I Feel at Home in Filth

October 11, 2024

Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson’s Dicks: The Musical is a faggy mess. That’s the point.

Photo: Hugo Yu. Grooming: Jennifer Brent

2023 is certainly not wanting for gay films, but from the competent schlock (Red White and Royal Blue) to the ghostly prestige (All of Us Strangers) to the cowboy yearning (Strange Way of Life), they all have that faint stench of polish on them — more Ang Lee than John Waters. Then there’s Dicks: The Musical. Originally performed in 2014 in the basement of a Gristedes as a Upright Citizens Brigade show titled Fucking Identical Twins, Dicks was created by and stars Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson, two of queer comedy’s most illustrious messes. Over the course of Fucking Identical Twins’s original year-and-a-half run, both the show itself and its after-parties became the stuff of legend. While it wasn’t the first gay comedy group to come together — Bob Smith, Danny McWilliams, and Jaffe Cohen performed as the troupe Funny Gay Males in the ’90s — Sharp and Jackson’s show and parties represented a turning point for their generation, a moment when gay comedians could stop seeing one another as competition for the one queer spot on a lineup and start seeing one another as friends and collaborators.

Now, Sharp and Jackson are attempting to get that party atmosphere into theaters across the country. Produced by A24 (its first musical), Dicks follows two mean, straight businessmen, Craig and Trevor (Sharp and Jackson, respectively), who discover that they are identical twins when they begin work at the same company, where their boss is played by Megan Thee Stallion. They then attempt to Parent Trap their mom and dad, played by Megan Mullally and Nathan Lane. Directed by Larry Charles (Borat) with music written by Karl Johnson and orchestrations by Marius de Vries (La La Land), Dicks is ridiculous, profane, messy as hell, and extremely gay — not only because it stars gay people, but because of its sensibility, which eschews respectability. Mullally, at one point, sings that “My nipples wink, I never sneeze.” There are slimy-looking puppet sewer boys referred to as “gay culture.” And the final song intones, “God is a faggot, and all love is love.” If the film seems designed to provoke anyone with an even slightly conservative streak, well, it wasn’t. “Some of it is naughty and offensive, but that’s just our point of view, and we’re making a movie for us,” Jackson says. “If people are offended, people are offended. I exist anyway. So they can be offended by my art as well if they’d like.”

Spoilers for Dicks: The Musical abound.

What reactions do you want to this film?
J.S.: We only wrote this for the people that will like it. We’re not edgelords. It’s mostly Dadaist and absurd and queer to want to push a thousand buttons. People have said to us, “I bet you can’t wait until Tucker Carlson picks this up,” and I’m like, “I can wait.” That was not the intention of this, even though I know some people think it was.

You say “offensive” is part of your POV. What do you like about the aesthetic of it?
A.J.: We come from a very underground, alt-comedy background, so we’re always being freaks and geeks. It’s weird, fucked-up basement shit. This movie came out of that. I’m not easily offended. I’m putting my own perspective out there.

J.S.: We were raised on Strangers With Candy — that’s always been the shit that makes me laugh. It’s not trying to be full-on Dane Cook. It’s very John Waters. It’s that queer version where you’re pushing buttons, but you’re not just pushing the offensive button. You’re also pushing the stupidity and absurdism buttons.

Can you describe the vibe of Fucking Identical Twins?
A.J.: Even at UCB, it was a cult hit. It was a pretty rowdy crowd.

J.S.: It became a queer mixer. Most shows you’d pair with another show. Then UCB found that because ours was bombastic and also a musical, nothing could follow it. So after a month of that, they were like, “What about you do the whole hour?” Then as a joke, we’d say, “Join the artists for a post-show talk back at Barracuda,” which was the closest gay bar. It was a long time of running the show that had a little following and also had a social component where everybody would go out.

A.J.: Even if people couldn’t see the show that night, they’d be like, “Oh, I’ll just meet you at the bar.”

I wanted to talk about the metanarrative of those Barracuda nights. They have some hefty lore as a founding moment for the modern queer alt-comedy scene.
A.J.: They have lore, baby!

J.S.: That was how I met Bowen and Matt, who I know glowingly built this lore you speak of. It was where we got to know a lot of the younger gay comics.

A.J.: Joel Kim Booster had just moved to New York. I met him at Barracuda after Twins.

J.S.: The podcast cabal.

Did you see it as a community-building activity then?
J.S.: No, it was literally a joke. It became important to us, but it was more just like an added perk. It became part of the sell — people loved to go to the show, then you all went out to Barracuda after and you saw Bob the Drag Queen.

A.J.: We would invite the whole audience. We weren’t trying to build community, but we do love to throw a party. The movie feels like a party, and the show felt like a party.

Then what do you think of the lore?
A.J.: I do think that time was very formative for a lot of us becoming friends.

