ABSTRACT
Humor, on the other hand, is often taken to embody playfulness and therefore flexibility, and also the creation of community through inclusion in the joke. Mikhail Bakhtin is the theorist who advocated that humor and comedy are intrinsically subversive. The representation of men who have failed to live up to ideals of masculinity and men with same-sex interests, however, has long been categorized in three broad groups: the dangerous pervert, the tragic pervert, and the comic pervert. Queer emerged in the course of the 1980s as a strategic term signalling a farewell to integrationist tendencies that simply asked for tolerance and visibility of gays. The runaway success of the British TV comedy show Little Britain resulted largely from its incessant breaking of taboos-against elderly people and the handicapped, but also homosexuals. That Little Britain is not a mindless reiteration of old camp clichés, despite the impression that the Sebastian Love sketches might generate, is shown by the Emily Howard sketches.
