sex comedy

Bull Durham (1988)

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As we’re nearing the midpoint of 2025, I’m making peace with the fact that my favorite new release so far this year is a movie about baseball. The laidback, casually philosophic baseball comedy Eephus finds tremendous thematic & spiritual significance in a sport that I’ve never really had much interest in before but now understand to be a rich cinematic subject. I was charmed by the team-camaraderie story told in A League of Their Own (both the 90s movie and the too-quickly cancelled TV show).  I had an unexpectedly emotional experience with the 90s baseball melodrama Field of Dreams as well, finding it to be a surprisingly affecting story about marriage, faith, and fatherhood – all filtered through the rhythms & spiritualism of baseball. My entire life, I’ve considered baseball to be about as boring of a spectator sport as watching someone assemble a jigsaw puzzle. I get that it’s an interesting strategic game for the players, but visually there’s just not much spectacle to it; it’s like watching competitive chess with the added excitement of … waiting around. All of that empty time spent loitering on the field and over-thinking game theory in the dugout does leave plenty of space for the transcendent poetry of cinema to flourish, though, and so I’m starting to appreciate the appeal of baseball movies these days even while still missing out on the appeal of baseball itself. As a result, it seemed like the perfect time to catch up with another classic example of the genre, the minor-league sex comedy Bull Durham.

Written & directed by former minor-league player Ron Shelton, Bull Durham attempts to provide behind-the-scenes insight to the general baseball-watching public of what it’s like to play for the minors. There are seemingly two career paths for competitive minor-league players, both defined by their relationship with The Major League (referred to in-film simply as “The Show”). Tim Robins is a young player on the upswing: a talented but undisciplined fuckboy who could earn his way into The Majors if he focused on honing his skills instead of bragging about what he’s already achieved. Kevin Costner is his older, wiser counterbalance: a dependable, level-headed player who’s aged out of his physical ability to compete in The Majors but is hopelessly addicted to the ritual of the game. Costner is hired to get Robins’s wildcard hotshot pitcher into shape as his more mature, grounded catcher, entering the scene with a verbatim “I’m too old for this shit” complaint of jaded exhaustion. Their old-timers vs. new blood conflict is quickly supercharged by the intrusion of Robins’s other unofficial sidelines coach: a fellow “too old for this shit” team groupie who sleeps with one promising player every season so she can help mold him into something great. Naturally, Susan Sarandon steals the heart of both men in that part, and the question of whether this will be her final season hangs just as heavily over her head as it does for Costner.

I might not ever fully understand the spiritual power of baseball, but I feel like I’ve intrinsically understood the full sexual dynamism of Susan Sarandon my entire life, so this is likely the most effective gateway to appreciating the sport as I’ll ever find. Sarandon is nuclear hot here, flavoring the cougar seductress role she later filled in White Palace with a thick Southern drawl, recalling Dolly Parton’s sweetly sexy narration track in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Her pursuit to reshape Robins’s wild horndog energy into something more purposeful & measured takes on a distinct BDSM power dynamic as soon as their first night together. He wants to tear his clothes off and immediately jump into bed, but she makes him slowly strip to really feel his body, then ties him to the bed and reads him classic poetry as foreplay. Later, she convinces him to wear black-lace lingerie under his uniform to help distract from the internal self-doubt monologue that throws off his pitches. When he first meets her, “he fucks like he pitches, all over the place,” but by the time they part she’s almost literally whipped him into shape. Meanwhile, her sexual dynamic with Costner is much more sincere & equitable. When Costner ties her to the same bed, it’s to paint her toenails as a visual substitute for cunnilingus. He’s mature enough to take things slow, all romantic-like, which is an energy Sarandon struggles to adjust to after “coaching” so many jumpy, undisciplined fuckboys over the years.

Bull Durham wastes no time to addressing the spiritual, transcendent aspects of baseball. In her opening narration, Sarandon explains that she has chosen to dedicate her spiritual life to the sport as a direct substitute for religion, musing about how the 108 beads in the Catholic rosary directly correspond to the 108 stitches in a regulation baseball. She’s not the only old-timer in the picture who pontificates about how The Church of Baseball is “the only thing that truly feeds the soul,” either. Whenever Costner gets misty-eyed bragging about his brief time playing in The Majors, he gets lost in the thought that “The ballparks are like cathedrals.” All of the game theory, philosophy, ritual, and superstition that goes into keeping even a mediocre minor-league team on its feet for a season gets away from everyone involved, and the genius of the film is in how it’s connected to Sarandon’s own complex theorizing on the transcendent poetry of casual sex. For his part, Ron Shelton brings all of this spiritual abstraction down to a tangible, real-world level once Costner & Sarandon make peace with their impending retirement. At the climax, Sarandon explains in narration, “Baseball may be a religion full of magic, cosmic truth, and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time, but it’s also a job.” Balancing that working-class practicality with the spiritually fulfilling poetry of the sport is something I’ve seen wrestled with in all of the various baseball movies I’ve been watching lately, so I suppose there’s an undeniable truth to the observation.

