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So I hated the play, the music, the jokes, and the performances. What about the campy, over-the-top portrayals of gay people--a two-minute lisp, for example, or a massively stuffed crotch in the tights of the flaming choreographer?

Um, can anyone guess what I thought of that?

The gay portrayals are so wildly offensive that defenders of the play don't usually even try to argue otherwise. They just say, “Oh, well, Mel Brooks spares no one! He skewers everyone!”

But does he? True, his portrayal of women is typically misogynistic. But who does he ridicule other than women and gays--the traditional whipping boys of straight male comics? Nazis? Wow, how daring.

Yeah, it's slightly edgy to joke about the Holocaust--and I'm sure it was genuinely shocking in 1968. But it's Hitler who ends up being ridiculed, not the victims of the Holocaust. And after all the doom-and-gloom about the Holocaust, open ridicule of its instigators was probably refreshing for many.

Why would Mel Brooks understand this? I suspect it's because he's Jewish, and he knew the feelings of his community.

Maybe Brooks understands something about gay people too, and he recognized that the time had come to laugh at all the “irreverent” writers and comedians who for decades have dutifully enforced a strict social and moral code by scorning and deriding gay people.

After all, plenty of gay people love the play--and even some of the cast members are gay. As I say, for them it's camp.

But for the record? The audience I saw The Producers with definitely wasn't in on the irony. They were laughing--uproariously and uncontrollably--at the idea of a man in a dress, at the lisping, mincing sidekick, and at the mannish, tool-wielding lesbian. They practically hissed when one of the predatory gay characters hit on Leo Bloom.

After the show, a friend in New York said to me, “What you saw in 2006 is not the same show we saw in 2001.” And I'm certain he is right. Frankly, being in that theater with all those straight families just howling at the ridiculous gay people up on stage kinda creeped me out.

Lord knows this isn't the first time I've gone to a show that critics and audiences adore, but that left me feeling like I was literally experiencing some alternate reality: I passionately hated Forrest Gump, Cats, The English Patient, The Phantom of the Opera, Fatal Attraction, and, yes, The Bird Cage.

I swear I'm not humorless! But I've heard these stale stereotypes and mean-spirited gay jokes all my life (frequently in Mel Brooks' movies). Like the playwright Jeff Whitty in his oft-forwarded letter to Jay Leno, I'm tired of them. For me, maybe like some Holocaust survivors in 1968, it's still too soon for irony.

Interestingly, while the New York Times loved The Producers on Broadway in 2001, their movie critic hated the 2005 movie (and, apparently, the play as well), saying that it revealed “its vulgarity, its cynicism, its utter lack of taste, charm or wit...The loud, lavish crudeness of The Producers reduces its one interesting idea to incoherence. Bialystock and Bloom hatch a scheme to produce a guaranteed bomb, Springtime for Hitler, in order to bilk their elderly investors. When opening night arrives, it is something of a relief, though also a source of confusion. Here are numbers that are supposed to be bad, which must mean that the rest of the movie is bad by accident.”

I agree whole-heartedly. So why not let that be the last gay word?

Last Gay Word columnist Brent Hartinger is the author of the gay teen novel, Geography Club, which is currently being adapted for the movies. The sequel, The Order of the Poison Oak, is just out in paperback, and his latest novel, Grand & Humble, is in stores now. Explore "Brent's Brain," his website, at www.brenthartinger.com.

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