Sex comedy  

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farce, comedy of manners, burlesque, bawdy, sexual humor, bedroom farce

British sex comedy films, commedia erotica all'italiana

Sex comedy is a vague term for comedies with sexual content. They may range from comic pornographic films to relatively innocent romantic comedies that include jokes about sex and other sexual related humor. They are indebted to ribaldry, the burlesque and the picaresque.

Sex comedy is a term for comedy movies with sexual content usually referring to those made in Britain in the mid 1970s. They may refer to comic pornographic films most famous sex comedy movies of the 1970s are 'Confessions of...' starring Robin Askwith such as Confessions of a Window Cleaner it concerns the erotic adventures of Timothy Lea. Similar series 'Adventures of...' directed by Stanley Long including Adventures of A Taxi Driver.

• Las Nenas del mini-mini (1969) - Germán Lorente
• Sex-shop (1972) - Claude Berri
• Tarzoon, la honte de la jungle / Tarzoon, shame of the jungle (1975)

   X-RATED COMEDIES

   Yes, we know we're dragging Creamguide's respectable name through the mud with this choice of subject, and we're very, very sorry. But, the fact that we can't think of anything else that starts with X aside, there's much worthy of exploration here, as these films provide not only a compendium of British comedy acting talent in its rent-paying dotage, but they also form part of the story of the British film industry's post-'60s decline as a whole. Oh, and it's the richest seam of film titles based around weak puns and ending in exclamation marks we know of, which must count for something, surely?

   The story of the sexcom begins with former horror film cinematographer and exploitation entrepreneur extraordinaire Stanley A Long. Long made his name, in the law courts as much as the cinema, with 1961's WEST END JUNGLE ("The sex-film that London banned! Made in the actual places of vice!!") a breathless "exposé" of Soho's sex trade, made in a mock-documentary style that was to provide the blueprint for British sex films for a decade before comedy came into the equation. Various follow-ups appeared in short order, with titles like LONDON IN THE RAW and TAKE OFF YOUR CLOTHES AND LIVE! 1965's PRIMITIVE LONDON is a bizarre bit of salacious moralising indeed, with scenes of beatniks, kids and Billy J Kramer being interviewed about pop music and, of course, "free love", familiar enough from endless '60s documentaries, strangely intercut with gruesome footage of car crashes, operations and battery hens being slaughtered, and appearances from Barry Cryer and Mick MacManus.

   This weird mix can be explained - sort of - by the still very strict censorship to which films in the UK were subject. Cheap exploitation fare had to show it was taking a moral stance, or at least paying lip-service to one, and hence films from this era are all "exposés" of the nefarious activities of wife-swappers, porn merchants and increasingly delinquent youth. Of course, it's all just an excuse to revel in the vicarious thrills these subjects provide, but the finger-wagging tone of the voice-over narration, coupled with the tabloidesque sleazing-up, ironically makes the films seem far dirtier than they actually are. They were extremely tame, and not only by today's standards. The following year's SECRETS OF A WINDMILL GIRL had Pauline Collins playing an ingénue showgirl at the celebrated eponymous theatre, agonising over whether or not to appear nude on stage, and finally deciding, er, not to bother. Martin Jarvis and Harry Fowler provide local colour from both ends of the spectrum.

   Probably the first out-and-out sex comedy came from Long's Salon Productions stable in 1969, with former "naturist" film director and horror scriptwriter Derek Long at the helm. THIS, THAT AND THE OTHER! was a portmanteau comic trilogy (with stories called This, That and, er, The Other) every bit as effortlessly funny as that exclamation mark in the title might suggest. Genuine star names begin to appear - Dennis Waterman and Alexandra 'Champions' Bastedo among them. Probably the biggest at the time was Victor 'Not a drop of water touched me' Spinetti, as a suicidal depressive who hooks up with - hooray! - a saucy hippy girl. Elsewhere, cab-driving porn- hound John Bird crashes his carriage and suffers erotic hallucinations in what amounts to some very experimental film-making for the largely no-nonsense genre. The sub-Carry On quickfire style hadn't yet been purloined, but here already was the basic set-up that pretty much every sexcom would take - horny young bloke, lecherous middle-aged bloke, naive-yet-sexually-available nymphet and latently rampant older woman all find themselves thrown together in various perms and combs by unabashedly contrived circumstance, and Fanny's your aunt. --http://tv.cream.org/specialassignments/films/filmsx.htm [May 2005]

• Sex is Comedy (2002) - Catherine Breillat
• The Libertine (La Matriarca)
• Carnal Knowledge (1971) - Mike Nichols
• Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
• Cry Uncle (1971) - John G. Avildsen