3 hours ago
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On a street in Edinburgh, a woman I’ve only just met is quizzing me on my sexual fantasies. “Do you want softcore or hardcore? What positions do you prefer?” asks Cameryn Moore, a former phone sex operator turned playwright from the US, along with other, less printable, questions.
Her business plan is simple: for £20, punters can tell Moore what turns them on. She will then bash out a piece of bespoke erotic fiction for them on her typewriter. “I listen to their content then spit it out on paper – no punctuation, very stream of consciousness,” she says. “I also offer to read it out loud to them – and they walk away grinning from ear to ear because nobody’s ever asked them what they like when it comes to sex. So that’s what I do every day at the fringe: sit down for four or five hours a day and crank out dirty shit.” She calls the service Sidewalk Smut.
That’s not all Moore is doing – her custom erotica stand is an innovative way of drumming up support for Smut Slam, her nightly session of dirty storytelling that has travelled the globe since she started it in a Boston Irish pub in 2011. There’s a segment in the show in which anonymous sex stories are dropped in a bucket and picked out to be read aloud. “One story that comes up a lot lately is someone finding out that their hook-up is radically rightwing.” Others have involved people falling asleep during threesomes or nipple rings going astray at sex clubs. “I am forever amazed at the variety that exists in the human sexual experience,” laughs Moore.
It is Smut Slam’s first trip back to Edinburgh in seven years, and it’s not the only sex-laden show in this year’s lineup. So, are we currently simmering in a summer of smut? Californian performer, writer and director Bryn Woz has a show simply called Smut, while English TV star Tom Read Wilson’s An Alphabet of Me alights at some rather filthy pit stops.
Most telling of all is an Edinburgh comeback for Julian Clary, after 17 years away, with a show called Fully Dilated. “That means I’m opening up to the public,” says Clary when we meet in a pub garden. “And once you have dilated, that’s when everything comes out.”
Clary is well aware that he’s best known for a smutty joke: at the 1993 British Comedy Awards he told the audience he had been “fisting Norman Lamont” (their shocked laughter drowned out the punchline – “talk about a red box”). The new show reflects on the run-up to this gag, in which Clary’s life was split into two wildly different sides – soaring to mainstream TV stardom on the one hand, tending to his friends who were dying of Aids on the other. “This isn’t going to sell me any tickets,” he says with a smile, “but I’m talking about loss. It’s uncharted territory for me, and something I could never have done at the time.”
Bawdy humour has been around since at least the ancient Greeks, but the kind we know so well in Britain is best associated with music hall and pantomime, where actors used innuendo and nudge-nudge wink-wink humour as a way of avoiding prosecution for obscenity. This style perhaps reached its zenith with Clary, who used smut as a way to slip the realities of gay sex into homes around the country. He has become something of a smut godfather, and you can certainly trace his disciples. Read Wilson describes Clary as a “huge hero” and namechecks a joke he once made at the London Palladium panto: “He came on dressed as an enormous bloom and said that he’d woken up with stamen all over him.”
Read Wilson’s alphabetical tour may sound crude – W is for Willy, after all – but it’s actually rather erudite. His word-of-the-day series on social media sometimes incorporates smut and slang (fuck-a-doodle-do was once analysed, alongside less rude offerings such as pettifogging). What makes his love of words especially infectious, though, is his Honor Blackman-esque purr, not to mention a rather Wildean flourish. It lends itself to smut throughout his Edinburgh performance, from his opening line (“Thank you for your warm hand on my opening”) to his selection of penis jokes (describing one penis, he says sympathetically: “Its two neighbours are nuts and it has an arsehole living at the back”).
We can’t even escape innuendo during our chat. “You know,” Read Wilson says at one point, “the trouble with the lexicon of smut is that it becomes indelibly seared on your mental retina and it doesn’t wipe off.” When our internet connection starts to glitch I find myself saying: “I’m just going to take you downstairs … do you think it’s your end or mine?”
