It’s time to laugh about sex on the big screen (again)

Ribald films disappeared from our screens for a while, but now they’re back with a fresh twist appealing to modern sensitivities around nudity.

Actor Steve Carell with Elizabeth Banks in scene from film The 40 Year Old Virgin

What was the first raunchy movie you saw — or sneaked into — in a cinema? If you came of age in the 1970s, maybe it was Animal House. Or Porky’s in the 80s, American Pie in the 90s, The 40-Year-Old Virgin in the 2000s or Girls Trip in the 2010s. In all those eras there were simply more comedies peppered with sex. Laughing at inappropriate stuff with strangers in the dark was a ritual.

Then, in recent years, the flow of risque jokes at the multiplex dried up. The genre also known for flashes of (usually female) nudity and wildly uneven quality had a double bringdown.

One: comedies became more of a streaming commodity as studios devoted theatrical resources to superheroes and other spectacles that seemed more likely to assure opening-weekend crowds. Two: the basic ingredients for crass comedy became more volatile to work with. Generational and cultural shifts led more people to bristle at the genre’s cringey tendencies of the past (ogling women, reinforcing stereotypes) while stalwart fans called such criticism a buzzkill.

The debate hit fever pitch four years ago when Todd Phillips, director of bro-com classics Old School and The Hangover, said he had quit making comedies because audiences had become too easily offended. (His next movie is a sequel to his grim Joker.)

Jennifer Coolidge and Eddie Kaye Thomas in American Pie

But now filmmakers sense people craving a release, and some studios are attempting a comeback for the adult comedy. Last month brought cute dogs with foul mouths in Strays and later this year on the streamers we will see lesbian high school losers forming a fight club to score with girls in Bottoms. Cinemas in the US also saw middle-aged male strippers mounting a second act in Back on the Strip, which does not yet have an Australian release date.

No Hard Feelings, directed by Gene Stupnitsky, launched the wave of raunch in late June and tops it with $US83m ($129m) in worldwide ticket sales, according to Comscore. Jennifer Lawrence stars as a year-round Montauk resident drowning in debt. She gets hired secretly by a pair of wealthy and overprotective parents to, well, deflower their son (Andrew Barth Feldman) before he leaves home for Princeton.

Maddie (Jennifer Lawrence) and Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman) in No Hard Feelings

In one scene she storms through a Gen Z house party searching for him, barging into rooms where she finds only young people huddling over their phones. Exasperated, she says, “Doesn’t anyone f..k any more?” It’s a generation-gap joke that hits at the waning of a Hollywood genre. “That line is also a comment about comedies. What’s wrong with us? Why are we so afraid of doing that kind of movie any more?” says Naomi Odenkirk, one of the film’s producers.

One reason: Delivering on the promise of transgressive humour without turning off too many people is a trick shot with a moving target. “If no one in the theatre is at least a little offended, you’re not doing your job with an R comedy,” says No Hard Feelings producer Marc Provissiero, Odenkirk’s business partner. (The film was rated MA15+ in Australia.)

Consider the age gap between Lawrence’s 32-year-old character and the boyish 19-year-old she clumsily attempts to seduce for a used car his parents promised as payment. It fuels jokes about everything from partying to sexual consent. (When she first makes a move on him, he zaps her with pepper spray.) Yet the age divide makes some viewers squirm: will they actually consummate the relationship?

“Over the three-and-a-half year incubation of this project and until it was fully shot, that always returned as a question: Should we do that or not?” Provissiero says.

The makers of these comedies say they’re not trying to reinvent the formula, they’re just turning the dials for changing norms and renewed relevance. That often involves different kinds of protagonists than the whiter, straighter, male-er characters at the centre of bawdy comedy hits of the past. And when characters flash skin, it’s less likely to titillate than induce gasps of surprise in the audience. Like when an intimate tattoo gets revealed in Joy Ride.

Released in July, Joy Ride remixes a familiar set-up: a group of friends stumbling into sex, drugs and trouble on a road trip. Instead of an ensemble of dudes at a Las Vegas bachelor party as in The Hangover, the film follows four Asian-American women through China.

Stephanie Hsu as Kat, Sabrina Wu as Deadeye, Ashley Park as Audrey, and Sherry Cola as Lolo in Joy Ride. Photo Credit: Ed Araquel

At the centre is Audrey, a lawyer played by Ashley Park, whose identity issues (adopted from China into a white family, hesitant to find her birth mother) form the heart of the story.

