Adam Devine's House Party, Episode 1.1: Adam shows his tree-trunk, eats fro-yo, and flirts with Andrew Santino

In 2013-2014,  while Adam Devine was starring in Workaholics and Modern Family and guesting on  Community, Arrested Development, Sanjay and Craig, and American Dad, he somehow managed to find the time for Adam Devine's House Party.  He plays an insecure, jerky, penis-obsessed version of himself, hosting a huge party in a mansion.  Each episode has a brief plot framing the sets of three up-and-coming comedians. I'm reviewing Episode 1.1, "Ex Girlfriend."

Scene 1:  Adam checks the food, booze, and comedians.  Whoops, there's some poop on the floor.  He covers it with a dollar bill. Gross! Everything is ready!  A hundred people burst in.  

Scene 2: To demonstrate how wild he is, Adam smashes a beer bottle on his head.  Uh-oh, too far.  We cut to him with his head bandaged, blood sopping down. Can they keep filming?  Director Kyle says it's fine.

Adam introduces the concept: "Comedy Central gave me a bunch of money to throw an awesome comedy show, and I blew it all on this house party."

Nope, that doesn't work.  Let's try repeating the opening amid gyrating butts --- a boy and a girl.  The boy's is obscured by the title, but that's the one he gawks at. Adam likes boy butts, and he cannot lie.

Scene 3: Andrew Santino invited Adam's ex-girlfriend to the party!  Adam gets all jealous and threatens to not let him perform. Santino claims that he didn't know, and the girl says that they just went out on one date, so who cares?  He counters: "We should have grown old and died together, but someone thought that someone was strange."

Scene 4: The first comic "won't stab you in the back by f*king your ex girlfriend: Ahmed Bharoocha. 

"Gay marriage is still illegal.  Can we get a boo for that?  Aha!  If you booed, you're gay!"  Wait -- anyone who supports gay marriage is gay, and that's a bad thing?   

He continues that it's crazy that gay marriage is still illegal. How can they allow someone who doesn't know any gay people to "vote on their happiness."  It's like going to a restaurant and ordering cake, but the guy at the next table cancels your order: "I don't like cake, so no one gets cake."

More riffs on a teenage God having kids too early, and baby crows.

Scene 5: Montage of a guy drinking, a guy kissing a girl, and so on. Ahmed and Adam discuss his head injury and the likelihood that Santino "won't get out of here alive."  

Scene 6: Adam introduces Andrew Santino, "a shit dog of a human being, but he's super funny."  

He riffs on his father's objections to him moving to California, with all the gay slurs: "you gonna roller blade and give blow jobs for cash."  "That's ridiculous.  Not everybody in California is gay."  

Then his friend asked him to go sky-diving.  The first time, you go tandem, which means that another adult male is strapped against you, his genitals against your butt.What if the parachute fails, and they both die, and his Dad comes to identify the body: a guy's dick in his ass!  He turned gay after all!

Santino lives in West Hollywood, the "gayest place in the world."  His apartment is at the intersection of Rainbow Avenue and Butthole Road.  You know, not all gay men are into anal sex.  His neighbor is a bear, but he eats penis instead of pic-a-nick baskets.  

If Santino was gay, he'd be a power bottom.  He demonstrates how he would clench to guide the action.  That's not what a power bottom is, but I'm surprised that Santino knows about the clenching. 

Scene 7: Adam asks the ex-girlfriend why she prefers Santino.  "Is his dick bigger than mine?" She doesn't know, having never seen Adam's dick.  Don't you go to movies?  Everyone's seen it.    

"Adam, you just took me out for fro-yo, and didn't pay for it.  You don't love me...you just get obsessed, and can't think of anything else."

"I do not get obsessed...wait, fro-yo?  I forgot about that."  He calls a fro-yo - frozen yogurt -- shop and orders enough for everyone.

