So there are people who go to orgies, or do poly, or just know a lot about organs and what you can do to em. Safe sex fans. Good people, but they are nerds. They are not cool.
The cool sex people are the ones blowing crack pipes at uncle mike’s highway ribs and catching ultra aids from seventeen freaks through orifices they invented for the occasion. I don’t make the rules; it’s cooler to not care about anything. Responsible sex people are inherently less cool than diseased addicts.
Which is fine. It’s good to be a sex nerd. Just wanna clarify who I’m talking to before I ask my question.
Any sex nerds in my readership? I’m trying to figure out these jokers. Let’s call them sex jokers. Specifically Dan the Automator Nakamura and his friends, who were responsible for the bands Handsome Boy Modeling School, Lovage, and Got a Girl. (among others; u kno how hip hop people do)
This isn’t a huge genre of art, but it exists, and Automator isn’t the only exponent of it. Arguably Edward Gorey’s The Curious Sofa was an example. Basically they make sexy art that treats sex as a ridiculous joke.
But it is still sexy. So are these artists actually expressing horniness or are they just doing a comic bit? Or is it both? I know Gorey was asexual, I know little about Mr. Nakamura and friends.
How do you laugh at sex while also getting off on it? Are these sex jokers all on a grade to being litcheral clown sex aficionados? I feel like I’m missing something.
Maybe I should try to have more sex to figure it out. Anyway, here’s Lovage sounding like a parody of Portishead for the sex joker set.
As I reflect, there’s probably an explanation in the years of music criticism regarding The Cramps, Mojo Nixon, Reverend Horton Heat… Still, who wants to dig? Enlighten me, nerds.
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EDIT to add: Electric Six, how could I forget? And that song S-E-X-X-Y by TMBG. And some unforgivable shit by Jonathan Coulton and others.
I think I’m clearly a sex nerd, though I’m not as into the art and music of sex as you seem to be. I have no opinion on Nakamura. While I’m familiar with (and enjoy) Gorey, “The Curious Sofa” is not a work with which I am familiar.
That said, TCS was intended as a satire of The Story of O. Having written both serious pornography — including activist pornography — and satires of pornography, I think I’m well equipped to comment on absurdist and facetious sex humour.
right, fantastic. ok. so. i guess it seems to me like laughing at sex would undercut erotic feeling, but there are clearly a lot of horny artists laughing at sex. why is?
So, first off, laughing at sex doesn’t necessarily cut erotic feeling, though it does tend to be incompatible with orgasming.
The thing is, though, that a lot of things that are “sex” in some sense or other are also funny. And if you don’t need your orgasm **right now** because you’re confident that it will still be available later, you can stop and laugh for a bit.
It’s not entirely unlike the advice that one should stop to smell roses along one’s path when one sees them. Sure, it slows down your arrival at your ultimate destination, but it has a value of its own, and ultimately it actually does save time b/c you don’t have to make a separate journey just to find roses to snort. So if something funny happens during sexiness, roll with the funny. There’s still time to go wobbly kneed later.
Then, too, there’s the fact that a lot of things that are in some sense “sex” are also not likely to produce orgasm. Peeing, watching pee, peeing on, and being peed on are all relatively popular kinks that don’t have any obvious path to orgasm. (I mean, it’s possible to cum from getting peed on, but I doubt that’s common.) Spanking, too, but that’s less likely to elicit laughter, while the foibles of fleshy bodies can easily cause even carefully aimed spurts to miss. Shock at suddenly getting something in your eye or wherever can easily result in laughter.
Finally, there’s just doing things wrong — which happens in sex. Finger in the wrong hole? Accidental and unintended application of teeth to a sensitive area that isn’t appreciating that? Used the flavour of lube that your current lover hates but that was in your drawer because another lover (past or peri-present) liked it? Did the ice cube get slippery while you were tracing a body part and get dropped into the bed? Where is it now? No, it’s got to be here somewhere!
All these things and more are wonderful occasions for laughter. If you’re only performing the sexification for the orgasms, then this seems as wrong headed as stopping to smell the roses while on the way to the obstetrics ward when you’re already 5 cm dilated. But if you have the time, then why not enjoy ALL the feelings that sexytimes have to offer, the orgasmic ones, the playful ones, the loving ones, and the humorous ones?