But when it comes to Audrey’s exploits with her friends, Joy Ride is a throwback (from producers including Seth Rogen). There’s some projectile vomiting, a cocaine-related crisis with police and a threesome that causes injuries.

Joy Ride stalled at $US14.4m in worldwide ticket sales, reinforcing the industry concern that comedies lack the event status needed to drive people to the box office.

The movie appeared on video-on-demand services three weeks after its theatrical debut.

Bottoms, from Orion Pictures, flips a typical premise – teens trying to get laid – by queering it. Ayo Edebiri (best known from The Bear) and Rachel Sennott (who co-wrote the script with director Emma Seligman) star as Josie and PJ, misfit friends with the hots for two cheerleaders.

Playing a nerd with no game, Edebiri joins an archetype associated with Anthony Michael Hall and Michael Cera, but with lines like, “I’m done trying to sow my damn oats. I’m packing up my vagina”. Then she rants about a sad hypothetical future in which she has to marry a closeted male pastor. Sennott’s PJ follows adolescent logic when she talks her friend into forming a fight club to get closer to their crushes: “We’re punching each other, adrenaline is flowing, next thing you know, Isabel and Brit­tany are kissing us on the mouth!”

Campy influences such as 2001’s Wet Hot American Summer shaped the heightened reality of Bottoms – jocks wearing their football uniforms in school, announcements on the loudspeaker like “Could the ugly, untalented gays report to the principal’s office?” Running commentary on feminism comes from the fight club’s male supervisor, played by former NFL star Marshawn Lynch.

Working in a genre once notorious for gratuitous female nudity, the filmmakers had to reckon with one of its staples: the sex scene. They initially planned to end one hook-up with a kiss, then decided it should go further. But they made it clear in the script: when a character takes off her shirt in that scene, her bra would remain on.

“We wanted to pay homage to the sex comedies that came before but not fall into the traps they created or to objectify female characters,” says Seligman.

“However, our characters are horny and shallow, so it also felt like we needed to honour that.”

Strays, from Universal Pictures, isn’t a sex comedy per se but its talking dogs are way more carnal than any from Disney movies.

“I remember being on set, shooting at 4am, while one of our trainers was saying, ‘humpity, humpity, humpity, humpity’,” said director Josh Greenbaum, recalling a skill that his canine cast learned to perform (with garden gnomes and other inanimate objects) on command.

Led by blind love, then revenge, a border terrier named Reggie (voiced by Will Ferrell) journeys home to his horrible owner (Will Forte) with the help of three other dogs (Jamie Foxx, Isla Fisher, Randall Park) who school him in life off the leash. The movie delivers a sentimental message about loyalty and lopsided relationships, but wrapped in lots of anatomy jokes, a magic mushroom trip and a gag involving more simulated dog pooh than probably any movie before.

Bug (Jamie Foxx), Reggie (Will Ferrell), Maggie (Isla Fisher), and Hunter (Randall Park) in Strays

A visual-effects team made the dogs’ mouths move to match their dialogue, which allowed Greenbaum and writer Dan Perrault to keep adding and tweaking jokes until the last minute.

Greenbaum and other filmmakers disagree with the theory that changing sensibilities have made theatrical comedies more difficult to pull off in 2023. “It’s no harder to make people laugh today than it was before. But whether or not we know it, we’re hungry for that shared experience,” Greenbaum says.

Still, Strays has struggled to find its audience so far, taking in about $US8.3m at the US box office on opening weekend.

Sony’s No Hard Feelings ran exclusively in theatres for nearly two months before getting released on digital platforms. Theatrical audiences were split almost evenly between male and female, producers say.

Odenkirk and Provissiero also manage talent, including stars of Bottoms and Joy Ride, and produced PEN15, the Emmy-nominated series about friends navigating puberty. For the producers, the sex comedy seemed like a commercial opportunity – and even an institution to champion. That mission came through in the recurring message producers received about the movie from friends and industry peers, which Odenkirk summarised as: “Thank you for being inappropriate.”

Strays is showing in cinemas. Bottoms is expected to be released on Australian streaming services in November. No Hard Feelings is on Apple TV and Google Play. Joy Ride is in select cinemas and streaming on Prime Video and iTunes.

The Wall Street Journal