-Brandon Ledet

Chatterbox! (1977)

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I’m currently watching Sex and the City for the first time without ever having much interest in it until now, and it’s instantly become an all-time favorite show.  It turns out it makes a lot more sense once you hit your thirties. Who knew? In the last episode I watched, Charlotte confesses to her brunch buddies that her gynecologist prescribed a mild antidepressant to help get a vaginal infection in-check, pouting in a hushed panic “My vagina is depressed!”  That kind of candid sexual humor was a large part of what made the show such a cultural phenomenon in the early aughts, when it was a lot less common to hear women openly joke about their genitals on national television.  Before then, you had to go digging in smut to find that kind of ribald women’s humor, as evidenced by 1977’s (incredibly well-titled) talking vagina comedy Chatterbox! being directed by gay porno auteur Tom DeSimone.  Chatterbox! only qualifies as a softcore porno if you squint at its AM Gold soft-rock lovemaking scenes with the most puritanical eye. Its main-attraction talking vagina never even makes an appearance on-screen, whether to avoid an X rating or to avoid the practical mechanics of gynecological puppetry.  Still, it’s got a mildly naughty pedigree as an out-of-time, post-hardcore nudie cutie.  It wasn’t until the early 2000s that you could hear women joke about their vaginas having minds of their own on the HBO sitcom equivalent of Seinfeld.  Before then, you had to go see a dirty movie, even if not in the same sketchy theaters where they played DeSimone’s true trenchcoaters.

Most contemporary reviews of Chatterbox! dismissed it as a low-brow, juvenile sex comedy and a masturbatory fantasy for men.  They were only half right.  Yes, the jokes are idiotically crude, like when Virginia the Talking Vagina greets her mother with the zinger, “You didn’t even kiss me hello!” or when a potential sex partner responds to her propositions with “You didn’t even move your lips!”  It’s all harmless schtick, but it’s schtick all the same.  Still, the hapless hairdresser who happens to be attached to Virginia, Penelope, reacts to her supernatural genital predicament with such embarrassed horror that it’s difficult to imagine someone treating the film as pure masturbation fodder.  As much fun as Virginia is having seducing every man (and most women) in their presence, Penelope is mortified that her crotch is getting so much attention, especially by the time the pair become late night talk show regulars as a kind of side show act.  The film is pitched more directly to the women in the audience than you might expect, playing less like a macho fantasy than an adolescent stress dream about showing up to school naked.  Its closest comparison point is The Peanut Butter Solution—a childhood nightmare about rapid hair growth—not the rearranged-female-body misogyny of Deep Throat.  Penelope’s talking, misbehaving vagina is presumably voicing her sexual id, but it does little to bring her out of her shell as a sexual person.  The two are mostly at odds with each other and struggle to find an equilibrium they’re happy with, much like Charlotte York whining about her depressed vagina to friends at brunch.

Chatterbox! is the kind of ramshackle production where the boom mic is onscreen so much it deserves its own character credit.  At one point, Rip Taylor—a total pro—stealthily swats it out of the frame in annoyance for stealing his moment.  The film’s sub-mainstream production values and other titles director’s back catalog (including gems like Swap Meat and Confessions of a Male Groupie) might raise questions of why it didn’t go full-porno, but I personally admire its decision to launch directly into its premise with no funny business.  Virginia starts talking immediately in the first scene, complaining about Penelope’s longtime boyfriend’s lovemaking skills because Penelope would never voice those complaints herself.  It’s not long before they make their debut on stage & television, after Penelope quickly manages to convince her friends & psychiatrist that Virginia really does have a mind of her own.  That efficiency leaves room in the tight 70min runtime for Virginia to launch a star-making career as a disco singer, including multiple performances of her nonsense hit single “Wang Dang Doodle.”  This is an aggressively silly, unsexy sex comedy about a woman’s war with her own body, like a Doris Wishman prototype for How to Get Ahead in Advertising – one with a lot less to say but a much more interesting place to say it from.  I’m sure there are so-bad-its-good cult movie obsessives who think they’re laughing at the movie’s expense—the A Talking Pussy!?! jokes write themselves—but it appears to know exactly how silly and misshapen it is, to the point where it’s always in on the joke. In a word, it’s a hoot.

