Top 10 Funny Sex Scenes

The Brits may not excel at Olympic opening ceremonies, but they sure do excel at making sex funny. This Monty Python film features the weirdest sex-ed lesson in the history of cinema — but actually, it’s a lot more helpful than most real-life sex ed these days.

A Catholic school teacher, played by John Cleese, asks his male students how to get the “vaginal juices” flowing. “Rubbing the clitoris, sir?” asks one
boy. Cleese responds, “What’s wrong with a kiss, boy? Hmm? Why not start her off with a nice kiss? You don’t have to go leaping straight for the clitoris like a bull at a gate.” He discusses other methods, from stroking thighs to nibbling earlobes. In case of performance anxiety, he suggests: “Tonguing will give you the best idea of how the juices are coming along.”

But it’s when Cleese pulls down a four-poster Murphy bed from his classroom wall that things get really weird: He proceeds to have matter-of-fact intercourse with his wife in front of the students to demonstrate how things work, while simultaneously reprimanding the students for not paying attention or passing notes. Only Cleese could seem so earnest and likeable in this position.

No one does awkward, neurotic sex quite like Woody Allen, and the results are usually hilarious. Which is fortunate, because we don’t think we could stomach Allen in a straight-up sex scene. It’s hard to pick just one, but a favorite of ours is when Howard Cosell joins a newlywed couple in their hotel room -- complete with cheering crowd -- to give a live, on-the-spot telecast of their honeymoon night, a la ABC’s Wild World of Sports. It’s all done in the style of a boxing match, with a starting bell and Woody Allen making his entrance with a white towel around his neck. Cosell gives running commentary as the marriage is consummated under a shiny peach blanket, then climbs into bed with the couple for the post-coital interviews. Our favorite Cosell commentary? “He’s wearing a green corduroy suit.”

Funny sex isn’t limited to comedies -- take the macabre movie AMERICAN PSYCHO. Christian Bale, as Patrick Bateman, hosts two prostitutes and explains to them the genius of Phil Collins. "I also think Phil Collins works best within the confines of the group, rather than as a solo artist,” he tells them, and the tone of his voice lets them know they shouldn’t even think about disagreeing. “And I stress the word artist. This is ‘Sussudio.’ Great great song." Bale then proceeds to have sex with the two women - to ‘Sussudio’! -- while vamping in the mirror: he points at himself, winks, flexes his muscles, and runs his hand through his hair like Christian Grey in 50 Shades of Grey. It’s not exactly slapstick, but the dark humor is a welcome relief in this bleak tale.

Funny sex isn’t always intentional. At least, we’re assuming we weren’t meant to laugh when Clive Owen is interrupted, mid-sex with Monica Belluci, by a gang of men with guns and never once removes his penis from her vagina, despite dodging bullets and slaying multiple attackers. He rolls off the bed, spins across the floor, bounces off objects, and, for the finale, pushes Belluci against the wall for her orgasmic climax. She has her eyes closed the entire time and it’s unclear whether she’s clueless about all the gunshots or simply turned on by them. Either way, she gets her happy finish. We know: it sure sounds like a joke, but we think it was meant simply to be hot and action-packed. Perhaps the filmmakers knew that the hormone-addled guys in the audience would just go with it -- this is Monica Belluci we’re talking about, after all.

In the middle of a romantic comedy starring, say, Sandra Bullock, you might not necessarily laugh out loud at a sex scene showed from the inside of a woman’s vagina, where brother-sister incest (not to mention necrophilia) is heavily implied, and a ginormous, ejaculating, CGI penis thrusts toward you. In, fact, you might find it a little disturbing. But deep in the midst of a Gaspar Noe film? Trust us, it’s funny. This is the same man who wrote and directed IRREVERSIBLE (2002), after all -- that light and fluffy film about violent rape and revenge. In other words, you need a laugh, and you’re prepared to adjust your definition of “funny” to get that laugh. Trust us, after the graphic abortion scene with fully intact fetus, you’ll be glad you had a LOL.

Remember how we said that filmmakers often feel freer to get kinky when the sex is being played for comedic value? Enter Jamie Lee Curtis’s Wanda -- a cross-dresser with a serious foreign language fetish -- and her boyfriend Otto, played by Kevin Kline. Otto seduces Wanda with a string of Italian words and songs, including, as he places her black lace stocking over his face, a cry of “Benito Mussolini!” He takes breaks to sniff his own armpits, then breathes in the scent of one of her knee-high boots, before inflating it to imitate an elephant, and then beating himself with it. No wonder Kline won the Oscar for this movie -- his O-face alone is worth a golden statue.

EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX *BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK (1972)

Like we said, Woody Allen is a comic sex genius -- we can’t even pick just one film of his, let alone one scene (and even though Allen’s got two slots on this list already, his movie SLEEPER really belongs, too, for the scene when he gets stuck alone in the orgasmatron). Pretty much any scene from EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW movie would qualify (hello, sheep bestiality!), but we’re going with Woody-Allen-as-bespectacled-sperm. It’s not exactly erotic, but there’s something kind of endearing about the immense group effort that goes on inside the guy as he segues from dinner date to intercourse. And Allen is hilarious as a neurotic sperm who fears he may be headed for a pointless end in a condom or worse. “What if he’s masturbating, I might wind up on the ceiling. What if it’s a homosexual encounter?” Our favorite moment, though, is when a priest is dragged into mission control during a flagging erection crisis and accused of “tampering with the machinery in the cerebral cortex, turning up the guilt reflex.”

Oh Bill Lumbergh, how we love you and your TPS reports. We’re going to have go ahead and say that our favorite Lumbergh moment is when Peter (Ron Livingston) has a nightmare about Lumbergh (Gary Cole) having sex with Peter’s girlfriend. Mmm-kay? Nightmare-Lumbergh is oiled up, mid-coitus, and says, “You can just go ahead and move a little bit to the left.” He stops to take a sip from his coffee mug and adds, “Yeah, that’s it.”

Oh man, we just looked up this scene to refresh our memory, and happened upon the original, uncensored, two-minute long version of the puppet sex scene in this movie. There’s puppet poop play! Puppet watersports! (And we’re not talking windsurfing.) Puppet salad-tossing! But even the much cleaner final cut that made it into the movie -- less than a minute long -- is simultaneously hilarious and wrong. Some of the sex positions are not humanly possible -- and even if they were, you could never show them in an R-rated movie. We love the swift transition from candle-lit chest-stroking and sensually intertwined legs to hardcore doggy-style fucking -- all to the tune of a romantic power ballad. Pretty impressive for a plastic doll with no penis.

Why is it only in comedies that characters actually deal with condoms? (Remember KNOCKED UP?) In this classic scene, a philandering woman offers her lover (John Ritter) one of her partner’s condoms, and it turns out to be glow-in-the-dark blue. When Rick, the man of the house, returns, Ritter jumps into a closet, while Rick dons a red glow-in-the-dark condom as a sexy surprise... but the real surprise is when he finds Ritter in the closet. Man fighting ensues. Oh, did we mention the lights are out? Which means the entire thing plays out via two bobbing, erect, disembodied, condom-clad penises. Now that’s a sword fight.

Latex runner-up: THE NAKED GUN: FROM THE FILES OF POLICE SQUAD (1988), when Priscilla Presley says, all breathy and bedroom-voiced, “I want you to know, I practice safe sex,” and Leslie Nielsen responds, all studly-voiced and meaningful eye contact, “So do I.” White sheer curtains blow in a gentle breeze in the softly lit room... cut to the couple, each clad in a full body condom.