More Comedies With Wild Sex Scenes, Please
Joy Ride and Bottoms are reviving R-rated raunch at the theaters, and upending tropes about women in filthy romps.
An outrageous film requires outrageous writing—and in the case of Joy Ride, outrageous brainstorming sessions. When the comedy’s writers, Teresa Hsiao and Cherry Chevapravatdumrong, were working on a sex scene involving a Theragun and a basketball, they figured they should test out the sequence themselves. (Adding unusual props meant untangling some complicated physics.) So Hsiao took a basketball, placed it between her legs, laid down on her back, and Chevapravatdumrong Theragun-ed away. “We’re authentic … I mean, it’s like, ‘Write what you know,’” Chevapravatdumrong deadpanned when we spoke over Zoom last month. “So we had to know it first.”
The road-trip comedy, now in theaters, juggles tones and locations as it tracks the journey of Audrey (played by Ashley Park), a lawyer who travels to China with a trio of mismatched friends to close a business deal and search for her birth mother. The film is part of a booming summer slate of sex comedies, a once-dominant genre in recent need of resuscitation. No Hard Feelings, which topped the box office when it was released in June, followed Maddie (a screwball Jennifer Lawrence), a 32-year-old Uber driver who pretends to date a rich 19-year-old so that she can save her family home. Bottoms, a movie from Shiva Baby writer-director Emma Seligman about two teenagers who would do anything to sleep with their high school’s hottest cheerleaders—in this case, starting a female fight club just to approach them—hits screens in August.
Of these, Joy Ride—which, aside from the Theragun incident, includes a concussion-inducing threesome and a “WAP” needle drop—may be the most explicit, especially when compared with the surprisingly sweet No Hard Feelings. But all three movies upend tropes about women in sex comedies and, in a post-#MeToo and pandemic-tested landscape, challenge the notion that depicting the changing social mores around sex can’t be fun. On top of that, they’re plain satisfying to watch—especially in a theater, gasping and gaping at the most ridiculous moments with a packed crowd. The return of R-rated raunch to cinemas “really feels like a moment for humanity,” Hsiao marveled, “in an insane way.” The genre is much more than a collection of gross-out jokes. Such films reflect how attitudes about sex—that most foundational yet taboo impulse that comes with being human—have evolved.
Of all the ingredients necessary to make a good modern sex comedy, a layer of resonant feeling may be the most essential. Just look at the films that the writers of Joy Ride and Bottoms told me were some of their touchstones. Girls Trip’s lead character is trying to survive an obviously broken marriage. Bridesmaids is fueled by its protagonist’s fear of being left behind as her friends embrace adult life. Superbad is about the separation anxiety that comes with graduating and going to college. Finding the emotional story for Bottoms, Seligman explained over the phone, made the movie “a little bit more grounded than we initially intended it to be,” with raunch and absurdity forming the Trojan horse for a deeper plot.
Consider the wildest scenes in Joy Ride. When Kat (Stephanie Hsu), Audrey’s friend from college, accidentally exposes an extravagantly lewd tattoo on her nether region, the reveal both shocks and changes the dynamics among the friend group by undercutting Kat’s holier-than-thou attitude. When the buttoned-up, careerist Audrey has a wild threesome, the chaos delights because she’s finally cut loose. “If [a scene] is based in a grounded character beat,” Chevapravatdumrong said, “it’s not just a joke that’s like, ‘Ah, we’re being disgusting for the sake of being disgusting.’”
For better or worse, Joy Ride and Bottoms must also deal with the pressure of being considered groundbreaking for Hollywood. The former is the first studio sex comedy to be led by an Asian ensemble. The latter is the rare teen-centric project to treat queer desire, especially between female partners, with both gravity and riotous humor. Making sex a prominent part of these stories while incorporating the thoroughly unsexy subject of representation created an unusual conundrum during the writing process. “I don’t know if I’d use the word prudish,” Seligman told me, “but I do think we have been in a weird sort of turning point where at least I feel, as a female director [making] movies about sex, extra cautious.”
When I bring up the fact that Joy Ride is considered the first film of its kind, Hsiao and Chevapravatdumrong chuckle; they’ve heard it said so often, it’s become somewhat of an inside joke for the cast and crew. By treating the subject of their characters’ race as a source of humor—but not the butt of the joke—Hsiao said they hoped their script would be “funny to a wide group of people.” In one scene, the friends pretend to be members of a K-pop band, rewarding stans who can appreciate the nuances of the parody while also wringing laughs from the ensemble’s extreme commitment and subsequent failure to convince anyone that they’re highly trained entertainers. “[If] someone who maybe isn’t as familiar with Asian culture comes in and laughs really hard at our movie, but then feels like they have learned a little bit of something along the way, that’s amazing,” Chevapravatdumrong said. The point, Hsiao added, is to invite viewers to learn more if they don’t get a punch line right away.
Bottoms takes a different approach. The film tells the story of two best friends, PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri), who, after a rumor spreads about them spending their summer in prison, capitalize on their new tough-gal reputations by starting a fight club. They’re supposed to teach members self-defense, but the whole thing’s a ruse to bait their crushes into spending time with them. The high-concept plot contributes to the film’s hyper-precise tone, which draws inspiration not only from raunchy movies, but also from action-infused romps, black comedies, and satires in the vein of Heathers, Shaun of the Dead, and But I’m a Cheerleader. PJ and Josie’s club is a ludicrously bloody operation—bombs are involved, and the body count rises as the film goes on—powered by a script that piles on multilayered jokes as cheeky as they are cutting.
Take the scene that Seligman told me has been surprising viewers at screenings. Thrilled that their cheerleader marks have joined their club, PJ and Josie attempt to foster deeper relationships by having everyone share their traumas. They ask the members to raise their hand if they’ve been sexually assaulted, making a point to add that “gray-area stuff counts too.” Every member does so in response, and the moment is equally somber and funny. PJ and Josie, after all, didn’t intend for their venture to be empowering. They were just horny, but pursuing an iota of emotional connection with the other girls inadvertently led to exposing hard truths.
Seligman told me she suspects that the audience’s laughter comes from the scene’s unexpected frankness. “Sex is a huge part of our culture and our world,” she said. “If we can’t make movies that make us laugh about a subject that affects all of us, from our perspective, it feels incredibly inhibiting … So much of the time, female characters in sex comedies are just learning [about sex], and are like, ‘Oh my God, this is crazy, what’s a vibrator?’” Bottoms rejects that naivete. By making its most risqué jokes with complete sincerity, the film pokes fun at the preposterousness of high-school dynamics while reminding viewers that teenage girls have rarely been portrayed realistically in similar movies that came before it.
The release of these films is enough to demonstrate that a fresh perspective in a familiar genre goes a long way in widening cultural vocabulary. But the biggest thrill of watching them, especially within weeks of one another, comes from seeing how they vary. No Hard Feelings, the tamest entry, is a showcase for a movie star who’s clearly been itching for something lively and low-stakes. Joy Ride packs in a dizzying amount of crass jokes and flamboyant set pieces that show off the richness of its characters. And Bottoms’ over-the-top premise allows it to make trenchant observations about youthful lust. For Chevapravatdumrong, Hsiao, and Seligman, writing a sex comedy has been cathartic—an endeavor, as Chevapravatdumrong put it, that “came naturally” because she was writing with the sense of humor she’d long wished to see more of on-screen. “We didn’t have to think about” how raunchy to be, she said, “because that’s who we are.” For all the outrageousness, the writers are tapping into a softer human instinct: to connect over a little laughter.
