Welcome back for another review of Saturday Night Live’s propensity to make jokes about homos. Click here for my reason for doing this and also, please think twice about telling me to lighten up, because I already have.

Anyway, this feature might soon have to snuff itself out. The Tina Fey episode was almost entirely void of gay jokes. There was just one that I caught (but feel free to chime in with others if you saw something I didn’t), and it was barely anything: In the sketch about Tiger Woods and the Masters tournament, Fey was playing a stripper/hooker who joined Jim Nantz for commentary and said “this is gay” about golf. Now, I am one of the few remaining people who actually think calling something “gay” is … sometimes funny, but always allowable. (I’m also still clinging to “retarded” to describe things that I think are … not performing at the corresponding intelligence level. Therefore SNL is often retarded and gay, but literally neither.)

Anyhow, to the show we go:

Air date: 4/10/10

Host: Tina Fey

Musical guest: Justin Bieber.

Okay, I need to blow some hard, here, for just a pause: If adults and adult-oriented late night shows like SNL had paid attention to a 16-year-old pop star when I was a teenager? I would have said it was gay and retarded. As a child, I looked to SNL to transport me away from Shaun Cassidy and the Bay City Rollers and all that childish junk. I wanted to see what grownups (even if they were in their early 20s) were laughing at.

So, Grownups of America: stop putting up with this shit. Stop reading vampire novels meant for middle schoolers. Etc., etc. This kid is DONNY OSMOND and DEBBIE GIBSON rolled into one package. You have been there and you have done this. No one over the age of 19 should be able to even know who Justin Bieber is, and more importantly, people should be embarrassed if they do. Keep this frosting on Nickelodeon where it belongs.

PS, and destroying the premise for my rant: Check out Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber.

Anyway, the show, the show: Enough people have posted Fey’s Sarah Palin Network sketch. Especially here inside the Beltway, where we only laugh at SNL sketches that have something to do with Washington and/or politicians. I’ll skip it and go to something that I was even better: THE BROWNIE HUSBAND. Delve in:

I thought this was one of the better episodes in a long while, thanks to Tina Fey. Her Palin stuff was good, her opening was good, and her “Weekend Update” commentary was better than good.

So …

Looking back since the last Homowatch update, there were reruns with Sigourney Weaver, Jon Hamm, and Jennifer Lopez over the last few weeks. Those too were fairly free of gay jokes. There was this one awful little skit from the Weaver episode that aired in the 12:45 a.m. SNL wasteland, starring Fred Armisen as a nasty gay child who calls everyone “bitch.” Hold your nose and click play:

Where does this come from? What does it mean? Eh, who cares. But I’ll bet they try this character again. If SNL wants to do a funny sketch about a family who gets strange and queeny gay vibes from their child’s new best friend, that could be funny. You just have to try harder.

Next show: Ryan Phillippe. (He’s still around? What’s the movie tie-in? I dunno. If they’re taking requests for gay jokes, how about a make-out scene between him and Jason Sudeikis. Just because?)

This is SNL Homowatch, where I track the number of haha-that’s-GAY jokes that the writers at Saturday Night Live deliver each week on their forlorn (for Lorne? haha) march toward 1 a.m.

I laid (haha x 2) my mission statement out for this project in last week’s inaugural edition, including a “lighten up, Hank, why don’tcha!” disclaimer. So you might want to go back and read that before you give me a freshly made batch of lighten up, dude. That said, thanks to all of last week’s commenters and the linky-linkersons who pointed new readers here.

Let’s do it.

Air date: 3/13/10

Host: Jude Law

Musical Guest: Pearl Jam

Homo jokes: Four? (Two very big jokes about the tickling-groping congressman and two much more subtle).

1. Disgraced, tickler-Congressman Eric Massa gave SNL the biggest homo-haha-hoohoo present ever. Even Larry Craig didn’t deliver like this, because he chose to scandalize himself in the summer months when SNL wasn’t on. The show cold-opened with Brian Moynihan (as Massa) and Kristen Wiig doing a skit where the congressman has his exit interview. Pretty much speaks for itself. Also, I don’t really count this among SNL Homowatch tropes. How could the show NOT go to town with this guy’s foibles?

2. “Secret Word”: A ’60s game-show spoof. At one point, Jude Law comes out as a Russian emigre ballet dancer contestant and attracts the subtle attentions of the game show host (Bill Hader) with the bulging endowment seen in Law’s leotard. This barely qualifies for homo watch, except it does. It’s funny that the host is attracted to the ballet guy because…?

3. “Weekend Update”: More Massa, during Seth Meyers’ “Really?!” bit, featuring super special guest star, Jerry Seinfeld. Homo Watch is delighted. Here we see SNL in full disgust at all things homo, co-delivered by the man who performed the ur-schtick of the modern era of enlightened homophobia, Seinfeld, which was: “Not that there’s anything WRONG with it.” That has been the favorite punchline of wink-wink/nudge-nudge comedic homophobia for nigh 15 years. Because of course there’s something wrong with it. It’s the founding document of all SNL sketches and comedy movie jokes that make fun of gays. But, like I said, the Massa scandal is giftwrapped with a giant bow for these writers. “The worst part of the story is that you ruined snorkeling for me.” “If that’s snorkeling, then what’s scuba diving?” (Translation: Nothing delights us more than jokes about gay sex.)

