Analysis Of Three's Comedy By David Adjmi

In high school, I was driving my brother and his friend home from school. His friend wouldn’t stop using the words “fag” and “faggot” in reference to people he and my little brother knew. So, at a stop light, I told him he either stopped using those words in my presence or I could pull over and he could walk to my house.

The word “faggot” is one of those unspeakable words that people just don’t say anymore primarily because it is horribly offensive to those in the LGBTQ+ community. No one involved in the production of this play ever uses this kind of language in real life. However, David Adjmi–an openly gay man himself–chose to include this vulgar language, as well as other racial slurs, in this play in order to make a point about the way we treated people then and the way we continue to treat them now. He chose the lens of the sitcom Three’s Comedy because even that show is continually lauded as a major part of American culture, upon rewatching it, it’s cringingly racist and homophobic.
And even though there are many moments in this play that are very ha-ha funny, pain is a major theme throughout; the pain of sexual assault, the pain of trauma, the pain of thinking you’re too fat, the pain of coming to terms with being gay, the pain of being in love, etc. It’s a very, very funny play about pain. Or a really tragic play that happens to have a lot of good jokes about pain. A reviewer of the play says it captures of sort of “psychological stasis” we all undergo to deny feeling the pain in our lives. We hope you’ll understand that