J.S.: It just spoke to the fact that there was not a lot of queer stuff going on at UCB. So when there was this one, people took it as this moment to assemble. Now it’s localized in different spaces. We have comedy clubs like the Bell House and Littlefield, and these people are all running shows and doing each other’s shows. There was just less of that then. UCB still felt like the big game in town because that was the end of the improv era, before our generation of queers was doing alt stuff.

We’re also always like, Well, John Early and Kate Berlant are mother and father.

A.J.: And Jeff Hiller.

The way that I’ve heard it told is not that you guys were the first queer comedians, but that it was the first time there was queer comedy community where no one needed to see one another as competition.
J.S.: I think for that generation, yes. We were in our 20s all coming up, wanting to spend a Tuesday night getting drunk at a drag bar. We happened to be the show that ran for long enough that it became a twice-a-month thing. Even UCB sketch nerds would go see it a lot, because it’s just easier to watch that three or four times than just the same sketch. Our show being at UCB often felt like an interloper, because it felt like the queer takeover of this space.

When making the movie, what was important to you to preserve about the original?
A.J.: The 30-minute show had a lot of plot-compression jokes and was very fast. Bang bang whizz bang ratatat. We knew it needed more space to breathe, but the movie is very absurdist and silly, and we didn’t want there to be 20 minutes without a laugh while the twins think. We still wanted it to be a runaway train.

J.S.: When Larry came on, he had seen videos of the stage show and loved the energy of the room and us fucking with each other. That’s why he shot a lot in proscenium. He wanted the cinematic version. The stage show was The Parent Trap in half an hour but it wasn’t like, “Let’s stretch The Parent Trap out.” It’s like, “Now The Parent Trap’s in the first 40 minutes and then it should take this left turn and be this other thing.” I didn’t want this to be The Parent Trap in 90 minutes. Then it would just be The Parent Trap.

A.J.: Larry was also very good about that. When we were writing it originally, we added even more characters than there are now in the movie and stuck to The Parent Trap more. It was still off the fucking walls, but he stripped some away and got even closer to the stage show. And Larry has never seen either version of The Parent Trap; he has no idea what it’s about.

J.S.: As a point of pride. In press, when they ask him about The Parent Trap, he’s like, “I’ve never seen it, and I never will. I didn’t want this film to be parody.”

When you were first conceptualizing the show, what clicked for you as ripe for queer chaos, or “camp,” about The Parent Trap?
J.S.: We liked The Parent Trap, but we also chose it out of a logistical necessity where we just wanted a two-man musical. With The Parent Trap, we could play the twins, then we could switch between playing parents. But once we got into it, we liked that we could take the thing and pervert it, like Strangers With Candy.

A.J.: They’re these family-friendly, all-heart, darling movies … but what if everyone in them were bad, horrible people? That is camp.

What excites you about chaos?
J.S.: It comes back to UCB. That is the ethos of that space, which is why the show did well there — it was very middle finger–y. But it comes from a place of joy and delight, and not from wanting you to feel bad.

A.J.: We will happily make fun of improv along with the rest of the world, but when improv is good, the fact that you’re watching something completely shaped by spontaneity is incredible. The show that’s going well could turn bad at any second, and that is so electric. That’s why people love watching Judy Garland. She’s right there on the brink of going south, but she’s giving you all she can give you. For the movie, we wanted to take some of that live danger.

When did you start to see it as a movie?
J.S.: By the end, we truly did 150 rewrites — it was in development so long that it got so fucking tight. I could see this whole thing in my head, and you couldn’t cut a thing. Every scene related to the next scene. But it wasn’t until I showed up on set and they were building apartments that I was like, Oh, this is a real movie. We just never thought it was going to get made.

I want to talk about the word faggot, which you love.
J.S.: In certain contexts.

What do you love about it?
J.S.: It does make me laugh. I’m not of the belief that it has to make everyone laugh. It’s the classic answer of “Take this thing that was used against you and reclaim it.” But it is a funny-sounding word. And it’s become a descriptor I really identify with: Am I gay? No, I’m just sort of a faggot.

What it is about faggot versus gay man?
J.S.: Well, I love that it’s non-gendered. I think I’m a man, but I just don’t care enough to want to lead with that.

A.J.: It’s a slur, and I love words that have a little power to them, a little zap. I love all the curse words.

J.S.: And the idea that it’s trying to push you on an iceberg and send you out to sea. “Fuck off, faggot!” I’d rather be that. “This should hurt.” Great. I don’t need you anyway. I’ll go over here with the other faggots.

There’s a sensibility implied beyond just sexuality, right?
J.S.: For sure.

How is the faggot sensibility different than the gay sensibility?
A.J.: Gay is more clinical. Pete Buttigieg and John Waters are gay, but John Waters is a faggot. I’m not sure Pete Buttigieg is a faggot. That’s not to say it’s political; there are faggots who are Republican.

