marksimpson.com

Thanks to my Cana­dian friend Elise for for­ward­ing this gem: A (late 1960s?) TV skit star­ring Jimmy Stew­art, Dean Mar­tin and Orson Welles, no less, at the hair salon — mak­ing mock of fem­i­nine van­i­ties.  The jokes then of course depended on the absurd gen­der reversal/confusion of three chaps tak­ing such trou­ble over their appear­ance. The very idea of a male hair salon! Ho! Ho!  (Though maybe there is an acknowl­edge­ment that Mar­tin took a just a bit too much time over his bouffant.)

Thank good­ness they didn’t know what was com­ing (or even what was going on around them in the hippy ‘uni­sex’ coun­ter­cul­ture of the 1960s).  The gags are still funny — but prob­a­bly for more ironic, more metro reasons.

Note the Tab Hunter and Rock Hud­son in-joke, decades before their sex­u­al­ity was pub­lic knowledge:

Orson Welles: ‘You must promise not to breathe a word of this, but I was at a party last night and Tab and Rock turned up wear­ing iden­ti­cal blazers!’

Jimmy Stew­art: ‘Wouldn’t you just die?’

It’s a funny line, but per­haps Tab and Rock are men­tioned as an exam­ple of the kind of men around then who might be expected to take care over their appear­ance, the homo­sex­ual excep­tion to the het­ero­sex­ual rule. Wouldn’t a lot of straight men back then have just died if they knew that men like Tab and Rock — and male spas — would become nor­mal.

When our love­able trio of old fogeys escape from the dri­ers, whip off their capes and reveal their mid-century male show­biz uni­forms, those Pel­i­can boil­er­suits, they look more dated now than even the con­cept of fin­ish­ing a skit with a song and (wob­bly) dance.