Laughing Won't Kill You

On Lady Ballers and making fun of yourself.

The Daily Wire’s screwball comedy Lady Ballers comes out tonight. I have a bit part in it: Ben Shapiro and I play referees at a basketball tournament where five washed-up dudes are posing as women so they can relive their glory days by dunking on girls. I’m pretty sure Ben and I both feel this is the pinnacle of our careers to date. Why else would we have spent years earning our advanced degrees?

The release has generated a lot of hype and a lot of indignation, which was to be expected. The reaction from LGBTQ+ outlets has been one of disgust at this cruel parody of the deadly serious and in no way hilarious subject of men dominating women’s sports. Some small amount of the anger has been directed at me, since I’m gay and therefore by appearing in the film I’m apparently betraying a sacred duty to uplift and support every last letter of the delicious alphabet soup. I did not realize that was an obligation I had incurred.

In the messages I’ve gotten to this effect, one recurrent theme has been by far the most interesting. Repeatedly I’ve heard some version of the complaint that Lady Ballers is the 2023 equivalent of scoffing at gays in the ’80s and ’90s for wanting to get married. The reasoning goes that if I lived back then, I would be the object of scorn—so how can I live with my complicity in the same harmful rhetoric now?

Well, first of all, I reject the premise that wanting to knee female MMA fighters in the jaw or smoke the competition at women’s swim meets is the same thing as wanting to marry someone of the same sex. Interestingly, it’s a premise that the most ardent partisans of both Right and Left now share: both agree that supporting gay marriage inevitably leads to supporting trans maximalism. They’re mostly arguing over whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

I see why one might believe that LGB implies T. I don’t agree, as I’ve said before. But for now, just for the sake of argument, let me accept the thesis: let’s grant hypothetically that me being in this movie is the same thing as being in a satire of gay life circa 1990.

Even if that were true, what really gets me about the complaint is the idea that poking fun at gays back then would have been an unpardonable sin, or that gay people themselves took their struggle too seriously to send it up. It’s almost impossible to believe now, but the gays of the ’80s and ’90s were in fact kings—er, queens—of self-mockery.

I mean, have y’all seen The Birdcage (1996)? Let me break to you the press-stopping news that Nathan Lane is not a heterosexual man. But he had a sense of humor about himself, and he clearly didn’t mind letting straight people in on the joke. That scene where Robin Williams tries to teach him to walk like a macho man and talk football? Gold. The play that movie is based on came out in 1973. We used to be funny, remember?

And it wasn’t because Americans felt any less passionate about their stances on social issues back then. It was because fewer of them had fallen for this farkakte idea that humor is violence. That’s an extremely drab and dorky way to view the world, which you realize as soon as you start hanging out with people who still look at things the old way—who still think it won’t kill you to laugh.

I spent a week filming my part in Lady Ballers, surrounded by various members of the cast and crew. Not one of them evinced so much as a flicker of malice toward gender dysphoric people or spoke so much as a nasty syllable to me about being gay. They have a range of beliefs on those subjects, rationally considered and held with principle, including quite a few who oppose gay marriage. Many of them also think it’s absurd that we’re supposed to act like it’s perfectly unremarkable or even inspirational when male bruisers trounce women in sports. As it happens, I think so too.

So we all got together and made a movie about it. Probably no viewer alive will endorse every moment in it; almost everyone who sees it will be scandalized by some parts of it and tickled by others. That’s because it’s, you know, a comedy. It’s funny. You should see it. And for heaven’s sake, lighten up.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer

P.S. The views expressed here are my own. I do not speak on behalf of the Daily Wire, nor have I ever.

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