Television
Milton Berle was one of the most famous early cross-dressing comedians in skits and such on his NBC shows from 1948 to 1956. Harvey Korman played a hefty Jewish mother character on The Carol Burnett Show. Flip Wilson created the memorable recurring character Geraldine Jones on The Flip Wilson Show. Some other comedy sketch shows, such as Monty Python's Flying Circus, Little Britain, The League of Gentlemen, Saturday Night Live and The Kids in the Hall routinely feature visual cross-dressing, with men dressing as women and speaking in falsetto. Not to be outdone in this regard, the (female) British team of French and Saunders have produced many sketches in which one or both of the actresses portray men. Rudy Giuliani appeared on Saturday Night Live dressed as a woman.
Kenan Thompson currently plays a range of women on Saturday Night Live.
Australian male comedian Barry Humphries has appeared as Dame Edna in several shows. British stand-up comedian and actor Eddie Izzard, who describes himself as an 'executive' or 'action' transvestite and regularly cross-dresses both on and off stage, has acted in several films (including most recently Valkyrie), as well as releasing his stand-up work on video and DVD (Live at the Ambassadors (1993), Unrepeatable (1994), Definite Article (1996), Glorious (1997), Dress to Kill (1999), Circle (2002), and Sexie (2003)).
Read more about this topic: Cross-dressing In Film And Television
Famous quotes containing the word television:
“The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labour in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.”
—Frederic Raphael (b. 1931)
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)
“His [O.J. Simpson’s] supporters lined the freeway to cheer him on Friday and commentators talked about his tragedy. Did those people see the photographs of the crime scene and the great blackening pools of blood seeping into the sidewalk? Did battered women watch all this on television and realize more vividly than ever before that their lives were cheap and their pain inconsequential?”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)