I excuse so much in the name of comedy. Don’t we all? When it comes to comedic movies and television shows, we expect to be at least a little uncomfortable. We pretend we don’t hear when rape jokes are casually thrown around and sexual violence is praised. The nature of television and film is this: if it’s funny enough, you can get away with it. So, in Sixteen Candles boys brag about getting girls drunk to sleep with them. In Wedding Crashers Vince Vaughn’s character being raped is a punchline. In Peggy Sue Got Married Nick Cage’s character says ‘stop’ and it’s funny that Peggy doesn’t. And in 30 Rock, it is a running joke that one of the characters enjoys having sex with his wife while she is asleep. No one bats an eye. In fact, all of these characters are rewarded for their actions. They all get the girl or guy in the end.
These scenes wear comedy as a mask. As Professor Sujata Moorti put it in an interview with The Chicago Tribune, “The people who make these movies probably don’t see themselves as endorsing rape… But the humor is derived from the ineptitude of these teenage boys, and sexual assault gets folded into that and it becomes an accessory to the humor. So, it has a trivializing effect. A sanitizing effect.” Every time I raise a question about it, I am told “It’s just a movie,” or “It’s a comedy! They’re just joking around.” But I don’t accept that anymore. I will no longer excuse anything in the name of comedy. Sex is funny, but sexual assault is not. And it’s time television and film stop normalizing sexual violence through turning something traumatic into a comedic beat. Following the Times Up and #MeToo movements, the attention those movements drew to the ways in which we let sexual violence run rampant in our society have gotten many television show and film creators thinking about, and acting out, change. Big Mouth, the 2017 animated comedy, is one of those shows that is at the forefront of a more sex-positive media.
How we get to a place of sex-positive media is a question with a complicated answer. It requires that we look at the relationship between sex and the media historically to know how we got here in the first place. In the early 1930s, there was a push to return film to a moralistic medium free of sex, violence, drugs, and anything else Hollywood deemed unsuitable. So, in 1934, what was known as the Hays Code was implemented. The Hays Code was intended to maintain the morality and purity of viewers through the banning of things like nudity, suggestive dancing, mocking religion, drugs, interracial romance, revenge, crime methods, or lustful kissing. Although the Hays Code was officially terminated in 1968, the nearly 40 years of film and television sanitation has had lasting effects.
On the one hand, the intense restriction encouraged filmmakers to get creative with innuendo. Think of the train going through the tunnel after a romantic moment in Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night. The impact of this can be seen directly in films and television today where creators use filmic devices to relay to the audience sex has happened without showing it. A similar example to It Happened One Night is in Nancy Meyers’ It’s Complicated when a sprinkler goes off outside the bedroom window after a romantic moment. On the other hand, though, audiences received an overcorrection once the censorship went away. Some television and film became hypersexualized, going from the cast of I Love Lucy being unable to say the word pregnancy on television because it alluded to sex having occurred, to “brief nudity” only giving a film a PG rating. And while opinions of nudity and the hypertextualization of female bodies in the media is a completely different nuanced conversation, the point is, things have changed drastically.
Sujata Moorti addressed the prevalence of sexual violence jokes specifically in comedy, saying, “…rape jokes became more pervasive with the rise of feminism, particularly during the 1970s and 1980s. Suddenly common were gags such as a Revenge of the Nerds character donning a jock’s Halloween mask and having sex with the jock’s unsuspecting girlfriend, and jokes like Rodney Dangerfield’s “My girlfriend is so ugly, when two guys broke into her apartment, she yelled, ‘Rape!’ They yelled, ‘No!’” The dangers of hypersexualized, aggressive characters on television come into play more significantly in comedic content because the media is using something traumatic to get people to laugh. Especially in these films and shows that are geared towards younger audiences, they are teaching these audiences that this violent behavior is acceptable, funny, and they will be rewarded for it.
Featuring sexual violence in comedic films overshadows the fact violence has occurred. So, it begs the question, what are the limits of comedy? How does a television show or movie make fun of sexual relationships without making a mockery of the severity of assault? I found the answer to these questions in the most unlikely of places: the Netflix animated show Big Mouth. Created by comedians Nick Kroll and Andrew Goldberg, Big Mouth chronicles the experiences of middle school students. But it’s not a show for middle school students. It is an extremely raunchy, but realistic, representation of what young people go through. The show never shies away from the grossest, most uncomfortable situations puberty presents. The show explores topics such as masturbation, first sexual encounters, sexual identity, attraction, and every other complicated and embarrassing thing we all went through in adolescence.
I was very hesitant to watch this show because I assumed it would fall into the same pitfalls every other teen show and movie does. But I assumed wrong. Big Mouth shows how a comedy about sex doesn’t have to inherently excuse violence. In fact, it can be used to do the opposite and teach young viewers sex-positivity. Big Mouth approaches sex jokes in a way that teaches their audiences about consent, the importance of communication, and sexual health. The show has entire episodes centered around sexual health or the work being done at Planned Parenthood. There are episodes about communicating with the person you are having sex with, debunking sex misconceptions, and being comfortable with your own body. In addition to being educational, each episode is also hilarious. Every moment of awkward, squeamish, gross puberty reveals a way in which sex without violence is funny. Of course, it isn’t perfect. There are parts of the show that fall short and things I wish were different. But overall, the show removes shame in conversations about sex, and that is an important first step.
Big Mouth shows there is room for education in comedy. There is a way to make sex jokes without the violence. And what’s more is, sex jokes can serve as a method of educating viewers on important topics. As Nick Kroll said about the show, “It’s a disservice to boys and girls not to create a dialogue about all of this spectrum of feelings, emotions and physical reactions that they’re having.” Really though, it’s a disservice to everyone. Young people and older people alike deserve sex-positive media that doesn’t make a mockery of rape and promote shame in conversations about sex. Shows like Big Mouth are serving as an outline for future content creators to follow when they are creating raunchy content. Big Mouth is evidence that there is room for sex education in explicit content. Just because something is labeled “adult” doesn’t mean it gets to reinforce rape culture. There are so many things that are funny about consensual sex that there is no need for characters to trick people into having sex with them for the sake of comedy. Nuance is important in these heavy conversations. And if a content creator is choosing to make content about sex, getting into the nuance is necessary. And fortunately, there is humor in that nuance.
[…] article was published on Film Cred […]