Please don’t equivocate homophobia with closeted homosexuality.
There are tons of homophobes who aren’t in the closet, and tons of gay guys in the closet who aren’t homophobic. Not to mention that using this as an ‘attack’ toward a homophobe is literally using gay as an insult, which is the same thing homophobes do.
It does gay people no good.
It’s not out of fashion at all, “virgin” just became “incel”. The intent is identical.
To make that joke? No.
To make the joke, having already decided to make it, as funny as possible? Yes.
People (I’m in the US) are pretty much always astonished to realize, when I ask them to say the word “important”, that they more often than not will pronounce zero of the T’s in the word, when I point out that they didn’t.
It always really stuck out to me as a kid when Shawnee Smith (probably most famous for the Saw movies now), on the old sitcom Becker, would always enunciate the T’s in that word—that’s what made me realize how weird it was that everyone wasn’t saying it that way, lol.
Apparently, there’s some sort of linguistic exchange program within British English where T’s are traded out for R’s, and then a persistent logistics issue causes the R’s to be distributed incorrectly.
No one is thinking this deeply when they call a man who just said/did something they don’t like an “incel”. People just use it mindlessly as an insult, same as with “virgin”.