J.S.: There’s a part to it that’s about owning the ugly parts, too, and not trying to sanitize it. It’s a freak show.

A.J.: Folsom is a faggot event, whereas a lot of Pride is gay. Gay pride is gay pride, not fag pride.

J.S.: With the movie’s last song, the joke is what happens when you take the “all love is love” message and just push it out to its extremes. But then we were like, “It is funny to trick the audience into singing ‘God is a faggot.’” At the stage show, we would shove mics in the audience’s faces only for the word “faggot” to watch how people would react when they’re lost in a crowd singing it. When they were isolated, some people would rebuke it. But there was one time, with this 70-year-old man, where we went “God is a …” and he went, “FAGGOT!”

A.J.: It was decades waiting.

J.S.: And the whole audience cheered. We had removed the barbs. We are now inviting you to use this word in a joyful, absurdist context. So obviously, when thinking of the movie, we did the same thing with a bouncing ball. It’s like a cinematic version of the same joke.

I am really interested in the “ugliness” that you put in there with the idea of the faggot. There’s messiness in there, and bitchiness, and an uncomfortable kind of camp.
J.S.: Is this not God?

A.J.: We really respond to that ugly-weird. There are slick, well-produced movies that I like, but I get very bored during most movies. My brain is smooth, and everything’s sliding off. I can predict what’s going to happen, or even if I can’t, I’m bored. It’s trying to keep me safe, but life is not safe, and I don’t need it to be safe. That’s not why we’re writing — we’re writing it to be funny. So yes, it’s gay, but it’s also just what I like.

J.S.: Especially right now, we’re both hungry for comedies that have jokes, characters, and points of view. A lot of them have turned into dramedies. I like a lot of them, but we don’t get off on it. We like the idea that we could make a joke-aligned comedy and that the jokes could push in a hundred different directions.

It was wild just how many incredible people agreed to do it. Larry, Nathan, Mullally, Marius de Vries. With Nick Offerman, his participation came from him and Megan having us over for dinner all the time. He would say, “They will teach this in theater school. I feel it honors my 20-year-old self who was doing avant-garde theater in Chicago.” Finally we were like, “Would you do it?” And he was like, “I would hold lights if you wanted.” I remember a guy who was the second report to the scenic designer who was like, “I signed on because I like the title. I want Fucking Identical Twins on my IMDb.” We were like, “Welcome aboard!”

But now it’s Dicks: The Musical.
J.S.: I think he’ll still like it. It’ll still jump out on his résumé.

What’s so exciting about messiness, beyond just that you like it?
J.S.: Life is messy. A lot of people try to pretend it’s not to get through it, but embracing it feels more honest to me. Particularly as queer people, you’re relegated to, Your life is gross and weird. Embracing that is fun to me.

A.J.: I came from a very conservative background, as did Josh, and everyone would say, “Don’t say that. That’s bad.” I was just like, “Why is it bad? I don’t care.” To me, that’s more real than pretending everything is fine. Both of us are sweet people, but when you’re told to be polite and to do something a certain way even when it feels bad, I hated that. I couldn’t wait to leave suburbia. I was like, I need to get to a city. It’s gritty and it knows it’s gritty. I feel at home in filth.

J.S.: The moments where we get to go see Christeene, a full drag terrorist, are the moments when I think, Thank God I’m alive. Thank God I’m gay in New York. There are gay people in New York who would never know of her or who would not like her, but I’m like, This is why I’m gay.

What Dicks feels like to me is that video of Charlene with Idina Menzel at Metropolitan — the messy queer life meeting that polished version of musical theater.
A.J.: I’m a musical-theater major. We wanted to make a real, original musical. We didn’t want to make fun of musicals.

J.S.: Every UCB musical is either a flag-waving parody of Les Mis, or it’s a real musical but it’s not funny. We wanted ours to have a joke in every line. It’s not a film for test screenings, which blessedly enough people knew. But we kept saying, “You’re not showing them a finished movie.” The music was bare bones, and people didn’t know that. None of these songs were hitting, and it really felt flat. Then the full music that Karl wrote and Marius produced and arranged the shit out of came in at the last minute, and it changed the game. This film is so wild and crazy and intentionally shitty that the music being incredible holds the whole piece together.

A.J..: It’s a high-low mix. The movie is filthy with good songs that are also dirty and weird, but everyone in the movie is very committed.

How else did the high-low come in?
J.S.: It’s us, as nobodies, paired with legends. We felt very lucky that our brain trust was us and Larry Charles — a comedy legend who fully got us and advocated for us and was one step ahead of everything we were thinking. Karl is an incredible composer who hasn’t worked in the film space, but he got paired with Marius. It was fun to see those collaborations. That “Lonely” song ultimately became, What if this was fully emotional with Nathan and Mullally getting to act the shit out of it for three minutes? It wouldn’t have flown in the stage show, but we had room for beats that we didn’t have before.

