ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

An odd thing happened as I attended a screening for Split recently. The film, opening in cinemas this month, sees James McAvoy play Kevin - a man with dissociative identity disorder. McAvoy does a fantastic job adopting the various personas Kevin is forced to live with - but I found myself squirming at the audience's reaction to one of Kevin's personalities. The camp, effeminate male one.

Every time McAvoy started to camp it up on screen, the audience - mostly men - would erupt with laughter. Why? This was no Kenneth Williams run-around; McAvoy was playing the personality seriously, not for laughs. Yet the people around me saw it naturally as a punchline. They thought the camp personality was a joke to ease the film's high tension.

The perception that effeminate or camp men are funny is, sadly, prevalent. 

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