TOO BLEEPING FUNNY by Dennis Doph

because why? 48

It's too fucking funny how as the years increase
Role models for our public attitudes seem to cease
former hyper masculine role models are in certain dearth
As Gable, Cooper, and John Garfield went to earth
Even those certain of us have successfully took to bed
Got soft and pulpy -- Alec Baldwin climbs in
with Meryl Streep instead!

So with this in mind we hearken back to great
comediennes of yore
Who put the onus on what had gone on before

BILLIE BURKE so fluttery and so golden-blonde
Everything about the distaff of which we might be fond
Picking her way cheerfully through all that cinematic dung
Making life hell for poor Bear-bodied Roland Young
Remember Flo Ziegfeld paid a heavy price for this fair Dame
Making it necessary for her to seize her fame
Paying off his gambling debts. And in so doing
As "Glinda the Good" she never could be ruing
The day she decided to tip her feathered hat
To that 17-year-old, drug-addled, vaudevillian brat!

Then with the Forties came butch Miss JUDY CANOVA
Giving dykes a bit of Cuntry with that Mouth All Over
Pushing aside the Cover-Girl pomaded maids
With one bleat of her down-home voice
and Hey Rube! braids
She'd push the contract studs around, make herself boss
Throw Larry Parks, Lloyd Bridges, and Allyn Joslyn
for a loss
Then when she'd ceased and desisted with these men
She throw 'em right around the ring again!
If her violent butch ways weren't quite enough
Every BDSM faggot in the world began to strutt HER stuff.

Badmouth Queen of Cinema for all the world to fave is
Eddie Cantor's mistress long-limbed bisexual JOAN DAVIS
Baby Queen of the May in the dying days of vaudeville
With rimming tongue she pushed precocious Eddie
up the hill
Into the movies, radio, and then the Tinsel Tube
Proving Miss Joan was no one's idea of a Rube
Then, in days following the Kennedy Assassination,
she and her daughter used their mouths too much
With the right wing of this country got in fatal Dutch
Then, like Dorothy Kilgallen, so the Sybil said,
Anyone who talked too much about JFK wound up DEAD.

If any comic lady had the US over a laughing barrel
It was the Hollywood Tot known as BURNETT CAROL
In her late teens she learned just how to lull us
With her blatant love song,
"I Made a Fool of Myself Over John Foster Dulles"
Then to thrill all us closet Scarlett O'Hara Dads
She used a curtain rod for shoulderpads
Bonded with juicy Julie Andrews on another graph
To give us concerts which were more than slightly Sapph.

But the one Gal who tweaked all our femme-conscious dicks
Was horse-faced, long-limbed insanely funny MARY WICKES
Who, as "Miss Bedpan" opposite Monty Woolley in
the Man Who Came to Dinner
Showed us a hip chick could always tell the sin from the sinner
Then followed this with a star turn in Now, Voyager
with Bette Davis
Showing there's no depravity from which she'd be loath
to save us
Though she finally descended to TV and Danny Thomas
La Wickes never abandoned her lofty thespian promise
Once her long race with the world of theater had run
She proved there's nothing wrong with being
BIG, BUTCH, and FUN
...and in so doing threw herself in the Sapphic hay
with Betty Hutton and with Doris Day!