Movie Review “Year One”: In the beginning … there was gay panic.

Here’s my question for straight male comedy writers everywhere: even if you think the idea of a straight guy being lusted after or forced to have sex with a creepy gay guy is comedy gold, have you really not noticed how 500,000 movie comedies have already made this same joke? Does it not seem the slightest bit tired?

That’s what I was thinking when I sat through Year One, the latest in a loooooooooooong string of American comedies that think that “gay panic” is, well, frickin’ hilarious, dude!

What’s Year One’s set-up? In the ancient world, hapless cavemen Zed (Jack Black) and Oh (Michael Cera) are exiled from their village for being lousy hunters and/or gatherers. So they set off on a quest that leads them from the tent of the Biblical Abraham to the city of Sodom, where “what happens in Sodom stays in a Sodom!”

The endless succession of circumcision and sodomy jokes aren’t particularly funny, but they aren’t offensive either. Given that the second half of the movie is set entirely in the city of Sodom, I was expecting a stream of cheap, easy gay jokes that never really came.

Well, okay, some came. There’s an anal rape joke, and a cross-dressing party-goer who exists merely to be a sight-gag – but hey, it could have been worse.

Then comes the High Priest of Sodom, played by Oliver Platt. He talks with a lisp, wears make-up, and is generally disgusting and cowardly.

Which means, of course, that he must force himself on Michael Cera’s Oh (who, earlier in the film while Jack Black is “sharing a bed” with Abraham’s beautiful, albeit lesbian daughter, is forced to sleep with Abraham’s disgusting, farting, sheep-banging son).

The reoccurring joke is that Platt’s High Priest keeps wanting Oh to rub oil on him, in increasingly intimate places, finally openly pressing him for sex. And, being a slave, Oh can’t refuse.

Oh’s reaction to all of this? Like he’s going to be sick (understandably enough!).

It’s beyond me how any of this is supposed to be funny. And now I feel stupid for defending, at least at first, Platt’s lisping, limp-wristed portrayal the gay Freddy Prune on last year’s Nip/Tuck’s.

The movie is also infused with this genuinely creepy misogyny where literally every single female character exists either (a) to be casually sacrificed to God, (b) to be an object of lust by the horny male main characters, or (c) both.