It’s also faggy to love musicals.
J.S.: One of my favorite parts of the movie is at the end of “Lonely” when Megan Mullally pops the fuck off and sings to heaven. When I’ve watched it in screenings with faggots, frankly, they’re going crazy. Those riffs hit harder at the Broadway Cares screening than I’ve ever seen, because it was gay people that were like, “I love to watch a woman sing fierce.”

We wanted very little heart in this movie. Obviously, you have to have some of that. People have to care. But when the music is there, it takes care of that, and we didn’t then have to write all these lines with pathos. The characters could be absurd cartoons doing crazy shit.

In John Waters movies, the characters don’t have actual hearts, but you care because of the subtext of relating to the creator.
J.S.: This was also a big Larry thing, where he was like, “These characters do not need to be relatable.” If you try to make them grounded and normal, the audience is going to turn on them. But if we are true to Aaron and Josh in our sensibility, then the audience can be with you.

The audience begins empathizing with the movie itself. We like that it got made.
A.J.: We start with title cards that let you know, “Hey, these actors are gay, but they’re playing straight.” The audience is instantly like, Oh, those are the gay guys I was told about.

J.S.: It’s the classic fucking Susan Sontag camp of acknowledging artifice. You definitely know we are Aaron and Josh all the time. You definitely know Nathan Lane is Nathan Lane. You certainly know it’s Megan Thee Stallion. You’re invested in these people doing this little goofy project and having a lot of fun together. You’re more invested in the project than you are in Craig or Trevor.

You bring up Susan Sontag, but one of her points is that naïve camp, like Mommie Dearest, is more satisfying than intentional camp. How do you make camp satisfying when you know you’re camp?
J.S.: We’re using “camp” a lot because that’s a buzzword, but we’re rarely seeking to be camp. The intentional artifice is more true to this originating as a two-man show in a black box. You always knew it was us doing it, because we were in shitty wigs.

A.J.: I hate to call it punk, but it’s kind of punk to me. And then because we are queer, our version of punk is camp. John Waters is camp, but his work is also punk. People are eating shit. But acknowledging artifice is camp, and we definitely do that throughout the entire movie.

J.S.: Our version is what Larry was always saying: “I want you to feel like you’re in the room with us.” That sensibility and DIY-ness can feel camp.

A.J.: We weren’t saying, “Let’s make a camp classic.”

J.S.: In the original show, there was a sense of danger.

I felt that especially when Nathan Lane was mama-birding food to the sewer boys out of his mouth. It felt like a dare.
A.J.: And then you see the bloopers, and it really was a dare.

J.S.: This is a spoiler, but we have a sex scene, and Larry pitched that. We were never going to do that, but Larry really wanted us to do it.

A.J.: In the stage show, we made out and spit on each other then got married, but Larry was like, “No, you guys should fuck.”

In that scene, there’s a grossness because they’re identical twins, but it’s also like you’re seeing how far you can push the world of the movie.
J.S.: When people say, “It’s gross, they’re twins,” I’m like, “It’s so not gross. The central joke of the movie is we don’t look anything alike.” We’re Josh and Aaron. We’ve always said that it’s not a sex scene, it’s a masturbation scene. These guys are selfish assholes — of course the only person they could ever love is their identical twin. When these straight guys get everything they want, they still want more.

I want to talk about bitchiness. Bitchiness is typically a part of the gay comedic voice, but this is a shockingly un-bitchy movie for how faggy it is, no?
A.J.: We like characters that like themselves and the world they inhabit. Gay bitches are usually cynics — they’re commenting, but they’re not involved. They’re back-row kids. These are all front-row kids. They’re very happy to be there. Everyone is all-in, and they’re all like, “I don’t give a shit what you think. I’m doing this because I’m very self-involved.” Of course, Bowen’s character is God, and, as the narrator, he’s the bitchiest, but he’s not involved in the story.

Even in Bowen’s bitchiness, you’re celebrating him as a bitch.
J.S.: Old Testament God is a bitch. It’s true to text!

A.J.: And I love bitchiness. The title cards say, “This is the first time gay men have ever written anything.” Someone thought that was a dig at Billy Eichner and Bros, and we were like, “No, that was in the UCB show in a pre-show announcement.” Josh and I don’t play in that world very often. We’re nihilistic optimists.

There is a nihilism to this movie.
J.S.: Conversations with people through the years of developing this were always like, “What’s the message?” None. “But the message is ‘All love is love.’” No, the message is “God is a faggot.”

More on Dicks: The Musical

See All ‘I Feel at Home in Filth’

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