Their jokes about assigning gender to babies and to being transgender, dressing in drag, like all of it was a send-up.
Sure, they did punch down if you were a person who were in those groups, but the fact that it was large enough social event to be relevant enough to be a comedy skit on a television show or a movie seen by millions implies that there were some serious things going on back then that they could see and wanted to address.
What the hell was going on that put all of those things in their mind?
Check the history of comedy.
Mel Brooks ‘The Producers’ movie had two gay men. Bugs Bunny was in drag in the 1940’s. “Some Like It Hot” came out in the 1950s. Heck, pretty much any Hollywood movie made before the Hays Code would have had gay gags.
Milton Berle was the King of Comedy and he did drag for years.
The Pythons didn’t invent anything
This is why the whole woke thing is so stupid to me.
“I’m sick of Hollywood putting DEI bs in my movies not like the old days!”
The old days: “Come see two men dress as women to escape the mob!”
Meanwhile Mary Poppins (made in the 60’s) straight up has a banger song “sister suffragette” and signs for women’s suffrage in it.
“Disney has gone woke” has to be the stupidest thing to say, they’ve been woke longer than I’ve been around.
Since this is a comedy thread, I’ll paraphrase John Cleese.
The great thing about anger is that it really works. It makes you physically stronger and less likely to feel pain. If you’re angry all the time you aren’t worrying about things because you’ve got a target to go after.
I’ll throw in another comedy classic.
The musical “The Music Man” is about a conman who gets the whole town in an uproar over a pool table.
The difference between movies then and now is that back then being gay, transgender, or wearing clothes not befitting your birth sex in general was always paid as a joke. Haha, everyone point at the man in the dress and laugh. These days media is starting to accept that sometimes someone born with a penis actually likes wearing a dress, and not just as a sex thing or a comedy bit.
Drag is kind of an outlier, but as far as I know that never had much of a mainstream appeal in most places. I think the exaggeration helps acceptance a bit, for close-minded people the excess can be interpreted as “someone putting on an act like in a play” rather than “someone wants to be something which my small world view cannot comprehend”.
On the other hand, feminist empowerment made it pretty normal for women to wear suits many decades ago, despite the weirdoes disgusted by the idea of women wearing suits. These days, only dresses and skirts are treated weirdly by western media (unless they’re Scottish skirts, of course, those are fine for Scottish men to wear because they get a special name).
Was that nuns on the run
This is it exactly. Before magnetic tape, Comedians told the same jokes For generations.
Modern comedians act like they’re the first people to come up with jokes because of the first people to record them.
Sometimes I wonder about how many songs the average person would know throughout history. An ancient Roman would be exposed to songs from the entire Empire, while a 1000 AD English farmer might only hear a few dozen in their whole life time.