And, of course, when creating art about sex, the most interesting artists are the ones who notice which aspects of their subject are least discussed, and try to make a statement about those. So the cool sex nerd artists are going to notice that they’ve had plenty of naked chuckles and guffaws, but when they see sex portrayed (in mainstream or porn movies, in books and smutty stories, etc.) they see a distinct lack of those playful and hilarious moments. As artists, making the same statement as someone else just isn’t very worth doing. Thus the attraction to something that is very much a part of sex, but is very much not part of discussions about sex.
yess this is what i needed! no time to read it now but i will return!
i’ve read it now, and while i might not be 100% to understanding of the phenomenon, it’s a good strong thesis. as a blogger i lean heavily on commenters to bring the thoughtfulness i lack, heh. muchas gracias.
I’m not really familiar with your examples, so this is more on the general topic
If you think about it (too much) sex is just kind of silly. So trying not to laugh at it becomes impossible and at some point someone will do comedy about it
Makes me wonder how many porn/sex scenes have been derailed by giggle fits
Hopefully without getting too much into my own weirdness, there’s also the power aspect. Trying to insist on seriousness in a silly situation makes you weak (e.g. Trump). It gives a clear way for other people in situation to remove that power
And when you consider the puritan side who insist you’re not allowed to talk about this too much, making sex jokes does really annoy them and attack that power
comments more thoughtful than OP itself, i got ’em. thanks, bud.
There are porn scenes that weren’t derailed by giggle fits. Look up tickling videos sometime.
smashing. i’ll get right on that.
we can just go straight to the dick jokes
or go gay to the dick jokes, whatever you like 😛
I can’t comment as a sex nerd, but I can comment about a couple comedic movies which were mainly about sex, if that is something you would be interested in.
The 1971 Pasolini film, The Decameron, Italian (with English subtitles) is probably the funniest. It’s a collection of nine shorts, each dealing with sex. Many of them have unexpected twists, some of them are quite sardonic, but still funny.
For some even weirder stuff, try Puppetry of the Penis, which is a basically a comedy show filmed for DVD. Released in 2003. It’s exactly what it says on the box. A couple of Australians perform “penis origami” with their most sensitive organs to create forms of The Eiffel Tower, The Loch Ness Monster, and other shapes.
Then there is Isabella Rossellini’s television series, Green Porno, made in 2008 and available on DVD. Rossellini dramatizes animal mating rituals, sea creatures and insects, and is educational as well as funny.
Oddly enough, with all of the US’s preoccupation with sex, there seem to be few comedies about sex made in the US. The couple I can think of, like Bakshi’s animated Fritz The Cat based on R. Crumb’s comic strip don’t really come together as coherent movies. There is the occasional nod to sex, and even some of the possible humor, the first Deadpool movie had a funny bit. Sex is usually used for only a quick laugh if it is comedic, or for 2-3 minutes to show the culmination of a romance. Sex may be discussed a lot, but the humorous aspects of sexual congress itself is generally not shown. Yet, there are a lot of US movies which show sex as leading to tragedy.
Then, of course, you might be interested in Umberto Eco’s essay, How to Recognize a Porn Movie, written in 1994 for Esquire, and then collected in his book of essays, How to Travel with a Salmon. The entire book is quite enjoyable, but there isn’t anything more about sex in it.
Flex’s comment about lack of mainstream US comedies about sex I think fits with my comment about the need to be comfortable with sex to make jokes. Mainstream US culture is deeply uncomfortable with sex, so any attempts to be funny are also deeply uncomfortable.
And not funny to anyone who doesn’t share that discomfort
That “deeply uncomfortable about sex” thing seems to be an Anglosphere thing, and to a lesser degree an Abrahamic thing. The latter I’ve explained elsewhere (the “temporarily embarrassed angels” mythology and nature-apartheid thing) but I’m not sure why it’s dialed up to 11 in ex-Brit societies. Maybe because the UK was the nucleation site for the Industrial Revolution and that made it possible to take nature-apartheid a lot farther than before without immediate starvation?
beans – gay 2 tha dicks today, thx
flex – i remember when Puppetry was on tour in the US and the dudes were on talk shows where no visual sample of their routine was in any way possible. awkward shit.
i saw a few of isabella’s animal sex bits when they aired as shorts on the independent film channel. funny lady.
there was a film genre for a minute in the 60s-70s called “sex farce.” couldn’t tell you how funny or sexy they were.
bek – we did start the colonies with the most repressed religious fanatics we could find. now i got a closet full of hair shirts and mormon underwear for lingerie. it hurts us precious.