10 Years of Bitter Posts - Looking at Time-Travel movies and Sex Comedies

I had forgotten about some of my early attempts at theme weeks on this blog. In addition to deep dives on specific movies and TV shows, I also occasionally did weeklong looks at particular genres of films.

Time-travel films were the first to get this feature, starting with Lessons from The Terminator, and contrasted it with Lessons from Back to the Future. Using these two movies, I explained the difference between closed-loop time-travel and multiple timelines time-travel. A closed loop is when the movie reveals that the time-travel only made possible the history that was always meant to happen. The multiple timelines version of this is when the characters can actually alter history.

Then, to make everyone's head explode, I explored how parallel and alternate timelines worked, using J.J. Abrams's STAR TREK. If you're writing a time-travel movie, you MSUT be consistent about which type of time travel you're operating under, otherwise the audience will end up more confused than you want. (And yes, the Terminator film series doesn't stay consistent film-to-film on this, though each film is internally consistent on its own.

Sex Comedy Week took a lot of cues from bad scripts I'd seen over the years. In Furries Aren't Funny, I groaned at the overuse of the furry fetish to get a shocking laugh out of the audience. There are so many odd kinks and fetishes out there that it felt lazy to go for the same "Ohmigod! He/She is a Furry!" joke. Be creative about this - or better yet, make up a fetish whole cloth.

Along the same lines, I ranted against cheap titillation and gross-out sex gags. If you guessed this means I'm not a fan of AMERICAN PIE, reward yourself with a cookie right now. I'd seen so many gags about bodily fluids in scripts that I had to devote an entire post to it.

I kinda feel like I should go back and cover some of these topics in greater depth, but the way I blog now, I'll probably wait until the subjects are relevant to a movie or show I've just seen and go in on a deep dive.

Sex comedy week - Day 3: Bodily fluids aren't funny

Tuesday I invited everyone to comment on gross-out gags in sex comedies, and mentioned that two specific gags still gross me out to this day. I challenged the readers to guess which two gags they were. No one really took a stab at it, but they are:

1) Stifler drinking a semen-laced beer in American Pie

and

2) Austin Powers drinking Fat Bastard's shit in The Spy Who Shagged Me.

Humor is subjective, and I freely admit that there were probably viewers who found the whole thing hilarious. Both gags are based on similar premises - namely, that the victim's drink is laced with something disgusting that he's unaware of and the audience really hopes he doesn't drink. After several false starts, it seems like the character might not drink the disgusting concoction, only for them to gulp it down as the audience roars.

I will give the writers this, some thought went into the construction of the respective gags. It also seems that the writer's built up to these gags well enough that there was decent motivation for the payoff. It didn't feel like the writing session began with the mandate, "Let's have Austin drink shit!" However, I'd wager that 90% of the gross-out gags I read don't.

By the way, just assume I'm gagging as I type each paragraph. Like I said yesterday, just thinking about some of these gags makes me throw up in my mouth a little.

I wonder if bodily fluids gags are ever as funny as the writer thinks they are. Too often they feel just like that - gags. They serve no larger purpose in the script, they don't advance the characters and they don't have anything to do with the story thematically. The gag only flows from the writer saying "Hey, I figured out a great way to cover someone in semen!"

(And by the way, if I had ever made a list of "Things I never thought I'd type - especially in a forum I know my mother reads" the quoted portion of the sentence above would probably be near the top of it.)

A while back I read a script where some guys decide to have some fun with a sleeping friend. While he snores, they turn on a vacuum cleaner and set the tube so that it sucks his penis. That's only half the joke, as he suddenly starts to wake up. Panicking, his friends pull back the tube and try to shut off the the vacuum - but succeed only in going from suck to blow. Yep, that means that our poor guy who was just trying to take a nap ends up with a face full of semen.

Normally I'd feel bad about ruining such a seminal gag, but the fact is that even if such a joke were so unique that its mention here would force the writer to remove it, said removal would have absolutely NO impact on anything else in the story.

And why is semen the go-to fluid of choice lately? Is it just that American Pie seemingly broke that taboo and every urine joke has seemingly been told by now. I recall that one of the first slush pile scripts I ever read at my first internship dealt with a single woman who buys frozen sperm samples. Naturally, she kept these in the freezer and guess what happened when she threw a party and the guests realized they were running low on ice. Inspired isn't it? Then about two months later, I read virtually the exact same gag, except the set-up was that a guy was worried he'd be impotent after surgery so before he goes in, he freezes his semen in an ice cube tray.

