AFTER SATIRIZING EVERYTHING from the western to the Stone Age, Mel Brooks in 1993 released the movie “Robin Hood: Men in Tights,” a sendup of “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” which had come out two years earlier.
Although Brooks’s parody was uniformly idiotic — Maid Marian wears an Everlast chastity belt; Blinkin, a blind servant, gropes a Braille edition of Playboy — many of the laughs were at the expense of so-called feygeles, a Yiddish slur for gay men.
During a musical number with a cancan interlude, the heroic outlaw assures the audience he’s not one.
“We may look like pansies,” he and his Merry Men sing, “but don’t get us wrong or else we’ll put out your lights.
To protect the social order, sumptuary laws were passed that discouraged commoners from dressing above their class.
Persons:
Mel Brooks, Robin Hood, “ Robin Hood :, Marian, ”, we’ll, William Shakespeare, Richard Thompson Ford
Organizations:
Playboy
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