10 of Film’s Greatest Sex Comedies

We’ve been excited about For A Good Time, Call… since its Sundance premiere, and not just because it (like fellow Sundance film Bachelorette, on demand now and in theaters next month) indicates that the post-Bridesmaids female-heavy R-rated comedy surge is actually going to happen. More than that, For A Good Time is, quite simply, a very funny and exquisitely likable sex comedy, and there’s a shortage of those any way you slice it. There’s no shortage of sex comedies, of course — since the early ‘80s heyday of Porky’s and Hardbodies and their ilk, they’ve been all but ubiquitous. But have you ever tried going back and watching those iconic titles? Good heavens. They do not hold up well.

But a select few do. After the jump, we’ve assembled ten of our all-time favorite sex comedies (which we’re defining as movies where sex is the primary preoccupation/subject matter); add your own in the comments.

The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek

The oldest film on our list, by a very long shot — Preston Sturges made this uproarious screwball comedy clear back in the early 1940s, and we’re still not sure how the hell he got away with it. Here’s why: it’s about a small-town girl who gets knocked up by a soldier she doesn’t know on his last night before shipping out. This was, you could safely say, not the kind of taboo story that regularly got past the ultra-conservative Hays Office (which regulated movie content in those pre-MPAA days). “The amazing thing about The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek,” wrote Joe Bob Briggs in his wonderful book Profoundly Erotic, “is not so much that it’s one of the greatest screwball comedies ever filmed (it is), but that it even exists”; Briggs goes on to note that when the great critic James Agee saw it, “he was so astounded that he said, ‘The Hays Office… has been raped in its sleep.’” But it could all be a matter of tone — Miracle is so cheery and good-natured, and so ripe with the dizzy small-town comedy that Sturges did better than anyone, that it was tough to get too worked up over its prurient content.