Dressing in Drag USED to be funny...

Now that we have all been treated to the spectacle of the freak show that is Mr. Kaitlin Jenner, it's wonderful to go back in time to this old comedy where no alternative lifestyles are in sight and we can simply watch Jack Benny do a funny turn in drag.
Benny's fey mannerisms have always made a certain amount of the public ponder whether Jack was 'light in the loafers', but the gay crowd can't get around his long marriage to Sadie Marks and a rumored affair with singer Giselle McKenzie. It's one thing to point out that Randolph Scott and Cary Grant lived together -- it's quite another thing to find any homosexual behavior attributed to Cary Grant or Randolph Scott. I have no doubt there are many gay people whom would love to welcome Cary Grant into their 'fold'...like Jack Benny, the facts of Mr. Grant's life get in the way.
I have sat through a few Jack Benny movies. Invariably, he is miscast. Jack Benny playing anyone else but Jack Benny is miscasting, so well known is his stingy and vain character. The only two movies I have truly enjoyed are 'George Washington Slept Here' and this film, easily his most famous. (Although Jack made such a joke of 'The Horn Blows at Midnight' that this title may be more well known than 'Charley's Aunt'.)
What struck me in Benny's work in 'Charley's Aunt' was how heterosexual Benny played the part. Maybe I have been treated to too many unfunny drag performances in the movies and on television. Seeing a very old 1941 movie, based on a successful play is truly going back in time.
The plot forces Benny into that dress! He's deriving no comfort from it, unlike say Norman Bates admiring his wig and his shift. I try to avoid comedies that involve 'drag' because it's invariably simply a cheap joke, like Clint Eastwood making a comedy opposite an orangutang. Guys in drag are as trite in comedy as banana peels. I had seen this film decades ago and got very little from it.
Kaitlin Jenner may make a very attractive woman (if you ignore the penis), but Jack Benny is fairly hideous as Charley's 'aunt'. It's hard to believe even old Edmund Gwenn would be interested in Jack as Charley's aunt. Fast forward to Joe E. Brown in 'Some Like it Hot'. By the end of the fifties, Billy Wilder could have Jack Lemmon proclaim 'I'm a man' and Joe E. Brown could simply remark: 'Nobody's perfect'. The Catholic League of Decency may have had some problems with that film, but audiences were hip enough to get the joke.
There is funny and then there is FUNNY. What really made me laugh was Jack's successful romance with the real aunt, played by Kay Francis. In one of the final scenes, Jack, still in drag, lays in Francis' lap, looking up to her adoringly. It's a bizarre sight. Had you started watching the movie just then, you would have thought it was some lesbian love scene! But no, it's 1941, and there are no lesbians. Ha ha.
Ultimately, Jack Benny's greatest success was being the character he had created for himself. Stingy, vain, arrogant with punch lines that read like straight lines: 'I'm thinking, I'm thinking!' Benny is the only comedian I can think of who stayed funny until the end, because he remained 'thirty nine'. That joke just got funnier the older Jack got.