Sex Education Is a Hardcore Believer in the British Sex Comedy

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It’s impossible for a series to feel more tailor-made for our current moment than Sex Education. It’s a peppy teen comedy catering to Netflix’s young demographic; it features warm, heartfelt, positive queer representation; it’s packed with likable, hilarious rising stars and newcomers; it boasts an eccentric, silly sense of humor; it vigorously engages with the online generation’s widespread exposure to all things sexual despite sex ed being uniformly piss poor. Oh, and it is also British, crucial to making a buzzy online hit. Sex Education didn’t just hit the zeitgeist, it answered a TV calling.

But Sex Education didn’t come out of a vacuum—even though Brits are not traditionally known for their sexiness, they do have a sterling history of being awkward about sex. A few hundred years after the first sex comedy was staged in the United Kingdom, Sex Education signals the clear influences that conditioned all its peculiar British quirks. But rather than evoking the past, Sex Education is an improved evolution of the sex comedies of yesteryear, not just by centering a diverse understanding of sexual health and education, but by letting a wider representation of people in on the joke.

Sex comedies are all predicated on pushing back against contemporary restrictions; in fact, it’s not a stretch to say that they are defined by the contemporary taboos they break upon release. Yes, this means they lose their sharp impact quicker than other types of comedy, but the ones that work best offer an audience something they can’t otherwise access and are being told they shouldn’t enjoy. British sex comedies, with their strictly observed social codes and boorish attitude towards sexual exploits, understood this well, and were most successful where the appetite for them was highest.

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But in an age where all media, comedic and sexual, is instantly available, how do the charms of a sex comedy work? Sex Education achieves this by showing that, yes, sex is an option all the time to everyone, but teenagers still have zero idea what to do when the opportunity arises. The comedy lies not in being denied sex, but in the lack of “education” around it. Tension and humor is still created from awkward embarrassment in sexual situations, but instead of solving it by rewarding characters with sex, our characters are rewarded with learning how to have sex and how to value their sexuality. It’s like if a Carry On film was wholesome.

For those unaware of the history of sex comedies, the first ones date back to antiquity, with Ancient Greek playwrights writing social satire through subversive takes on the era’s sexual politics—the most famous being Lysistrata. A couple thousand years later in a post-Shakespeare England, the Puritan’s 12-year ban on theater was lifted upon King Charles II’s return from exile, and with debauchery and subversiveness back in fashion, the sex comedy got a new lease on life on British shores with the “Restoration comedy.” Expect comic misunderstandings, lascivious cads, and plenty of attempted adultery; cursing and explicit discussion of lewd topics were encouraged. It’s not “I gave two and a half handjobs to that guy I met in Butlin’s,” but it’s as close as you could get in the 1600s.

While the most sexually explicit plays were written by men, the Restoration period allowed women to earn a living writing plays for the first time in England. Aphra Behn’s work focused, like Sex Education, on social inequalities between the sexes, and her and other female playwrights bore the brunt of dismissive criticism against the Restoration comedies. Soon, the Restoration era gave way to serious moral plays, and the sex comedy was reduced in the public eye.

Victorian England was known for its sexual repression, so the most well-known stories of sexual frivolities are period pieces—still, burlesque was very popular, which parodied well-known plays with gender reversed roles. This taboo-breaking transgression seems bold and progressive, but in reality just gave fuel to the Victorian fire that female actresses were basically immoral sex workers. Cut to the 1950s, where post-war cheer was interrupted by severe conservative morals in all sectors of the arts. British censorship was pretty tough, but occasionally sexually explicit material would slip through, particularly if they pretended to be nudist documentaries (seriously, this worked more than once). Despite the exploitative angle of these films, the tongue-in-cheek informative angle feels very in-keeping with Sex Education’s erotically-charged PSA material—except, of course, for the fact that Sex Education is genuinely informative.

As the 1960s rolled on, producers found they could get sex past the censors if the films were comedic in nature—playful naughtiness was a lesser offense than serious eroticism. The Carry On franchise began as a cheeky send-up of the British music-hall tradition and was much more in-keeping with popular bawdy seaside postcards than sex positivity. Innuendos, pantomime theatrics, and a lot of blouses being undone made the series a household name. The heightened performances and embrace of silliness codified the Carry On films as a classic British way of tackling sex in film precisely because they could be enjoyed respectably by a vast variety of ages. They were naughty, but also harmless, playfully rebuking overblown sexual appetites in shrill tones. Think “Detty, detty pig” but at the seaside.

Sex farces grew in popularity in Britain from the end of the 60s onwards, with genre mash-ups and stories of the erotic exploits of ordinary tradesmen offering a lewd fantasy before Thatcher moralism and the VHS market wiped out softcore theatrical releases. But these boorish yet ultimately fluffy works all played squarely to male tastes—female characters enjoyed the slight agency offered by subverted sexual dynamics but they weren’t offered the chance to be real characters and existed purely for objectification. It wasn’t just humor that was heightened in these works; sexism was too, emboldening all the backwards attitudes of a chauvinistic patriarchy that still saw women as a supplement to male desire.

Sex Education works so well not because it owes its success to Britain’s archive of sex comedies, but because it takes from it only what’s aged well—now people of any gender and sexuality are part of the joke rather than on the other end of it. Clearly the dated farces of yesteryear can only be appreciated in terms of what taboos they were pushing when they were released, but Sex Education argues that they shouldn’t be discarded wholesale. The sex comedy is still able to elicit joy and titillation not by reinventing the wheel, but by centering those who have historically been excluded. Sex, after all, is still something we should all have a laugh about—now everyone gets to join in.

Season 4 of Sex Education is now streaming on Netflix.

Rory Doherty is a screenwriter, playwright and culture writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow his thoughts about all things stories @roryhasopinions.