‘Sex comedy’ is a rather nebulous classification; films like American Pie (1999), and much of Judd Apatow’s oeuvre (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Superbad) fit the bill, with ancient Greek and Restoration comedies and the films of Doris Day and Rock Hudson providing a lineage for comedies that revolve around sex. It’s a genre that can be reactionary in terms of gender politics, but two contemporary novels, Jen Beagin’s recent Big Swiss (2023) and Miranda July’s The First Bad Man (2015) are doing interesting things, moving away from the rather masculinist bent of the form. It turns out sex organs are more central to sex comedies than might at first be apparent, and these novels are shifting the focus in a fundamental way.
Both ancient Greek and Restoration comedies are often characterized by what Deborah Payne Fisk calls a ‘swaggering masculine energy’ (xii), and while the swagger dissolves into something much more neurotic in modern films like American Pie and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, it’s largely the hapless male hero who is the focus for the audience’s sympathies. Humiliation is often key to the comedy, and cultural taboos mean women can’t be humiliated in quite the same way. Women are physically more vulnerable, while the condition of femininity, for complex reasons (with objectification perhaps preeminent), seems rather brittle and breakable. Wayne Koestenbaum argues that femininity is peculiarly liable to humiliation, as ‘something that can be ruined, impeached, reproached, poached upon- a capacity or endowment vulnerable to smear and stain and scar’ (32). Masculinity, conversely, is more robust, and perhaps central to that quality is the penis and its indefatigability, something frequently underscored in sex comedies. Just think of Jim and the pie in American Pie, for example, and the multitude of embarrassing erections elsewhere. The penis is often figured as hapless but – mostly – unflagging. Indeed, for Howard Jacobson, ‘In its unpredictability, in its capacity for abrupt movement and sudden change, in its miraculous powers of recovery (or not), the phallus gives the comic its dynamic pattern’ (62). It’s a rather audacious claim, but recovery and resilience and the assurance of indestructability are certainly central to the comic universe – that ‘vigorous, exhilarating rebound of living things from mishap’ that Jack Morgan argues is so characteristic of comedy (32). The quality of endearing resilience partly accounts for the penis’s comic dominance.
The vagina, meanwhile, remains obscure. Largely unseen, and still shrouded in mystery, and without any of the cultural familiarity of the penis (see, dick jokes and all those nicknames). This is changing, though, and Beagin and July are just two of the artists attempting to dispel the vagina’s troubling mystique and allow for a more sturdy cultural presence. In Big Swiss, for instance, a novel about an intense love affair between Greta and Flavia (aka Big Swiss), we get detailed descriptions of their genitalia when the women first have sex. First, it’s Big Swiss:
‘Her pussy looked like advanced origami. A crisp pink lotus flower folded by a master. Greta briefly rearranged it with her mouth. The flower transformed into an acorn. Then a unicorn. Then back again. Greta dragged her tongue over it diagonally three dozen times. Now it resembled two dragonflies languidly mating on a lily pad’ (168).
Older (and not a ‘perfectionist’ Swiss), Greta’s pussy is not as ‘pristine and tidy’ – rather, it’s ‘a clumsily wrapped Christmas present. Too much wrinkled, recycled paper, not enough tape. At the top, a crooked little bow’ (169). Interestingly, while the description is detailed, it’s entirely metaphorical (flesh as paper), perhaps revealing that even in this seemingly transgressive text there’s a lingering inability to forgo the habitual reticence about women’s genitalia. But there is something to be said for this transformation – the pussy is perhaps too starkly itself – too vulnerably fleshy – and the play of metaphor provides the grounds for a new robustness.
In July’s The First Bad Man, however, there’s little reticence in the account of the protagonist Cheryl’s infatuation with her house guest, Clee. Much older and ostensibly heterosexual, Cheryl is in denial about her lust for Clee, and her sexual fantasies are all routed through the ‘medium’ of Phillip, her crush.
