July 2/05: What's So Funny?

Is porn funny? Can it be funny? Not in the "this is so fucking stupid it's making me laugh" sense, but really funny? Should it even try, or should it just give up on its lame attempts at humour?

Funny porn is almost always reality porn that's making fun of its own premise, or the bad acting, or its cheap budget. While studio porn can be ironic and campy, most Internet porn gets its laughs from improvisation and shooting from the lip. In a lot of the early reality porn episodes the guy holding the camera had to keep a monologue going for ten or fifteen minutes while his mostly silent sidekick cock-potato buddy did nothing but get hard. I think it was supposed to be funny but it never was. There were some novelty sites (like the now defunct BoyGirlBang) that tried to keep a funny premise going (hot girls fucking total losers!), but they never seemed to last very long. Once you got the joke it wasn't funny anymore--and if it wasn't funny it wasn't anything. That seemed to be the lesson: Porn can be funny, but it can't be funny and sexy at the same time. Novelty sites are good for a laugh, but big tits and round butts are what keep us coming back for more.

The other reason you don't see a lot of funny porn on the Internet is that it takes a bit of brains and imagination. That is to say, effort. It's hard to do right. And unfortunately most porn producers don't want to bother, especially if it isn't going to help their bottom line. So here I'll give a plug for one network that I think does do a good job with the funny stuff: Naughty America. My First Sex Teacher and Bookworm Bitches are pretty consistently funny, at least in the set-up. But of course when the fucking starts the laughs stop. It's time for the JAM, and humour, lets be honest, wrecks the mood.

Porn is always going to seem a little funny just because it's so outrageous. Porn's vision is inherently satiric--the costumes, the massive organs, the endless easy fucks. Even the nasty, extreme stuff, like girls puking all over each other, has its roots in a long tradition of body humour. And you realize how silly it all is as soon as you stop believing in the fantasy. I think it was the film critic Roger Ebert who once said that nothing is as ridiculous as other people's sexual fantasies, and he was right. The thing is, for porn to work you have to believe in it, at least on some level, and when it tries to be funny it doesn't let you. It makes you aware of how ridiculous the fantasy is, which is the last thing you want to be reminded of when you're looking at porn. 

They may be ridiculous, but I take my fantasies very seriously.

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