Well...when Berlusconi said "it's better to be fond of beautiful girls than being gay", the entire nation laughed for months.
I guess you guys don't find that sentence funny, do you?
It may not translate well enough to get the humor.
Although, perhaps a similar trope might go back to the 1990s, when Seinfeld was on. There was an episode where some people thought that Jerry and George were gay. They had to keep denying that they were gay, while still not appearing to be homophobic. "I'm not gay! Not that there's anything wrong with that!"