Also, in case you’re wondering, Penelope is a Charlotte but Virginia is a textbook Samantha. And, yes, I plan on ending every review with this exact analytical lens until I get this show out of my system.

-Brandon Ledet

Easy A (2010)

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There has been such a great wealth of teen-girl-POV sex comedies in recent years that it’s easy to take the genre’s gender-flipped resurgence for granted.  Titles like Blockers, Booksmart, Plan B, and Never Have I Ever have successfully de-Porkys‘d the high school sex romp entirely, to the point where the 80s straight-boy fantasies of yore are more of a distant memory than a ripe target for feminist satire.  It took years to ramp up to this new, de-jocked normal, though, and it’s easy to lose perspective on how far the genre’s default POV has come.  When The To Do List attempted to give teen girls’ libidos a spin at the wheel for a change in 2013, it got away with it by casting fully-grown adults in the teen roles and setting its horny hijinks decades in the past, filtering its transgression through an ironic remove.  In 2022, the Hulu series Sex Appeal borrows The To Do List‘s exact premise wholesale (in which an uptight honors student applies her academic work ethic to learning how to be good at sex) without having to soften its post-Porky’s hook.  The genre has come a long way in a relatively short period of time, especially considering how long mainstream comedies were specifically about boys’ quests to shed their virginities in opposition to the demure deflections of their female classmates.

2010’s Easy A might even be a clearer benchmark for the genre’s recent progress than The To Do List, since it’s a teen-girl sex comedy about its heroine not having sex.  Emma Stone stars as a precocious high school senior whose self-serving lie about losing her virginity to a college student spirals out of control, falsely labeling her as The School Slut.  As an early prototype for a Blockers-style revisionist sex comedy, it is embarrassingly restricted by how much sexual desire “good girls” were allowed to express onscreen in its time.  Our heroine has no interest in participating in the sexual adventures her peers imagine her to be indulging.  When a friend gifts her a vibrator as a thank-you present it’s played as a cheeky joke.  Of course, she wouldn’t use one of those.  She’s a good girl.  Easy A is set in a bizarre fantasy world where California high school students are having so little sex that it becomes the talk of the town when a senior loses her virginity (except don’t worry, she didn’t, really).  It makes a semi-progressive moral stance against slut-shaming gossip, but to get there it has to pretend that smart, well-mannered teen girls don’t actually want to have sex.  That’s still reserved for the realm of mouth-breathing boys (such as the leads of 2007’s Superbad, Emma Stone’s professional breakout).

Contemporary timidness about teen girls’ libidos aside, Easy A is cute.  If you haven’t noticed in her star-making decade that followed, Emma Stone is a charismatic, easily loveable performer who has no trouble commanding the spotlight.  Here, she’s saddled with a near-unbearable overload of voice-over narration—delivered directly to camera via a late-aughts webcast—which includes disastrously overwritten chapter titles like “The Shudder Inducing and Clichéd However Totally False Account of How I Lost My Virginity to a Guy at Community College.”  She handles the challenge ably, though, working in crash-course lit guides to The Scarlet Letter and twisty self-owns like “I’m not really as smart as I think I am” with a casual ease.  By the time she’s riffing with her absolutely delightful parents (Patricia Clarkson & Stanley Tucci), it even feels like she’s having fun (though not near as much fun as they’re having).  I don’t know that the movie ever graduates from cute to hilarious, but I also don’t fit its target demographic anyway: 12-year-olds who want to feel Adult.  The film is basically a slightly-growed-up version of a Disney Channel Original—tipped off by the villainous presence of Amanda Bynes—and for that, it’s endearing enough to get by.

Maybe I’m not giving Easy A enough credit for pushing mainstream-sex-comedy boundaries in the dark days of 2010s.  It blatantly announces to the audience (through rapid-fire montages) that it intends to mash The Scarlet Letter together with 1980s John Hughes comedies, and it certainly achieves that goal, however chaste.  It also takes a few pot shots at overly religious sex-negativity, assuming the audience shares its pronounced secular worldview, which does feel bold for the time.  I’m just hung up on the idea that it’s a teen sex comedy where no teens actually want to have sex (except one dastardly cad who propositions the lead for an act of prostitution).  Its idea of provocation is dressing Stone in lingerie top & blue jeans combos to test the boundaries of her school’s dress code.  That would certainly raise the eyebrows in any American high school, even today, but it still feels timid considering what similar comedies have done since.

-Brandon Ledet