‘Clee thought her pink boxers covered her but they didn’t. If she was sitting cross-legged I could see the edge of her dark blond pubic hair and sometimes more. One morning I saw a flash of labia, pink and hanging loose. Not the tidy, concealed meat that I had been imagining. With this new information Phillip had to go back and redo all the sex he had already done. He really wanted to see her anus although he wouldn’t have called it that. I reread all his texts but didn’t find a word for it. I went with pucker. I’LL ADMIT IT, he might have written, I WANT TO RAM MY STIFF MEMBER INTO HER PUCKER’ (2015, 112).
That matter-of-fact description of Clee’s genitalia feels pretty shocking, but July’s explicitness is underwritten by Cheryl’s innocence – her rather dated sexual slang comically at odds with the aggression of her sexual desire. July is clearly attuned to the importance of vocabulary, and the levels of discomfort and resistance involved in confronting taboos about sexual explicitness and Cheryl’s quaint language allows July ‘to go out on a limb while simultaneously being familiar and inviting’ (2011, 52).
While stand-up is not strictly sex comedy, it’s certainly comedy much preoccupied with sex, and this is another art form where the vaguely ignominious secrecy of the vagina is being countered. Ali Wong, in her special Hard Knock Wife (2018), ‘takes a staple of male standup comedy- the dick joke- and turns it into an extended peroration on the transformation that childbirth can wreak upon a woman’s labia’ (Mead, 2018). For all the thrill of such bold truth-telling, though, there is a risk that simply talking explicitly about sex is for women a form of edge-lordism, and an attempt to ape a macho stance. Jacqueline Novak’s show On Your Knees (2022) takes a different angle, and one that is distinctively feminine and cerebral – the show is both a disquisition on the blow job and a candid account of her own sentimental and sexual education. She demythologises the penis – showing it to be less resilient than often thought. (The long tradition of erectile dysfunction jokes counters that notion of resilience, too, but it’s an uninspiring archive and without much current cultural purchase.) Like July, she understands the importance of vocabulary: ‘‘penis’ – it has soft syllables’, she says, but ‘cock’, with its hard consonants and the suggestion of machismo, is ‘flattery’. For Novak, the penis is the ‘more flower-like, delicate, it needs to be wooed’ and describes her concern for its vulnerability on first sighting: ‘shouldn’t that retract now? Surely that shouldn’t be out here.’ It’s not that the penis is the butt of her jokes exactly; the show is more treatise than takedown, and Novak recognises that more dick jokes are not the answer. Instead, in her circuitous and tumbling riffs, she’s dismantling the machismo of the dick joke. Pondering the phrase ‘rock hard boner’, she says, ‘it’s not rock hard – you could imagine it served up on a plate, tender’, thus returning the comic robustness of the phallus to vulnerable fleshiness.
As a sign of cultural confidence and familiarity, the dick joke is a way of incidentally re-inscribing the phallus at the centre of things, a centrality that Novak is questioning, and that others are seeking to counter, by finding the same kind of casual presence and symbolic parity for the pussy.
Beagin, Jen (2023). Big Swiss. London: Faber & Faber
Jacobson, Howard (1997). Seriously Funny: from the Ridiculous to the Sublime. London: Viking.
July, Miranda (2015). The First Bad Man. Edinburgh: Canongate Books.
July, Miranda (2011) ‘I Am Wild And Always Will Be: A Conversation with Miranda July’, PDR, Vol. 1, No. 2
Koestenbaum, Wayne (2011). Humiliation. London: Notting Hill Editions.
Mead, Rebecca (2018) ‘Ali Wong’s Comedy, Ivanka Trump’s Instagram, and the Rights of Mothers’, The New Yorker, 5 June. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/ali-wongs-comedy-ivanka-trumps-instagram-and-the-rights-of-mothers
Morgan, Jack (2002). The Biology of Horror: Gothic Literature and Film. Southern Illinois University Press.
Payne Fisk, Deborah (2005). Introduction to Four Restoration Libertine Plays. Oxford University Press, p. xii.
Humour in the Arts 