Robert Smigel’s TV Funhouse turns 25 this year, as good a reason as any to talk about the SNL bits that inspired the show on the Fun For All Ages podcast. Those classics include Fun with Real Audio, the X-Presidents, and of course, the Ambiguously Gay Duo.
Turns out that the origin story of the two superpowered chums dates back to The Dana Carvey Show, on which Smigel was a writer alongside Dino Stamatopoulos (Community’s Star-Burns). Smigel decided cartoons would be a good way to differentiate Carvey’s show from Saturday Night Live, and Stamatopoulos pitched an X-rated version of ‘Wallace and Gromit’ that wouldn’t stand a chance against the network censors.
Don’t Miss
But the idea got Smigel’s brain-gears turning. “I said, What about two superheroes and everybody suspects they’re gay?”
Give partial credit to the superhero movies of the day, especially Batman and Robin. That installment, starring George Clooney as the come-hither crusader, featured an extended sequence in which director Joel Schumacher delivered steamy close-ups of latex-covered nipples and asses.
In addition, “there was a lot of of gay panic at the time,” Smigel said. “And a lot of people frustrated with celebrities who were not coming out.” One magazine put up posters of Jodie Foster, challenging her to go public about her choice in bed partners.
“I was fascinated by our obsession with people’s sexuality. I’m still fascinated by it,” he says. “There’s this weird distortion that comes with it where people just become identified by who they fuck or how they fuck.”
@millennialporexcelencia
The biggest laughs in Ambiguously Gay Duo, says Smigel, are courtesy of the villains who can’t help speculating about Ace and Gary’s chummy relationship. “The best version of this cartoon is the first one because it’s really 90% about the badly animated villains exchanging very subtle looks that you would never have seen in a Filmation cartoon in the 60s,” he says.
The series’ other main joke, according to Smigel, was the fine line between homophobia and homoeroticism “that you would see in movies like Predator. Or where Stallone is a super macho guy, but he has all the body oil.” Schumacher was doing his own kind of satire with his Batman films. “He was trying to make a statement there. That was again about our obsession with sexuality.”
Due to the cartoon sketch’s popularity on Carvey’s show and SNL, the jokes extended into visual puns like a phallus-shaped car bursting through boulders that resemble a giant ass. “We did so many jokes like that,” Smigel sighed. “I get why they’re funny, but that’s not the initial intention of the sketch.”
In a perfect world, the cartoon’s gags would have been less obvious and more, well, ambiguous.
