Viral “He’s Just Not That Into You” Video Breaks Gay Comedy Ground

He’s Just Not That Into You may have just marked a small, but seismic shift in gay-related comedy.

No, not the movie itself, opening today, which is getting decidedly lackluster reviews (the critics seem to agree that it’s amiable at best, and too long).

The true comedy gold may lay in a short video, 10 Chick Flick Cliches That Are Not in “She’s Just Not That Into You,” produced for iTunes to virally promote the film and released on January 20th.

The video stars Bradley Cooper, Justin Long, and Kevin Connolly, actors from the movie, and it’s supposedly directed at male-moviegoers who might be brought to the movie by their girlfriends.

“He’s Just Not That Into You is not your typical chick flick,” Cooper assures the men.

To illustrate his point, the three actors present ten “chick flick clichés” that don’t appear in the movie: “No make-over montages,” for example, and “No sliding down a wall while crying.”

But what makes the video so fresh and funny is that the three male actors also portray romantic comedy clichés such as “Nobody chases anybody anywhere to get them to stop doing something,” and, “There is no speech where a guy, in order to win a girl over, tells her all the little details about her,” that involve two lovers.

The men, in various pairings, portray the two lovers in question.

It’s not a “gay” video per se, and it wasn’t necessarily created to appeal to gay viewers. On the contrary, the video is directed (at least in part) at straight men.

But that’s what makes it so extraordinary. They’re clearly portraying same-sex couples, but they don’t call attention to it. The actors do not play on gay stereotypes for cheap laughs.

By contrast, in I’m F***ing Ben Affleck, Jimmy Kimmel’s painfully stilted 2008 response to his ex-girlfriend Sarah Silverman’s sublime I’m F***ing Matt Damon comedy short, Jimmy Kimmel and Ben Affleck mince broadly and wear pink short-shorts.

More interesting still, the He’s Just Not That Into You video doesn’t rely on the mean-spirited “gay panic” humor that’s been so popular this decade, in movies such as Wild Hogs and Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, where the “joke” is how funny it is to watch a straight man’s reaction when he realizes that people might mistake him for being gay — as if that’s the worst possible thing in the world to be.

The actors in Ten Cliches never freak out at the idea of being romantic with another man, or break the fourth wall to communicate to the audience how uncomfortable with this particular acting gig. Instead, they seem totally game (Bradley Cooper and Justin Long are clearly old comedy pros, but Kevin Connolly, “E” from Entourage, is endearing in his obvious discomfort with broad slapstick comedy.)

L to r: Kevin Connolly, Justin Long, and Bradley Cooper

In the He’s Just Not That Into You video, same-sex relationships are simply taken for granted, not explained or underlined or apologized for.

Mainstream American gay-related humor has almost always been slightly behind the cultural curve — not so offensive as to provoke outrage, just a little off-putting to most GLBT people. There’s frequently a condescending sense that the writers are trying to appeal to the 12-year-old boys in their audience, or those in the “red” states — people uncomfortable with gay people. Sometimes there’s even a feeling that the comedy writers themselves share that sense.

The result is a set of deeply ingrained comedy grooves where the writers repeatedly set up the same few incredibly obvious gay jokes and follow them with the same incredibly obvious punch-lines — punch-lines that stopped being funny for any thinking person in about 1982.

You’re being sent to prison? Better not drop the soap in the showers!

None of this exists in 10 Chick Flick Cliches That Are Not in “She’s Just Not That Into You,” which seems fresh and original. Instead of being slightly behind the cultural curve, it’s clearly ahead of it.

Which, for the record, is exactly why it’s so funny.