Humor and Erotica

[DanDelaware]

Do you think humor and erotica mix? I get the feeling that opinions on this subject are all over map.

If you DO like it, what do you like about it? What kinds of things make you laugh in an erotic story? What things don't?

I've been thinking about it because I just published my second story in the Humor and Satire category today -- https://www.literotica.com/s/a-story-and-its-readers. Like my last Humor story, it's a kind of "meta-story," playing with conventions and reader expectations. In this case the first half is a very short over the top cuckold story, followed by a series of "comments" that I intended to represent (I hope amusingly) the gamut of the responses one gets to cuck stories. I was partly inspired by all the crazy comments I've received and read over the years to my cheating wife/hot wife stories, and also by Nabokov's Pale Fire.

It's not intended to have any serious purpose or satirical intent. It's played purely for cheap laughs.

I think sex and erotica are, if you look at them a particular way, inherently funny subjects. They bring out so much human vanity, insecurity, pretension, and folly. Think about the movie American Pie, for example--very sexy and very funny at the same time.

Humor is great and sex is great and humor & sex together is just fantastic.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

I make frequent use of allusion to bring, what I think, are humorous elements to many of my stories. Whether readers appreciate the subtlety of these allusive elements is questionable.

An example is in one of my stories where the man and woman who manage the apartment complex where the main characters live are named, Johnny Castle and his wife, Francis, who goes by the nickname, "Baby". When some gang members attempt to break into one of the apartments, Johnny and Baby stop them. The first law enforcement officer on the scene is Officer Swayze with her K9 partner Patrick.

No one has ever commented on the allusion to "Dirty Dancing", but it didn't hurt the story and I had fun weaving it in.

 

[Rustyoznail]

I recall a long-ago thread on humor in erotica, and the considered opinion of one respected member that humor was inconsistent with erotic tension.

Yet we have a hole competition devoted to jokes, humour and general shenanigans. Admittedly, it's not one that gets a lot of entries.

 

[12oclocktales]

Types of humor come in and go out of fashion quickly, I think, and what was funny yesterday is just ho-hum today. Also, verbal humor involves a way of thinking, a thought process, and many people come to this site not very interested in thinking too much but rather in finding stimulation for body areas a few feet lower than their brains. Thinking only gets in the way, even if it’s just noticing a funny bit of dialog or odd situation. Some categories probably experience this more than others (Fetish, for example).

 

[AwkwardMD]

Types of humor come in and go out of fashion quickly, I think, and what was funny yesterday is just ho-hum today. Also, verbal humor involves a way of thinking, a thought process, and many people come to this site not very interested in thinking too much but rather in finding stimulation for body areas a few feet lower than their brains. Thinking only gets in the way, even if it’s just noticing a funny bit of dialog or odd situation. Some categories probably experience this more than others (Fetish, for example).

Counterpoint:

Humor is hard if you're not funny.

 

[SimonDoom]

Counterpoint:

Humor is hard if you're not funny.

I think Tim Conway's and Harvey Korman's "Dentist sketch" would be funny in any era.

 

[AwkwardMD]

I think Tim Conway's and Harvey Korman's "Dentist sketch" would be funny in any era.

Those guys had "it." They were hilarious seperately, and magic together

 

[Bassytian]

I doubt there is a tried and true formula that works 100% of the time. It takes practice, but erotica and humor can go hand-in-hand.

I agree with the OP that sex is inherently funny. While I do try to make my scene sex scenes steamy, it is a fictional fantasy story so I do have some unrealistic and frankly absurd things happen at times. For example, my main character is a femboy elf who has semen that tastes like chocolate milk. The idea came to me at work one day and that was the first time my coworkers saw me laugh that hard, talk about awkward!

Personally, if someone told me that a sex scene of mine made them laugh until they cried, I would find that just as flattering as someone telling me that it got them off.

 

[ChuckWolf]

Most CFNM scenarios in mainstream media are played for laughs.

There are a LOT of CFNM situations that happen in telenovelas that are humorous, but are VERY sexy, usually a scenario where a naked guy is caught by an older & very attractive cougar, who has cornered the embarrassed guy and is flirting and ogling him in his vulnerable state as he struggles to cover his nudity.

 

[Codoc24]

I had a scene in one of my books where a woman (25ish) is giving a blowjob to her boyfriend (25ish) at her parent's house. The parents are hosting a pool party, and the couple sneaks to the basement thinking they will have privacy. The dad has to retrieve something from the basement and catches them in the act. The parents are pretty cool about it, but still, it embarrasses everyone.

Seriously, how many dads would want to see a cock in their daughter's mouth? I thought it was pretty funny.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I've been thinking about it because I just published my second story in the Humor and Satire category today -- https://www.literotica.com/s/a-story-and-its-readers. Like my last Humor story, it's a kind of "meta-story," playing with conventions and reader expectations. In this case the first half is a very short over the top cuckold story, followed by a series of "comments" that I intended to represent (I hope amusingly) the gamut of the responses one gets to cuck stories.

Reading it again (why did I do that?), I realised you missed a golden opportunity to honour and immortalise the high art of the skilful comment: "Eat my condom."

I'm a little disappointed about that .

Wanda's hot though, sexier than your mom.

 

[SimonDoom]

Reading it again (why did I do that?), I realised you missed a golden opportunity to honour and immortalise the high art of the skilful comment: "Eat my condom."

I'm a little disappointed about that .

Wanda's hot though, sexier than your mom.

I would be taking credit for someone else's fine work. I have standards, twisted though they may be.

 

[TheRedChamber]

There is a group of us, on this site, who, whenever the conversation gets too high-faluting and focused on the writing of Hemmingway, try to bring the conversation back down to earth by talking about what Terry Pratchett would have done.

There is also, I think, a particularly British* bawdy type of tale that has mixes sex and humour together (*Maybe just English but I'd include the Scots and possibly Welsh in it as well). So I'd argue that my tale which starts with the main character wanting to eat a Mars Bar out of his girlfriend's vagina and ends up with her pushing a finger of fudge up his backside instead is following a grand tradition that goes back to at least Chaucer.

As a pre-Internet fourteen year old, I watched a lot of arty French movies and suffered from a lot of second hand ennui just for the moment where the heroine would finally get her top off. England had little truck with that type of fancy smansy erotica. We did have Ursula Andress emerging from the ocean to get it on with James Bond but during the same period we also had Barbara Windsors bra flying off during aerobics in Carry on Camping. You didnt see anything in those films, but by Confessions of a Window Cleaner you did (though shamefully Channel 4 supported the French film industry far more than our own)

Im not James Bond so none of my characters are either* . People who have lots of sex having a bit more sex is of little interest to me. Besides, as I get older, Im increasingly of the opinion that a night with Babs would have been more fun anyway. Most of my stories are based around the idea that even the losers get lucky sometimes.

(*well, apart from that story where Moneypenny gets married but keeps 007 as her bull...)

Ive written a couple of flatout jokes as submissions on Lit - 1k word stories that build to one specific punchline. Ive also written farcical tales where the twists of the plot are intended to amuse and are far more the point of the work than the actual sex - (these do need to go in humour, a rule which I didn't always follow as a newer writer - unless of course you're sending up a particular category - Simon should have braved LW for his IMHO).

I also tend to see the funny side in most stories which are intend to be primarily sexual. The idea of an ordinary guy getting to spend a day (which eventually becomes a date) with an actual Playboy centefold is, to me, at least going to be at least as funny as it is erotic and as a writer I should have something to say about how we men behave when we are way way out of our league.

I'll end with my general philosophy - the only thing more ridiculous than two people in love is two people having sex.

I may be wrong however and, in fact, humour and erotica dont mix. If that ends up being the consensus of the thread then I nominate Simon as OP to write to Brazzers and tell them to stop making 'step-sister trapped in the washing machine' porn...

 

[SimonDoom]

If that ends up being the consensus of the thread then I nominate Simon as OP to write to Brazzers and tell them to stop making 'step-sister trapped on the washing machine' porn...

I think you know me well enough by now to know I'd never do that. Those washing machines can be fiendish.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

I think you know me well enough by now to know I'd never do that. Those washing machines can be fiendish.

Indeed, use the dryer instead.

 

[RetroFan]

If you want a challenge, try and make the Incest Taboo fans laugh. I've tried on many occasions, but they aren't impressed by my efforts, in fact the opposite is true. In an odd sort of way, it is in itself amusing how utterly humourless some of the readers there are.

I've even made the Loving Wives fans laugh - not much I admit - but I did get positive feedback on one of my stories where a male detective has to go and buy sanitary pads for a hot trophy wife in witness protection when she gets her period, but cannot find the right type in the feminine hygiene products aisle at the supermarket as lots of women and girls pay a visit to this particular part of the store and think he is some sort of pervert. The readers said how funny they found this scene, but a similar scenario in IT would probably be met with indifference or antagonism.

 

[StillStunned]

I think that the problem is that amusement and arousal are two separate states of mind, both of which tend to be pretty dominant. So to write erotica that amuses, on top of the inherent difficulty in writing something that's genuinely funny, you'd have to strike the perfect balance between the two. You'd have the same difficulty with an erotic tearjerker.

If I were to attempt this, I'd keep the humour and the erotica separate. Write the funny bits as funny, write the sexy bits as sexy. Probably a humorous tale that evolves into erotica once the situation that causes the humour has been resolved.

 

[Publius68]

I make people laugh. I do it in real life, and the evidence suggests strongly that I do it here as well. But I don't usually set out to write funny stories. They just become more and more funny as I go.
The reason that my stuff just gets funny as I go is that, contrary opinions here noted, sex and humor are EXTREMELY compatible. The parts of our brains that handle humor and arousal are closely linked, and our physiological reactions to both are also closely cross-wired. Sex and humor are not inevitably paired, but when they are paired, they work.
I write about ridiculous situations. Ridiculous is not always funny. Sometimes ridiculous can be unreadably bad. But ridiculous, even, perhaps especially, when it is not fundamentally funny to the participants, often becomes funny when you add self-awareness.
My Alistaire Cycle, which I am currently extending at long last, has me thinking about this a lot. I came back to the series not for the sex, but because I am always grinning like a maniac while I write these stories. humor is the only reason the stories work. Trying to take seriously my innocent, earnest, somehow eternally naive sex god would be impossible, and make for utterly dreary, unreadable tripe.
But Alistaire knows how ridiculous he is, and that is what makes him funny. If he wasn't self-aware, he would be the most miserable 18 year-old with a double-digit body count that you could imagine. And his cast of supporting characters also know how ridiculous he is, which makes them funny.

 

[intim8]

Do you think humor and erotica mix? I get the feeling that opinions on this subject are all over map.

I think they're a great mix. Mostly because I think fun, laughing, playful sex is one of the best kinds.

But also because, as you pointed out in a follow-up comment, embarassment is both very tittilating and very funny.

As is the frustration of two people trying to carve a private moment out of busy lives (or a busy situation) and getting stymied at every turn. I wrote a story, published elsewhere not as erotica, about a newlywed couple at a family Thanksgiving dinner. The husband takes his new wife up to show her the bedroom he grew up in. They almost got away with it without being caught, almost weren't late to the table, and almost weren't the target of sly remarks throughout.

(Note to self: write more of that).

 

[intim8]

I think that the problem is that amusement and arousal are two separate states of mind

Actually, I bet not. They're closer to flip sides of the same coin, like joy and grief (ever noticed how easily a grieving or distraught person can laugh when they are caught off guard, though briefly? How choking sobs and laughter are sometimes hard to tell apart, and sometimes morph into one another? How intense laughter sometimes brings tears?).

And we all know that getting a girl to laugh is one avenue towards getting in her pants.