Gay male whiteness, of the coastal elite kind, presents itself with the proclivity towards pop culture-and the broadness of whatever “pop culture” is, as well as the kind of people who say they’re obsessed with it, is part of the joke. In both tone and content, Billy Eichner has, under his eye, white gay coastal elites. But those aforementioned cultural objects are middlebrow liberal things watched by, admittedly, not that many people ( Mad Men averaged 2.3 million during its seven-season run and Last Week Tonight floats by on the virality of its YouTube clips). He’s very pointed in both expressing his passion for The Thing and getting the other people to have just as much exuberance for The Thing. Yes, technically, anyone can like these things: I’m sure lots of people have seen La La Land, Mad Men, and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, but the aggressiveness with which Billy approaches these topics, as if they’re a matter of life and death, seem to exist within a particular cultural niche. You will find Billy-tall, well built, hirsute-harangue people about La La Land and its Oscar chances, pester civilians regarding a threesome with him and Jon Hamm, and interrogate gays on the street as to whether or not they care about John Oliver. But you won’t find that on Billy on the Street. Dalloway to Audre Lorde to Angels in America to Judy Garland to Lady Gaga.
Queer culture is fluid, elastic, and can encompass everything from Mrs. Perhaps the reason Eichner, who fires on all cylinders at all times, is equally beloved and dismissed is because his target is gay male whiteness: Billy on the Street attempts to deconstruct the insularity of a gay media culture that’s very white, and relies on women and people of color not necessarily as significant subcultural contributors but as objects to gaze at. If gay male culture is often a foundation for the material that Eichner uses, both on Billy on the Street and on Hulu’s Difficult People (created and written by Julie Klausner), it’s a very specific subset of gay male culture, even subculture. (Even The New Yorker called his brand a “ comedy of confrontation ) There’s something subversive about what Eichner does that feels different from a lot of gay comedians.
He’s brash, a kind of confrontational that’s polarizing. This is simply the fact of his style of comedy, whether it occurs beside you on the streets of New York, where he shoots his TruTV show Billy on the Street, or through the speakers of your TV, computer, etc.