Face it folks, you're not going to come up with an original way to deliver bodily fluids for laughs. I guess my point is that it isn't inherently funny to use semen or diarrhea in ways outside their normal context. Nor is just being gross justification enough in itself.

In the two produced examples I discussed above, the humor really comes from the close calls that the victim has with ingesting the fluid. That's where the comic tension lies. If Stifler immediately took a swig of his beer and gaged, it wouldn't be damn funny. Ideally, I'd ask you not to include such gags at all, but if you must I beg you to really ask yourself "Is this funny? Why is this funny?"

Words every comedy writer should hear - "Just because something makes you laugh doesn't mean it's funny."

Tuesday Talkback: Sex comedy week - Day 2

Over the years, I've read a lot of sex comedy specs from both pros and amateurs. If there are two things they all had in common they were: 1) cheap titillation and 2) gross-out gags.

Yet here's the interesting thing - I can't recall ever reading a scene in one of these films that was genuinely titillating. In fact, I can't remember even seeing a truly titillating scene in one of these movies. There's plenty of cheap T&A in those flicks, but that's not what I'm talking about. Scenes of naked breasts, or girls in bikinis and lingerie might be appealing as eye candy, but usually those moments are so "in your face" as to be empty calories. The fact that I can't pick out a single scene that was truly sexy might seem to back that up.

Gross-out gags are another matter. I can think of plenty of scenes that rubbed me the wrong way in some major films. We're going to discuss gross-out gags tomorrow, so I don't want to get ahead of myself. However, I'll give a no-prize to anyone who correctly guesses both of the gross-out gags that still make me want to throw up in my mouth a little when I think about them. (A few have made me laugh, so you lose points if you pick one I liked and one I hated.)

And while you're at it - try to prove me wrong and tell me what you think the sexiest moments in sex comedy history are. Shoot for "genuinely sexy" and not just "hey, cheap excuse to show boobs!" If you agree with my conclusions, then do you think the lesson is that sex in general is window dressing in a sex comedy?

Sex comedy week - Day 1: Furries aren't funny

If you're writing a sex comedy, and you need a "funny" sex scene for shock value, I want you to go right now and check out this Wikipedia list of paraphilias.

As the article explains, paraphilia is "defined as powerful and persistent sexual interest other than in copulatory or precopulatory behavior." In plain English, it's a catagory that means "weird sexual fetishes."

Here are some of the more interesting ones on that list, with the titles, followed by the unusual cause of the sexual arousal. I invite writers to pick any one of these:

Abasiophilia - People with impaired mobility
Acrotomophilia - People with amputations
Agalmatophilia - Statues, mannequins and immobility[6]
Autoerotic asphixiation - Self-induced asphyxiation, sometimes to the point of near unconsciousness
Chremastistophilia - Being robbed or held up
Dendrophilia - Trees(!)
Emetophilia - Vomit
Formicophilia - Being crawled on by insects
Ursusagalmatophilia - Teddy bears

As you can see, there's quite a list to choose from. Unfortunately, most writers don't give it that much thought. Screenwriters often think they're being edgy and clever when in actuality, they're merely reusing an idea that has been done to death. Case in point, whenever a sex comedy calls for an "oddball" sexual deviance, there's a 99.9% chance that a writer is going to pull out a plush suit and subject me to yet another furry joke.

What's a furry, you ask? Well, in short, it's a sexual fetish that involves dressing up in an animal costume while having sex. In other words, it's people who like having sex while dressed as Yogi Bear and Elmo from Sesame Street.

(Dear god, I really don't want to see the Google searches that this post is going to bring to my page!)

Bizarre? Yes. Funny? Maybe when it's done for shock value. The fact is, this joke has been told many times before, not just in spec scripts, but in actual shows. It's been done on ER, CSI and Entourage among others. In other words, it's gonna take more to get me to laugh than showing Johnny Drama taking a girl from behind while wearing a pink plush bear outfit.

So strike out on your own and pick one of the more obscure "freak" fetishes. Or invent your own. If there is actual documentation on a guy who likes to have sex with trees, then surely your own imagination couldn't come up with something less plausible than that. Be creative and show me something I've never seen before.