnoses as likely "a hypersensitive chap who was raised by a miserable aunt named Martha." This premise, ironically resonant with homophobic and transphobic rhetoric while airing queer gender, prompts an abstract chase-dance routine featuring Cox reading Raye's diary and wielding an affected weapon, a left-pocketed scarf. Cox's characterization as an ambiguous threat devoid of muscles prompts Raye to go by the name of Irving, which Cox seamlessly uses to address Raye in an iconic deadpan manner. Following elaborate cross-cut choreography, Lynde's Gunderson character stages a reenactment of the unfolding news story of the "Martha murders," showcasing Raye and Cox, the actual participants. Orchestrating their encounter as a live entertainment scoop that feeds into an advertising segment, Gunderson exclaims about the surreal macabre news, "You just put my show in the top ten! Commercial!"

This self-reflexive emphasis on ratings and ad breaks, part of the matrix of associations productive of queer gender, came at a moment when the broadcast form of commercialized airtime was beginning to change in accordance with shifts in the overall balance of power in the industry. Lynde's Gunderson character speaks of trading in twelve different sponsors for one, which, in the hyperbolic and inverting manner of camp, points to a real relatively recent increase at the time in the "magazine" strategy of juxtaposing consecutive short commercials between story segments instead of having hosts and announcers plug brands and products by directly addressing their audience. The comedy, that is, indirectly invokes the ascendance of the sitcom, a half-hour format that helped institute the magazine style of advertising in tandem with more covert product placement in place of explicit sponsor plugs. In the context of this uneven transition, queer gender resulted from casting. The combination and loose partnering of people with different vivid, idiosyncratic gender expressions in the comedy-variety-influenced form of the sitcom inspired the scripting and staging of ironic coupling. Writers, performers, and crew created queer gender by developing tropes of ambiguously believable romantic interest and sexual devotion. These easily repeatable character and narrative formulas were keyed to the changing rhythms of product shilling and industry-investor brand building.

This chapter explains queer gender as camp productive of a straightforward irony in characters and coupling that generates a discourse of trans representation. I analyze circuits of assimilation in the development of the television sitcom, choosing examples that are multiply iconic in terms of the performers, offstage producers, and intertextual references they involve. In other words, I intersect the robust resumes of exemplary producers of camp TV in order to argue for the significance in the present moment of the trans gender queer representation common in 1950s programming. Across changes in production and commercial context during the period, dispersed group efforts into situation comedy — including in comedy variety programming such as The Raye Show — consistently resulted in queer gender. I connect the trans gender queer camp in sitcoms to situation comedy in comedy variety in order to reconnect sitcoms to their influences from black minstrelsy and blackface vaudeville performance, which came to television by way of radio, film, and other entertainment traditions. I use this multiply sourced queer gender in the context of my concept of camp TV as a retrospective antidote to the representational violence of the early commercial television era. The inequities of that period are still manifest today, in the persistence of broadcast airtime, including as a model for new media-commodified advertising, and in the differential value conventionally attributed to various TV-related objects, archives, and embodied practices of everyday life.

A Variegated Field of Trans Gender Queer Representation

The broad history of media industry appropriation of marginalized culture for the construction of whiteness appears within the history of sitcoms and their middle-class assimilationist norms as a kind of drag and as an infrastructure for unconventional forms of drag. Emerging formulas for network success, for example, briefly brought Gertrude Berg back to series TV in 1961. An intimate Jewish icon from The Goldbergs (1949 – 56, CBS, NBC, DuMont), a program generally considered with respect to the blacklist backlash and as the first sitcom on TV, Berg returned as Sarah Green in Mrs. G Goes to College (The Gertrude Berg Show, CBS), a less explicitly Jewish version of Berg's character Molly Goldberg in The Goldbergs who faced stiff competition from Screen Gems series about culture mixing like O.K. Crackerby, a sitcom about a New Englander tutor for the grandkids of a tycoon from Texas. In this context, a queer Jewish context, understandings of drag tethered to conceptions of biological sex obscure the variety in trans gender queer representation interwoven with ridicule. The way that conviction in some noncultural meaning or information in "sex" can interfere with the process of appraising TV history is evident increasingly across the 1960s but also in the case of the most famous drag artist of US television in the 1950s, the Jewish comedian Milton Berle, a counterpart in the comedy variety format to Berg's success with situation comedy. Known by gender binarized appellations making "television" Berle's last name following a gendered honorific and construing Berle as an assigned-male member of the family (as "Mr. Television" and "Uncle Miltie"), Berle set a standard for facility with gowns,...