Madame’s Place Was TV’s First Gay Puppet Sitcom
Added 2022-04-21 06:15:19 +0000 UTC“#001” (September 20, 1982)
Look, Madame’s Place wasn’t a good sitcom, but it was the gayest puppet-focused sitcom and also a contender for one of the first gay sitcoms, on account of its draggy sensibility and the fact that the man behind Madame was one of the first openly gay entertainers. Drew and Glen discuss how weird this show is, including the fact that its antagonist is a TV executive who’s literally missing a face and who can control the weather. All this plus dick jokes.
Read a 1985 L.A. Times interview with Wayland Flowers.
Decades before Joan Rivers, Faye Emerson might have been the first female late night talk show host — and also the first late night host of any gender identity.
Watch: Bea Arthur vs. Madame and Playboy's Roller Disco & Pajama Party.
Listen to the Round Springfield episode where Jeff Martin discusses naming Waylon Smithers after Wayland Flowers.
The anime Glen fails to name, BTW, is The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.
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Comments
Raja just played Madame for snatch game on the most recent season of Drag Race All Stars. I wouldn’t have gotten the reference if not for this episode! It’s on YouTube if anyone is interested: https://youtu.be/48gIglLsgzk
Tom
2022-05-23 22:11:12 +0000 UTCDid I miss you two mentioning that the first scene after the commercial break has Madame shaving her legs? Dubya tee eff. :-) This is definitely something.
Benjamin Rippel
2022-04-27 00:30:56 +0000 UTCHaving read the description of Jiffy before you mentioned her on the episode, I decided to look up and see how bad it was. It managed to be even worse than I had expected.
Turner Arrington
2022-04-24 20:31:22 +0000 UTCI did a bad job of explaining suspension of disbelief. I’m not saying it’s no longer a thing, just that you don’t hear the term much these days. And as new technology becomes available our way of watching older movies changes. In the 80’s we’d watch slasher movies and even though you knew it was a mannequin head the machete was going into you still bought it. But now, looking back, it’s hard to believe anyone could see anything but an obvious edit to an incredibly fake looking head about to be sliced in half. We all knew Madame was a puppet we just didn’t think about it. I think the fact that she was an obvious puppet and everyone around her treated her as if there wasn’t a man holding on to her obviously doing her voice was part of the bizarre charm of the whole thing. The 70’s were weird. Plus, with such a lack of gay representation in entertainment I think gay people were all thrilled to see such a blatant form of gayness on mainstream television, especially one that celebrated joy and ridiculousness instead of drama and tragedy. I’m not saying that Madame’s place was all that good. I’ve watched a few episodes recently and just groaned, but at the time (especially to a repressed little kid like me) it was a peek into a world that didn’t exist in small town PA. I was drawn to Wayland and Madame. Then again as a kid I might have just loved that she was a really strange puppet.
Don Mike
2022-04-22 18:46:02 +0000 UTCWas it really that different? I'd say current movies and shows require more or less the same suspension of disbelief. The artifice may be a little less apparent with CGI (in some cases), but it is still the same game where we as viewers willfully buy into the lie we're being told. The only aspect of this game that's changed significantly since the early 80s is the language: Then it was puppets, hand-drawn cartoons and the like, and now it's CGI. We're not used to seeing those kind of puppets anymore (not on TV at least), and I think that's why Madame's presence is more jarring and makes the suspension of disbelief harder in this particular instance. But I'd say that generally speaking, our capacity for suspension of disbelief is doing fine. Have you watched a stage play in recent years? There's usually plenty of traditional suspension of disbelief going on (like say, an actor "driving a stagecoach" by sitting on a black box and mimicking the motion) with audiences of all ages.
Vaand
2022-04-22 16:54:54 +0000 UTCMammy Yokum was a character from the comic Li’l Abner, which was later adapted to a stage then a movie musical. She was played by Billie Hayes, who you might remember from the Paul Lynde Halloween Special as Witchiepoo.
Don Mike
2022-04-22 16:26:16 +0000 UTCThe creepy androgynous puppet from Mr Rogers Neighborhood was Lady Elaine Fairchild. I didn’t understand who she was. These days I like to think of her as the first non-binary tv character because even though they referred to her as “she” she sort of existed outside of gender. That’s not at all why she was creepy, I think her mannerisms and voice just made her that way. Also, Ma Kettle was a character from a popular series of movies in which her and her husband, Pa Kettle, got into crazy shenanigans, sort of like The Beverly Hillbillies. It was the era when middle America was fascinated with small town country and hillbilly culture.
Don Mike
2022-04-22 16:23:17 +0000 UTCThere’s a thing called “suspension of disbelief” where you see something on TV or in a movie and your brain interprets what you should be seeing rather than what you actually are. But technology had impaired how it works. Because of CGI we’re used to seeing Marvel superheroes flying around like it’s nothing so when you watch the first Superman movie the blue screen effects look obvious and the 50’s tv series with the rear screen projection is downright laughable but at the time, when people were used to imagining what they should be seeing it seemed really impressive. That’s why Madame worked. People were told that she was a living being so seeing Wayland next to her was irrelevant. We knew she was a puppet the same way we know The Muppets are, so we ignored him the same way we ignore the unseen people under the stage. It was a different time.
Don Mike
2022-04-22 16:16:31 +0000 UTCI love these episodes about obscure TV history I wasn't even aware of. Also horse ejaculate and Haruhi Suzumiya talk. No notes!
Russ McGallian
2022-04-21 21:35:28 +0000 UTCSee, I was thinking Buffy but you are correct.
Drew Mackie
2022-04-21 18:32:36 +0000 UTCWhen you guys were trying to think of puppet sitcoms near the end the only one that came to my mind was Cousin Skeeter, which ran on Nickelodeon from 1998-2001
Ryan Zepp
2022-04-21 18:05:15 +0000 UTCGlen knows the word poppet from The Crucible, where it is used to mean a voodoo doll type thing
Erin Fletcher
2022-04-21 16:13:20 +0000 UTC
