If You Can’t Make a Joke About Sex, Someone Else Will

Is Comedy the Obvious Next Step After Porn?

During a recent Friday afternoon, I was interviewed by comedian Sam Bass for his “Super Secret Pod.” In case it isn’t obvious, I’m a total media whore. The very proximity of a live microphone makes me not just want to share my thoughts and opinions but think it’s a great idea that I do so. If nothing else, I know that regardless of how ignorant I may be on a topic, I am funny and can keep the patter interesting and ongoing. In the 21^st century, that’s even better than knowing what you’re talking about!

Fortunately for the host and his two co-hosts, I knew what I was talking about. Sex. Owning a kink club. Producing Masturbate-a-Thons. Sybians. Tentacle dildos. Falling off Larry Flynt’s executive office desk. That kinda stuff. It was just work talk mixed with some personal stories for me, but apparently, it was comedy gold for my hosts, at least two of whom are comics themselves. One has even encouraged me to try an open mic night that he hosts each week. That kind of praise is heady stuff. Comics are solitary creatures who translate pain into laughter.

They usually fall on each other like Ivy League sorority girls wearing the same dress to a frat party.

This got me thinking, which nine out of 10 times means things are going to get weird at some point. If just telling my stories can make people laugh, surely there are others deeper in the porn industry who can, have, or do use their experiences to inspire or elicit laughter, the orgasm of the face. But who, and how are they being received? If writers who are open about their work in the biz are assumed by many to be idiots, what must the expectations of an audience be when they are faced with a comic who has fucked more people than the audience has been rejected by (which is probably a lot).

Of course, we have had performers who take on comedic roles in movies for years. Viewers saw waves of comedy releases during the Era of the Parodies in the early years of the new century. I confess those were super happy viewing days for me. I also confess that I have a huge professional crush on director, actor, and overall pornographic Renaissance Man, Will Ryder. He brings humor and sex together with good grace, great costumes, creative sets, and frequently funny scripts.

But writing funny porn scripts or acting in an amusing or even hilarious manner in a movie is one thing. Okay, they're two things, but who's counting? Standing in front of a crowd with strong opinions about what’s funny and what’s not is an entirely different matter. It's the difference between singing in the shower and doing karaoke in public.

The first, if regrettable, example of a porn performer who has done stand-up that pops into the mind of the average porn-consuming American is Ron Jeremy. Prior to his arrest, conviction, and descent into dementia, he appeared in mainstream comedy films and shared his humor during his XL Comedy Tour. The antidote to Ron is probably Stormy Daniels.

In addition to an appearance on Saturday Night Live, the infamous one-night stand of Donald Trump also performed improv with Tim Meadows of LA’s Upright Citizens Brigade. Her Twitter account, oh, excuse me, X account (whatever, Elon), keeps her fans in stitches as she eviscerates the closet-cases who call her things that are only appropriate after negotiation and consent.

Another female performer whose past does not so much haunt her as fuel her comedy is Alia Janine. If you Google her, you’ll find her listed in Wikipedia as an “American comedian and former pornographic film actress.”

Sovereign Syre is well known within adult as both a performer and director. Anyone who has seen porn from even one side of the camera knows it’s full of hilarity, however unintentional. See it from both sides and cracking jokes about a day at work becomes a four-dimensional experience sure to delight the masses. It’s also less expensive than therapy, assuming you’re not drinking your tips away (if there are any tips to drink away). This latter bit seems especially important for comics such as Sovereign and hopefuls such as myself, who have wanted to be a stand-up comic since our teens.

The path seems to run in the other direction for at least some of the men in porn. For example, Tommy Pistol, who I also have a total crush on (shhh, don’t tell him), isn’t some rank amateur who is sometimes accidentally funny when the role calls for it. The dude actually started out in sketch comedy and, on purpose, brought his dick and his blue humor and solid acting skills to the Valley of Porn.

Frankly, the marriage of comedy and porn seems perfectly natural to me. If there is anything as ridiculous looking as fucking, I don’t know what it is. Not all the time, of course, but it has its moments. You know what they are. What they sound like. What they look like.

Anyone who has had sex more than once hopefully knows that’s part of the charm of being a largely hairless (especially in porn) hominid that loves to explore other hominid’s bodies and often gets tangled up in their heartstrings, too. Even the most romantic scene, hardcore or softcore, at its core, has a seed of ridiculousness. Fabulous, liberating, dynamically vulnerable ridiculousness. It’s one reason I love it so much. Even when it’s fake it’s honest.

The beauty of being able to blend insider porn knowledge with comedy is that you never have to make anything up! You don’t have to lie! The jokes write themselves and the punchlines are everywhere, bless their hearts, and ours while we’re at it. Sadly, comics with a history in porn are still not taken seriously, which is unfortunate on a lot of levels. Also ironic, given that we’re talking comedy here and not brain surgery or astrophysics.

Comedy is transgressive by nature. So is porn. To minimize the voices of witty and compelling sex worker comics and those who have unique insights into sexuality or porn is to conform in a most suburban way. Why listen to someone who has been there when you can rely on tropes and stereotypes about them instead? Why? Because we’ve got some funny stories and masterful storytellers to share them.

No mainstream comic needs to worry about erasure by a porn comic because there’s scant chance the jokes will be the same. They can’t be and that’s why more of us need to be doing comedy or creating independent art of some sort. The potential for unexpected guffaws, a unique message, and sex worker empowerment is enormous.

Not everyone in porn is interested in making art or music or dance or spoken word anything, of course. The humor and politics of porn and sex do not matter to many, but to the smart asses among us with a strong opinion, a witty way with words, and the guts to share them with others, they matter a lot.

That being said, not everyone is funny. In fact, far more people think they are funny than actually possess the skill of inspiring mirth in others. Remember: Dad Jokes. So, yeah, I’m fool enough to give an open mic night a try and see if anyone other than myself and three podcast hosts think I’m funny when I tell my “I fucked your dad,” jokes.