Don Roy King | New Beginnings Summer Camp / 2013 [TV (SNL) Episode)

the real outsiders

by Douglas Messerli

 

Seth Meyers and Colin Jost (head writers), Don Roy King (director) New Beginnings Summer Camp / 2013 [4 minutes] [TV (SNL) Episode]

 

The September 20, 2013 episode of Saturday Night Live starring Ben Affleck is basically a far less funny version of the skits of Jamie Babbit’s 1999 gay film, But I’m a Cheerleader, where star Natasha Lyonne, a high school cheerleader, is sent off to a gay conversion camp.

     In the discussion with his new group of gay young men and women, Marvin, their camp director attempts to convince these you people who believe that they were born gay, that they’re truly not and in three days will certainly convince them they are straight. “Hetero is better yo,” he insists.

     However, since they seem to be missing two counselors, we warns them not to wonder off towards the hot springs or the tall grass, or the smooth rocks behind the waterfall where you can’t be seen.

     After polling the boys and girls, all convince that they were born gay, he tries to make it clear that they’re simply wrong by trotting out his wife, Deirdre, who is mostly is church every day and he can hardly bare to kiss, and displaying the camp Music and Arts Director, Mike (Taram Killam), who used to be his gay roommate, that conversion is not only possible but preferable—despite the fact that he can hardly keep from kissing Mike. “But once you go straight, you know that it’s great."

      He announces, soon after, that tonight is “Movie Night,” the movie being The Outsiders, which even he perceives, with its highly homoerotic images, is hardly something that might help in their conversion. He’s now afraid that a lot of them are going leave the camp much gayer than when they entered, particularly when the cook, Rico, announces that for dinner the are having a hot dog eating contest. He decides to dim the lights and let the guys tear each other apart.

     I have to admit, that over the past several years, Saturday Night Live, in its total embracement of absurd stereotypes on all subjects imaginable, has been less and less successful as a humorous entertainment source.             There is also humor, one might remind the SNL writers, in exploring the standard notions of what used to be funny as opposed to what we not perceive. But SNL writers never go over their early juvenile attentions to what was outrageously outré. Today, it might demand a sophistication of thinking nobody on the show even quite knows once existed in Noel Coward or the thousands of other 1930s and 1940s coded films.

 

Los Angeles, June 21, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).