It’s a trend that’s been (um) growing, getting (ahem) harder and harder to overlook, so I guess I’ll have to (blush) stiffen my resolve and, yes, plunge in: The preponderance of straight men making penis jokes in the movies and on TV has become a (sorry, can’t resist) full-blown epidemic. Unfortunately, the above sentence is about as sophisticated as things get. The bromances popularized by Judd Apatow and his ilk are expanding – verbally, anyway – into full-frontal crassness. Call it bronography.
Anyone who has seen a movie by Apatow (Knocked Up), the Farrelly brothers (Hall Pass, There’s Something about Mary) and their ilk, watched the documentary The Aristocrats, or gone to a comedy club in the last half-century, knows that dick jokes are nothing new. Comedies are written by comedians, and comedians are obsessed with their genitalia. Apatow himself once vowed to include a penis in every one of his films.
But I’m talking about something more than movies like The Hangover Part 2, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Borat, which use naked flapping penises as set-ups and punchlines. More than Justin Timberlake and Andy Samberg’s instant classic, Dick in a Box, their mock video for Saturday Night Live. More than the dialogue in films like Superbad, where Michael Cera razzes Jonah Hill about performing oral sex on his dad, or Clerks II, where a drug dealer says he’s holding “everything but coke, heroin and your cock.” I’m talking about a dick-mance of a kind I’ve never seen before.
In the upcoming hockey comedy Goon, Seann William Scott plays a sweet but dim-witted soul who finds salvation in becoming an enforcer for a B-league team, and Jay Baruchel plays his best buddy. Throughout the film, Baruchel spouts a non-stop, high-octane stream of penis jokes, including an offer to cheer up his pal by – I’m paraphrasing here – inserting his member into Scott’s backside and “filling him up with cream.” I was startled, but Scott didn’t even look surprised.
Less frank but still notable is the upcoming action/romance This Means War, in which two studly CIA operatives (Chris Pine and Tom Hardy) employ their covert skills and tactics to cock-block one another as they compete for Reese Witherspoon. It quickly becomes apparent, though, that the only relationship that matters is the one between the two men – and that they have at least a passing familiarity with one another’s equipment. After bugging Reese’s home, they hear her complain to her best pal (Chelsea Handler – more on her in a bit) about the smallness of Pine’s hands. We all know what that means. But the old joke takes a new bent when Pine turns to Hardy and pleads, “You’ve seen it. Tell her it’s not small.”
“You’ve seen it” ... really? That’s not a line Bob Hope would have said to Bing Crosby, no matter how many roads they went down.
The trend really crystallized for me at last month’s Golden Globe Awards. The evening was, yes, crammed with penis jokes. Ricky Gervais claimed to have a small one. Seth Rogen announced he had “a massive erection” from standing near his co-presenter, Kate Beckinsale. Tina Fey and Jane Lynch riffed about Hung star Thomas Jane’s package, then high-fived and crowed “Penis joke!” In an act of equal-opportunity razzing, Gervais also made a vagina joke, saying that few men in the room had seen Jodie Foster’s Beaver.
But it was when George Clooney joined in, comparing Michael Fassbender’s member to a golf club – actually acting out its swing – that the trend became officially alarming. George Clooney, King of Hollywood, the New Jack, giving a shout-out to a fellow actor’s statuette – well, blow me down, as it were.
I’m sure we could all speculate endlessly on why this is happening. Access to Internet pornography has created a world of sexters for whom nothing is off limits. The uncertainty of the job market, which has kept young adults from reaching economic maturity, has also kept them arrested in the genital stage of development. The record-breaking numbers of young men in U.S. prisons, as Adam Gopnik noted in a recent New Yorker, has contributed to making anal-sex jokes de rigueur. The current generation of twentysomethings, raised with less homophobia, is embracing Kinsey’s theory that all sexuality is on a continuum. Take your pick – but prepare yourselves for more.