Scene 8:  Next comedian: Barry Rothbart (top photo.  At least, he claims that's him).  He riffs on why he's so good at sex; ordering in a restaurant using hand signals: and dolphin sex.

Penises after the break. Caution: arousal.

Steve Howey: Gay ally happy to show his dick on screen. And his butt. And his elephant.

 

  

I've been following Steve's career since he starred in Reba (2001-2007) as the boyfriend of Reba's teenage daughter. It was a country-western sitcom, so I figured that "Howey" was a stage name that made him sound more countrified: "Steve Howdy, y'all!"

He went on to guest on many comedies, like Psych, New Girl, Jennifer Falls, and Workaholics: In Episode 6.15, "Gramps Demamp is Dead," he plays Adam's cousin "Blue Knight" Demamp.  At Gramps' funeral, Blake brings up a happy memory of having a "sword fight" with their wieners, and seeing the Blue Knight's balls. 

Steve had aa long run on Shameless as Kevin Ball, a bartender (and occasional stripper) who is friends with the shameless Gallagher family. 

Shameless gave him many opportunities to show his bulge, dick....

And butt.

More after the break

"The Eyes of Tammy Faye": A gay-positive light in the homophobic 1980s

 

The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021) takes us back to the golden age of televangelism, when the big names were world-famous celebrities with huge political and social influence.  They had dinner at the White House.  They were parodied on Saturday Night Live.  

1. Jerry Falwell (Vincent D'Onofrio) turned his Moral Majority into a seething- ground for anti-gay hatred.  He blamed them for everything.  An airplane crash in Peru -- must have been some gays on board.  Rise in teen pregnancy -- gay rights make our kids think they can do anything they want.  Your basement is flooded -- God is punishing you for not hating gays enough.  "A homosexual will kill you as soon as look at you."

2. Pat Robertson (Gabriel Olds) proclaimed that God was punishing all of the gays by giving them AIDS, but they wanted to infect as many straight people as possible, with the goal of destroying society before becoming extinct.   They had special rings that, when you shook their hand, would prick you with a little of their blood, so you would catch AIDS and die.  They would spit on your food or cough on you on purpose

3. Jimmy Swaggart (Jay Huguley) said that he would kill any gay man who looked at him romantically.  He saw his huge tv ministry decimated after two prostitution scandals, in spite of his famous "I have sinned" speech. 

4. Oral Roberts managed to build a whole homophobic university with sleazy fundraising techniques, like claiming that if viewers didn't send in $8,000,000, God would kill him.

5. Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker (Andrew Garfield,top photo and left, Jessica Chastain) ran the PTL (Praise the Lord) Club, the most direct influence of Eli and Aimee-Leigh's Praise Be to He hour.  

Jim always promoted homophobia and denied allegations of "homosexual activity," even after he was convicted of defrauding his viewers out of $150 million and sentenced to prison.  

Tammy Faye, however, believed in compassion.  In 1987, she interviewed Steve Pieters, a gay minister (who had AIDS), without ever saying "God's punishment." She asked stupid-sounding questions like "If you've never been with a woman, how do you know you don't like it?". but later explained that those were the questions her viewers had.  

She regularly attended pride events and was interviewed in gay magazines through her post-PTL years.  Her heavy make-up made her look like a drag queen, and she went with it, attending -- and judging "Tammy Faye Drag" contests.

Tammy Faye was not entirely gay-positive: she didn't support same-sex marriage, and continued to believe that same-sex acts were sinful.  But so was premarital and extramarital sex between straight people; why should gay people be subjected to discrimination and prejudice?  

Many evangelicals today still hate LGBT persons, but imagine what it was like in the 1980s and 1990s, when almost all of them did!  My sister didn't speak to me for five years after I came out (my brother was always fine with it).  In that morass of homophobia, Tammy Faye was a beacon of hope.  

Bonus: Louis Cacelmi as Richard Fletcher, who furnished prostitutes for Jim Bakker and claimed to have had sex with him.