you men, stop that
The thing about Police Academy --in particular, but also several of the other films from my childhood that preached irreverence through most of the story--is that that, in the end, the status quo is held up. At the beginning, these new recruits are jokes. By the end of the film, they have all bought in to the police academy, even Mahoney, who was forced into it, and Jones, who happened into it because of Mahoney. The film reifies law and order, promotes conformity, and reinforces heteronormativity. Regarding the latter, the film starts in on masculinity at least right away. The second segment is Mahoney at work and he shames a guy for having a wig. Losing your hair is an easy mark for a measure of one's manhood. McCann, Plummer, and Minichiello (2010) explains: Humour's role as an 'othering' technique has two functions: first, it marks out what is to be taken seriously such as stoic, heterosexual masculinity, and what can be devalued by being laugh at. (p. 519) Fla...