I'll laugh tomorrow.

IT MUST HAVE BEEN A LATE-CENTURY CASE OF P.T.E.S.S. (a.k.a. post-traumatic Ellen stress syndrome), with its attendant classic symptoms--memory loss (inability to remember gay history before Ellen came out), dissociation (inability to associate with gay organizations. tendency to dis them; e.g., "Why should I join? Ellen is gay. It's OK"), addictive behavior (gin-drinking, obsessive long-distance bike riding), depression (inability to get out of one's bed and into another's)--that made it difficult for The Advocate to imagine in its 30th anniversary issue the future of gay humor. (In fact, the subject of gay humor may well have seemed inappropriate for such a serious look at the future.) But I have thought about it and hope to "stand in the gap," to borrow a phrase from the Promise Creepers.

Since the past serves as prologue to the future, let's look at the last 30 years of lesbian and gay humor, after a brief first look at what's happened to other minority humor, for hints of what is to come.

The humor of both the African-American culture and the Jewish culture was originally the humor of survival, a general pool of inside jokes that kept people going while on the plantation and in the ghetto. Since even oppressed people get busy, they had to hire one person who was very good at making fun of the Man. At the Apollo, in the Catskills. Then along comes the Man, who's heard all the laughing and feels left out, and he puts the comic on TV or hires him to write sitcoms. The joker for hire is smart I enough to know he can't keep his job by continuing to make fun of his employer, so he makes fun of himself. That's when he gets the big bucks. Maybe even a Grammy or an Oscar. Then he's just like everybody else, has a place at the table up in the big house.

Our humor parallels the history of other minority humor--a shared pool of buoyant inside jokes, with paid practitioners always in danger of co-optation by mainstream media. The two strands of gay and lesbian humor became entwined in the mid '80s in response to the I right wing and the AIDS crisis, but prior to that the forms and context of gay and lesbian humor kept them separate. Gay men's humor was usually cabaret, piano bar, drag-oriented, bitchy camp with an emphasis on outfits, the big show, female. Lesbian humor was more traditional, individual, nonmusical comedy club, tailored, stand-up, male. These male and female strands merged when lesbians and gay men began to appear together at fund-raisers, benefits, and march rallies. Lesbians put together more of a show, and gay men started to craft more traditional comic routines. Access to comedy clubs, with the promise of a vaunted six-minute scot on late-night talk shows, also served to recalibrate lesbian and gay humor. After Ellen DeGenerMorgan came out, the possibility of gays on TV and in movies held out promise to lesbian and gay comics of big bucks and big time.

While I wish that future humor will be the humor of change and challenge of the status quo, I fear that the conservatizing influence of the voracious maw of media and entertainment could prevail. The net effect of the Internet is to blur the ironic margin, to open a secret trapdoor in the back of the closet behind the shoe boxes, where gay cyberians can escape to the secret cybergarden beyond where there is no gender or orientation. The more our movement becomes a market, a niche just waiting to be scratched, the more our humor is reduced to lines on a bar code indicating "Laughs three times per minute at references to menstrual pads, icked out by mucous references, can't go beyond `the vice president is dull' in political references."

If gay and lesbian comics take the easy road and speak only to that level of audience, all that will be left of our humor tradition will be Catskill hypnotists or the voices behind some family-oriented cartoon character--"See the nice lesbian, honey? Don't be scared. Here's your action figure." The content of our humor will be, "Take my significant other, please"; "So on their wedding night, one dyke says to her wife..."; "Knock, knock. Who's there? Jodie. Jodie who? Just kidding."