In an interview with The Guardian, Seth Rogen talked about his recent realization that some jokes in his films, including Superbad—and, now that you mention it, yes, even his recent movies—are “blatantly homophobic.”
While promoting his new film, Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, Rogen told the paper he only recently noticed this trend of disturbing bro humor in retrospect:
“It’s funny looking at some movies we’ve made in the last 10 years under the lenses of new eras, new social consciousness. There’s for sure some stuff in our earlier movies — and even in our more recent movies — where even like a year later you’re like ‘Eh, maybe that wasn’t the greatest idea.’”
Namely, it’s the homoeroticism played for laughs in Superbad, he says. “There are probably some jokes in ‘Superbad’ that are bordering on blatantly homophobic at times,” he says. “They’re all in the voice of high school kids, who do speak like that, but I think we’d also be silly not to acknowledge that we also were, to some degree, glamorizing that type of language in a lot of ways.”
On Neighbors 2, a movie in which young women get to be reckless partiers, Rogen acknowledges, “The Greek system seems a little sexist. The sheer fact that the women and the men don’t have equal rights and opportunities I think by definition makes it sexist, so that’s something we talked a lot about while we were making the movie.”
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