Smut can be fun and frivolous, but for Chelsea Birkby, a young comedian performing her third show at Edinburgh, filthy gags are more than just a way to get laughs. “As a teenager I used to hate standup because of the sexual humour,” she says. “But that’s because I grew up feeling ashamed about sex.”
After being persuaded to see live comedy while studying philosophy at university, she had an epiphany. “Simon Amstell was the biggest influence,” she says. “Being so confessional, and so much about sex, I saw him and thought, ‘Yeah, this changes everything.’ And now, getting older and working through some of that shame, I find that being able to talk about these things is liberating! Sex is kind of confusing and it’s often private, so it’s fun when you bring it out into the spotlight.”
Birkby’s show is about desiring total domination and control and is fuelled by self-help guides along with a sexually explicit PowerPoint presentation. She has an easy way with the audience, especially when quizzing two older comedy-goers about whether they know what “edging” means. But that doesn’t mean it’s all plain-sailing for her. Smut, when performed by a woman, brings drawbacks. “If you’re talking about mental health, people aren’t really assessing you, like, ‘How mad is she?’. But if you’re talking about sex, people are thinking about you in a sexual way. There is a judgment there, which can be exposing. On TikTok she noticed she had become the subject of the game Smash or Pass. “And it’s like, I’m just sharing a joke, I’m not asking to be rated. Having said that, the extra liberating thing about standup is that then you can just incorporate all that into more stuff that you talk about.”
Bryn Woz has been trading in smut for some time. But while she used to have no trouble regaling audiences with her sexual stories, over time she started to find it more difficult, which is why her new show is delivered through filthy alter ego Entendre Entendre. “I realised I had been using some version of this persona my whole life to kind of fool myself from realising how vulnerable I was,” she says. “I used to be, like, ‘Yeah, I did it for the story, so what if I hooked up with my friends in the car park outside their wedding rehearsal?’” But, lately, she says of making a show about her sexual adventures, “I realised I wasn’t quite the person I thought I was, and that trying to say these things as myself didn’t feel honest. So the Entendre persona is like a personification of all the coping mechanisms I’ve used throughout my life and all the masks I’ve worn. She can tell these stories very easily because she doesn’t think of the consequences. She’s unfazed.”
She certainly is – as Woz peels off her emotional layers during her Edinburgh show, she also performs a burlesque striptease. While scarf, gloves and brassiere (there are strategically placed stars underneath) are discarded, Woz runs the full gamut of smut – we get songs with audience sing-alongs (“Call me when you learn how to use that dick”), and what Woz calls “beautiful poems, such as Stanky Dick and Balls”. But there’s also sadness, as Entendre considers the emptiness behind a life of “doing it for the story”. “We get to see the person underneath,” says Woz.
Smut may have a therapeutic element for some of its practitioners, but when I put this to Clary he looks agog. “I’ve not had any childhood trauma,” he says. “I don’t need sex therapy. No, no, I’ve never thought down that line.”
For Clary, smutty humour started at home – his mother would make the family laugh by dropping naughty words into conversation. At school with his friend Nick he would draw rude cartoons of his teachers having sex. After studying Greek drama and the war poets at university, he decided that the works of Wilfred Owen simply weren’t smutty enough and headed off in the opposite direction. “I like the way smut makes everyone a child again,” he says. “And there’s a different type of laugh you get with smut. A proper belly laugh, not a cerebral titter, which is of no use to me.”
The first line of his Edinburgh show is, “Are you ready for some filth?”, and he thinks the reason gay comedians are adept at smutty humour is because: “There’s a lot of sex and immediate gratification that goes on, so we tend to cut to the chase.” Yet Clary’s own brand of smut thrives on its coyness. He recalls one of his favourite lines by Kenneth Williams, who once said: “Whenever I see innuendo in a script, I whip it out immediately.”
