‘I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry’: Somehow Even More Homophobic 10 Years Later

I spent 10 years being someone who had never seen I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry. I liked being that person. Now I’m a different person, someone who has survived the interminable “no homo” joke that is I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry.

I’m also a different person now than when INPYC&L (still a mouthful, even as an acronym) arrived in theaters ten years ago today. Back in 2007, I was quasi out, fully anxious, and enraged by this movie’s trailers. Kevin James and Adam Sandler, two guys further removed from the gay community you shall never find, were dressing up in gay stereotypes while ruthlessly mocking them. 2007 Me was wary and weary of the glitter-covered pride movement too, but I could express that as a gay man grappling with his newly accepted identity. Two straight guys known for making the lowest-of-all-the-brows comedy, though? Your take on the gay experience was not welcome or wanted, sirs.

I’ve grown over the last 10 years. I don’t hate being gay anymore. I acknowledged and confronted my internalized homophobia and have worked to become my most authentic self, stereotypes be damned and/or celebrated. I’ve also spent 10 years operating under the assumption that Chuck & Larry was probably the movie equivalent of a hate crime. I was wrong. After watching Chuck & Larry, I can now say it’s the movie equivalent of a hate crime with fart jokes.

To its credit, Chuck & Larry doesn’t just hate gay people (it freely drops the “F” slur with the restraint of an angry middle schooler). This movie also hates women, people of size, people of color, and foreigners (especially people of Asian origin). I’d also say this movie hates white men, because nearly every white man in this movie is a flat-out moronic bigot–but those are actually traits worthy of celebration in the Chuck & Larry-verse. This is, in nearly every conceivable way, a painfully unfunny movie that deserves every percent of it’s abysmal Rotten Tomatoes score. And even though it came out in 2007, it’s more bluntly misguided than movies that came out in the late ’90s (like The Birdcage and In & Out).

The movie’s plot is contrived, doing whatever it can to force two macho firefighters (Sandler’s Chuck and James’ Larry) into matrimony. Larry, a widower, is worried about who will take care of his kids should he die, a sensible worry considering his high risk profession. After learning that he needs to name someone his primary beneficiary, he zeroes in on his best bud Chuck.

This decision is patient zero for the outbreak of bad decisions that is Chuck & Larry.

Larry: get better friends. In no universe is Chuck the guy you want taking care of your kids. He’s aggressively misogynist, void of any empathy or emotional intelligence, and isn’t a functional adult (despite having an impractical NYC apartment that is overly decorated like an HGTV man cave). And here’s the big kicker, Larry: your 11-year-old son is probably gay, and your best friend Chuck is a violent homophobe. I know Larry needs to marry Chuck so audiences can laugh at the idea of two men being a couple, but I find it deeply sad that Larry doesn’t have a boring college friend or a milquetoast cousin out there that could give him a hand.

Oh yeah–Larry’s son is most likely gay. That’s a detail I did not know going into Chuck & Larry. Larry’s son Eric (Cole Morgen) spends the movie draped in rhinestones and Flashdance eleganza and in a near perpetual state of the splits. His main worry: auditioning for school musicals Pippin and Annie Get Your Gun. Eric, potentially a fun character that could be used to educate Larry and Chuck, is just used as catnip for gay panic. Eric does the splits (an apparently super gay action?) and Larry panics and forces his son to watch the Mets. Because Eric is constantly dressed like a Fame extra, Chuck taunts Larry about having a gay kid. Later on, Chuck helps Eric practice a tap routine–but only because Frank Sinatra danced! It’s okay to help your probably gay kid do stereotypically gay things as long as you can cling to the tiniest sliver of straightness while doing so.

Chuck & Larry teaches audiences that gay bashing is bad, except when it’s hilarious. This right here is the result of taking a screenplay by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor (the Academy Award-winning duo behind Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, and Sideways) and handing it over to Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison machine. This movie comes from thoughtful screenwriters, a duo that tackled the complex argument around abortion rights in the fantastic Citizen Ruth (starring Laura Dern). At times, you can see where the Ruth screenwriters had a hand in Chuck & Larry. At one point, Jessica Biel (playing Chuck and Larry’s duped defense attorney, protecting the couple against a state inspector on a totally justified mission to out them as straight) says a line that feels like it’s criticizing every line that came before and every line that comes after: “I mean, gays and lesbians have not been fighting for these rights for forty years to be made a mockery of.” Apparently they have!

There’s also a moment that reads as Citizen Ruth-y even if you don’t know Payne and Taylor’s involvement. As they’re leaving an AIDS Coalition party (where every gay club stereotype descends from the ceiling on silvery lycra butterfly wings), Chuck and Larry run into a group of religious protestors. Confronted with bigots holding bullhorns, Chuck and Larry see the effect this hatred has on gay people; two men in drag hold each other, crying. The lead zealot, played by Rob Corddry, calls Chuck the “F” word–and Chuck punches him.

You’ll notice I’m not typing it out. That’s because it’s a slur. This movie says it…a lot. Sandler says it a lot, and it’s almost always a joke–like when Larry tells Chuck they’ll only be married on paper, and Chuck hilariously says they’ll be “paper f—–s.” I bet straight audiences just laughed and laughed! This is part of Chuck’s character arc, though, since the movie ends with him telling all his firefighter buddies that that word is an “ignorant” and “hurtful” slur and that he said it too much. Sandler delivers the monologue with the conviction of someone ordering a burrito bowl when they really wanted a chicken sandwich. This movie wrings laughs from ignorance, and then tries to use those laughs as a teaching moment. But Chuck & Larry can’t make its audience feel ashamed for laughing at all those gay jokes! That’s not fun! So instead, all the “lessons” are halfhearted. It’s okay to laugh at gay people, because they are ridiculous, but just don’t say the “F” word as much. All good!

I can tell that Chuck & Larry wants to be on the right side of history. It was a gay marriage comedy starring two of 2007’s most mainstream comedians released when gay marriage was still not legal (Chuck and Larry have to go to Canada to get married–by a super unforgivably racist Chinese character played by Rob “not at all Chinese” Schneider in full-on yellowface). But like all the straight people in my life that have told me they accept my sexuality while also telling me they don’t want to see me even hold hands with my husband, this movie doesn’t want to listen to gay people. This movie points out how wrong it is for religions to discriminate against gays, but it also treats two men kissing as hilarious and gross. It wants to help pre-teen Eric nail an audition, but only because manly men can be performers too. It celebrates Ving Rhames’ character coming out of the closet, and then drops him into the center of an extended “don’t drop the soap!” gag. Dan Aykroyd’s Captain Tucker (a straight guy) gives the big, rousing thesis statement at the end of the film, when he says that Chuck and Larry have done so much good for the community (?) by showing everyone that sexuality has nothing to do with “who we are as people.” Ugh, Dan Aykroyd gets more right about aliens than he does about sexuality.

Sexuality has everything to do with who we are as people. Even the truth of not having a sexuality is integral to a person’s being. Pretending that sexuality isn’t inextricably linked with who we are is how people excuse bigotry, and it’s shocking to me (watching this in 2017) that this was played off as a progressive message. You don’t “accept” someone by refusing to deal with something that is as important to them as if they love, who they love, and how they love. And if you learned that message 10 years ago from I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, you’ve been had and you should apologize to the gay people in your life.

Also, never, ever learn moral lessons from a movie that thinks this is okay.

This movie is very bad.

Where to watch I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry