In the basement/bar of the Museum of Sex an usher asks museum goers, fresh off the boobie bouncy house and the cock climbing wall, whether or not they would like to sit in on a live recording of The Week in Sex podcast. There is a bar. There are comfortable chairs. There are pornstars towards which questions can be asked. There is absolutely no reason to miss this event.
They start off with their introductions (after the producer has come around to the tables and the couches and told the listeners not to talk and to laugh at every joke made). The host is named Alan Finn and tonight his guests are Sheba and Sydney and Ralph. Alan begins the evening by saying “We’re here to party” and asking his guests how their sex lives were that week.
Sheba has sex after she wakes up. Sydney doesn’t need sex sometimes (this statement makes the men whoop and ask her why she’s on the podcast). Alan has great sex in the dark because he’s self conscious of his hairy body. And Ralph, well Ralph doesn’t know why he gets laid so much. He tells it like this: basically he has a pick up line that works, even though it shouldn’t. He says that sometimes he’s not really going anywhere with a girl and then he says to her, “Hey, why don’t you grab a friend, we’ll head back to my place, I’ll cook you dinner and breakfast in the morning.” Everyone wants to know why this works. He even acknowledges that this is him being a “brazen ass-hole” he thinks it might be because its just a shocking thing that catches them by surprise and even further surprises them when they say yes, but there is the promise of two meals, and Ralph did go to culinary school. And this is a review of a performance, not a critique of promiscuity.
The second segment is an interview segment with Mia Isabella, transgender pornstar, actress and voice actress. Now the audience learns about her life. She was born a boy in Chicago, but when she decided that wasn’t the gender or sex she was interested in she had the full support of her family, including an uncle that would dissuade her peers from bullying her. It wasn’t until she grew up and got more into the trans community that she realized that her experience was different from almost everyone elses. At twenty, she got married, and this is after she was legally recognized as a woman. Later she got divorced. Recently she was dating an NFL athlete who had to remain nameless, but the broke up because his celebrity status could have been defamed if media found out he was with her. She retired from doing porn two years ago and now works as an actor on the FX show Sons of Anarchy, directs porn and is a featured voice actor in Grand Theft Auto V.
Or in the last segment “In the News” where Amanda Gale gives her reports on the sexual happenings of the week one of the first things she says is “I’m gonna give you the news so hard this week. I’ll squirt the news in your face.”
Now the hypersexualization of a podcast called The Week in Sex probably doesn’t really need to be explained. And of course it was supposed to be comic and raunchy and out there as well as sexy. But what is interesting is how desperate the puns seem. From the producer coming around before the show starts, asking everyone to laugh at the jokes (and this even is escalated to the point of providing prizes to patrons with the most energy). To the apparent scriptedness of the conversation. And, besides some of the jokes made by the comedians also interviewed, most of these laughs feel forced. Half of jokes made have punchlines along the lines of “tee hee we’re talking about sex” or “She has a bigger dick than me” referring to Mia Isabella.
But there is still cleverness, it just is never in the jokes that are laughed at. It is sometimes so steeped in double entendre that it seems rehearsed, or completely the opposite. For instance, when Mia is talking about her voice acting in GTAV, she says that because of skills she acquired at matching noises as a porn star she “Banged [her recorded dialogue] out in less than an hour.” And no one laughed, but that was pretty clever.
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