Anyhow, Seth, the “sarcastic ‘really’” skit is still funny? Really? (Really?)

4. Finally, don’t think I didn’t notice k.d. lang as one of the unwanted intruders in that home-alarm commercial spoof.

SNL is on a break until April 10, when Tina Fey comes back, and she loves a good gay joke. Meanwhile, I’ll blog the repeats.

For years I’ve been vaguely (in a teensy way) bothered by Saturday Night Live’s complete dependence on sketches that make fun of being gay. I don’t know exactly why. I’ve written a little about this before — “enlightened homophobia,” which is probably socially harmless (as is most televsion, really) but nevertheless irritates me. In the 1990s, after her disastrously unproductive season on SNL, Janeane Garofalo was quite free with her gripes about the SNL culture and one of them was that the male writers were obsessed with gay and anal sex jokes. In a 1995 interview with New York magazine she said:

They love the anal sex here [at SNL]. That’s considered incredibly funny.

So. Years and all those Judd Apatow-generation movies later, we are still at that point. The current crop of performers on SNL have made fun of gay in every way possible — all the men on the cast have kissed one another (with tongue!) for sketches. The “Not That There’s Anything WRONG With It” era of accepting gays while making fun of them has evolved: Gay is so okay in our culture now (plus) that it can be mocked constantly and topically (another plus, sorta), but in a way that ultimately makes clear that being gay is bad, by making endless jokes about how ooky and weird and gross and hilarious being gay is, as told and performed by hetero performers and writers. (A net minus.)

For an example of what I consider the nadir of this trend, see Brian Juergen’s breakdown of the horrible Paul Rudd episode from 2008, at Afterelton. It seemed like every skit was gay-related that night, and, being SNL, a lot of them fell flat. It bordered on unhealthy obsession. I resolved to start counting the gay jokes each week in SNL. I usually get up to three or four before “Weekend Update,” and then “Update” usually puts it past half a dozen.

I’m certainly, totally, definitely not the first person to point this out.

So I’m going to start a weekly SNL Homowatch and see if it starts to make any more sense. Why do I care? (Besides the fact that I’m gay and I think about TV and popular culture for a living?) I dunno. Clocking SNL’s gay weirdness feels not only futile, but horribly PC. Two reasons, I guess:

1. Because SNL, after all these years, through all its up and downs, is still considered a social mirror. The show certainly takes credit for its influence on the political and cultural sphere whenever possible.

2. No openly gay performers. The same way they have Fred Armisen playing half-black President Obama and Keenan Thompson playing every single black person (including Mo’nique last night), SNL does “gay” all the time, but without any gays.

So, on to this, the inaugural installment of Hank’s own SNL Homowatch:

Air date: March 6, 2010

Host: Zach Galifianakis

Musical guest: Vampire Weekend.

Homo jokes: 3. Miraculousy, given Galifianakis’s cohort and past work, I only caught three moments of enlightened homophobia in this week’s episode:

1. The Inappropriate Family: SNL has done this skit a lot before, which is basically about a family (dad: Fred Armisen; mom: Kristen Wiig, sons: Bill Hader, Brian Moynihan, others, and host Galifianakis, playing their inappropriate Orthodox priest) who show inappropriate amounts of affection. It starts with a lot of kissing and ultimately ends up with the men giving one another deep long kisses while the audience SCREAMS in disgust. (You’d think the performers were eating Hormel chili out of a toilet bowl or something, from the decibel level of reaction.) Question: Is the disgust about the incest or the homosexuality? (Or, at the end, homo necrophilia?)

2. “Weekend Update”: Remember, I watch this show half-awake, but I only heard one gay joke from Seth Meyers, to the effect of: “It was announced that the cast of Glee will be going on a seven-city concert tour [pause] said your teenage son who never quite mastered a spiral throw.” (Haha. Sissies can’t play football.)

3. Beauty pageant gay guy skit in the show’s final minutes, spoof of a talk show (80 percent of SNL’s skits are spoofs of talk shows: WHY) hosted by a super-lispy gay man with a frosted pompadour hairdo (Galifianakis) who is a beauty pageant consultant. As far as I’m concerned you can make fun of that all you want. Galifianakis wasn’t too far off most of the “pageant queens” I met while covering Miss America many years ago, and the makeup people did a neat job of turning Galifianakis’s beard into a double chin. And speaking of beards, they made it (barely) funny by having Wiig play his chain-smoking wife. And brought on Bill Hader as another gay man who was the show’s guest. Both Galifianakis and Hader really played up the lisps and effeminacy. It goes nowhere, but it satisfies one of SNL’s core missions: Make fun of gay people whenever possible.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Hank, sometimes this stuff is really funny, so just lighten up, wouldja. I agree. They can and do get it right. Would you like to see something I think is really, really funny? Check this out. Please note — it stars a woman and an openly gay man, both doing a sort of drag. It’s so much funnier with Neil Patrick Harris than it would be with, say, Paul Rudd. Why? Because Harris is working with something innate, something more intelligent, nuanced, subtle. He knows.