Clary says that in the UK, the further north you travel the more likely an audience is to appreciate smut. “Although I remember talking about fisting in Harrogate and there were a lot of old ladies in the audience. I’d just been on Strictly so I think they were expecting charming anecdotes, but I did enjoy the gasp.” Australia and New Zealand are keen smut consumers, he says, but the US he always found tricky. “They never used to really understand the coyness of it,” he says.
This may be true. Smut Slam’s Moore was raised as a Mormon, yet despite (or possibly because of) this, she has always rejected “comedy that tiptoes around things or has euphemisms. That’s not funny or cute to me. I would much rather just say the thing.”
Woz agrees: “I think you guys [the Brits] probably do it a little smarter than us because of all your repression.”
Thanks to Smut Slam’s international success, Moore has a good knowledge of different nations’ appetite for smut. “When I apply for a German visa to perform I have to print off all these pieces of paper detailing what I do and they don’t even blink.”
Some countries, on the other hand, need a little warming up. “Whenever I tell people I’m taking Smut Slam to Finland they say, ‘Oh my God, are you sure?’ Because Finnish and Estonian audiences are considered to be very stern. It takes time to open them up, but it’s satisfying when you do.” Moore’s favourite thing is to bring Smut Slam to places where it’s considered genuinely transgressive – the American south, Alberta, Canada, Ljubljana in Slovenia. As for British audiences, she says, we’re good listeners but need a bit of cajoling when it comes to contributing. That’s certainly the case for me as Moore attempts to interview me for her erotic story. “You’ll need to take off your sunglasses,” she says as, to do this properly, eye contact needs to be established. It’s not long before I’m telling her things I’ve never discussed with close friends.
So why this gargantuan appetite for smut? And why now? “Smut is perhaps one of the great primary colours in the world of escapism,” says Read Wilson. “People in these difficult times need a good laugh,” adds Clary. “I’d much rather see something smutty and rude than some kind of highbrow analysis of Trumpism. That wouldn’t make me feel better at all.”
Moore sees smut’s power entwined with the sexual politics of our age. “It’s a mistake to underestimate the power of raw, authentic language,” she says. “It’s very easy to write off smutty humour as just tits and giggles. But if you’re good at it, you will plant seeds that are going to have people thinking about their own stuff, perhaps about shame in their own life, or how they’re having these conversations with other people.”
Both Birkby and Woz have noticed an uptick in women reading erotic fantasy novels. “There are more single women than ever who think: ‘I’m not gonna settle for less than what I deserve like my mother did, like my grandmother did’,” says Woz. “Consuming smuttier content is their way of getting that eroticism on their own terms, not expecting it from another person.”
“I do think we are on an upswing at the moment,” says Birkby. “There’s been a lot of nervousness around sex and talking about sex for the last few years, which absolutely needed to happen. But now that we’ve had these valuable discussions about what consent is, perhaps we can say, ‘We’ve got these new rules, how can we have a laugh about things now?”
She references the hemline index, a theory that whenever countries enter a recession, women’s hemlines lengthen. “Perhaps there’s a comedy equivalent,” she says, “that whenever the world gets worse, the jokes get smuttier.”
My smut-filled tour of Edinburgh has sadly come to an end. And so, after learning the tricks of the trade from some of comedy’s lewdest practitioners, there’s only one thing left for me to do: unfurl the story Moore wrote with me and see if I have become a true smut convert. “The bedroom is already warm this late in the morning,” it begins, “but her –”
Unfortunately, readers, we have just hit our word count. If you really want to know the rest, you’ll just have to use your (filthy) imagination.
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Smut Slam is at Banshee Labyrinth until 30 August. Bryn Woz: Smut is at Assembly Roxy until 31 August. Julian Clary: Fully Dilated is at Assembly Rooms until 23 August. Tom Read Wilson: The A-Z of Me is touring from 6 September. Chelsea Birkby: is in Full Control The Entire Time is at Pleasance Courtyard until 30 August
