Dying for Sex Puts a Kink in the Cancer Comedy Genre

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Besides rubber chickens and Scottish kids swearing, nothing’s funnier than cancer. Maybe it’s the hard k sound. Maybe it’s the assless hospice gowns. Or maybe it’s the way the illness hijacks the body from the inside out, until all we can do is succumb to our inevitable demise in complete agony, leaving our grieving loved ones to curse the God who watches with indifference as we slowly sink into the eternal nothingness of the next realm. Are you laughing yet?

So if cancer’s not that funny after all, what’s up with the “cancer comedy” genre? Although a certain gallows humor around terminal illness has existed in literature and drama for eons, cancer’s prominence in the 20th century as the number two worldwide killer, coupled with its uniquely heinous method of attack on the body, has made it an apt conduit for conflict-driven narrative. It’s not hard to dig for what’s sad, what’s dramatic about cancer. Its gravity would be unimaginable if it weren’t also so ubiquitous, hadn’t touched so many of us as to skew prosaic. The funny of it all then comes from these built-in juxtapositions: death by cancer is arbitrary yet personal, pitiable yet inspiring, grotesque yet beautiful, drawn-out yet over too soon, indescribable yet straightforward. One of the funniest standup specials of this century, Tig Notaro’s Live (2012), opens with her revealing to the crowd, “Hello, I have cancer. How are you?”

Dying for Sex, FX/Hulu’s new eight-episode miniseries adapted from the homonymous documentary podcast, is familiar with intrinsic ironies. Punny title and all, the show has the sort of off-kilter yet tantalizing logline that this century’s cancer comedies thrive on: A depressed former comedian gets his diagnosis and tries to make amends and nab stage time (Funny People [2009]); high school sucks but leukemia sucks harder (Me and Earl and The Dying Girl [2015], Alexa & Katie [2018–2020]); two old-timers tick off all the activities they’ve always dreamed of doing while the clock ticks down (The Bucket List [2007]). Dying for Sex’s hook starts right away. In the first scene, Molly (Michelle Williams) finds out she’s been diagnosed with Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer during a couple’s therapy session with her doting but sexually incompatible husband Steve (Jay Duplass). Hoping to give the body that will soon betray her one last hoorah, Molly leaves him right then and there and sets off with her best friend Nikki (Jenny Slate) on an odyssey to achieve la petite mort before her grand mort. Let the hijinks ensue!

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If on paper this sounds like the show underplays the severity of Molly’s situation, rest assured. Like others in this nimble subgenre, Dying for Sex is a laughjerker, the type of story that forces you to laugh so you won’t cry (but you’ll still cry anyway—a lot). These shows earn trite descriptors such as “heartstring-tugging,” “life-affirming,” “human,” because they’re just twee and self-aware enough to use humor to soften and paradoxically enhance the sorrow at their core. It’s effective, if predictable. Scenes alternate between being funny vs. sad, the division between the two always clear. Take 50/50 (2011): Joseph Gordon-Levitt shaving his head with a pube trimmer = funny! Him preparing for a surgery he will likely not survive = bring out the tissues.

But this is perhaps Dying for Sex’s crowning achievement: it upends the cancer comedy genre while hitting—nay, striking, flogging, paddling?—all its well-worn beats. As Molly dives spread-legs first into discovering what turns her on, she abandons the chokehold penetrative sex has on the cultural imagination and finds instead a predilection for dominating men. Whether she’s demeaning her hookup app match’s penis or checking an adult man in a Scooby Doo costume for fleas, the show’s portrayal of Molly’s carnal awakenings is simultaneously whimsical yet savvy and ultimately affirming. Rather than making her and her partners’ erotic proclivities either the butt of the joke or overly exoticized, the humor comes from the natural, astonishing folly of sex—and having a body at all—itself.

Now add Molly’s cancer into the equation. Molly’s journey toward bodily liberation is consistently inspired and impeded by her body’s deterioration. She snaps a bone in her leg while kicking her neighbor in the dick; one of her partners may have drunk her chemo-laced urine. The madcap energy that made co-creator Elizabeth Meriwether’s New Girl (2011–2018) a millennial tome is firmly onscreen, but a blistering sorrow augments the antics. Even the score during a frenzied masturbation session, complete with wry breathy chants and a melancholy synth pad line, makes a straightforward scene emotionally complex.

There’s a reason the kink community labels much of its sex as “play,” something joyous and frivolous meant to subvert kink and BDSM’s status as dark, shameful, violent. And yet Dying for Sex understands how multifaceted both kinky sex and Molly as a person are. A subplot regarding how Molly’s horrific experience with sexual assault at the age of seven hinders her ability to orgasm with another person develops movingly over the course of the season, and we’re suddenly back to more juxtapositions. Molly’s cancer, her childhood trauma, and her quest to come are all something to both laugh off and take earnestly. Meriwether and co-creator Kim Rosenstock imbue the philosophy of kink into the very lifeblood of the show—as in, it’s not perfect, it’s a little messy, and it’s way more fun as a result.

A quiet radicalism is at work here. At a time in which middle-aged women’s sexual pleasure has permeated the discourse (see Miranda July’s novel All Fours or the Nicole Kidman vehicle Babygirl, both from 2024), the growing tradfem movement and enduring conservative attitudes toward female sexuality seem to meet any deviations from the norm with venom (a quick scroll through Dying for Sex’s audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes will give you an indication of what I mean). Sexual freedom is political freedom. As the show goes on, Molly’s droll, rambunctious superego-driven inner monologue begins to eclipse her mousey exterior, and her journey toward bodily liberation brings with it a sort of spiritual transformation. She stands up to a sometimes dehumanizing medical system (embodied by Doctor Jerry Pankowitz, played by David Rasche) and voices her needs, her desires, without shame.

The message is one of empowerment, another trite, eye-roll-inducing descriptor. But through the sheer force of the show’s emotional tapestry, animated by its incisive dialogue and spot-on performances, it fits organically. Dying for Sex’s pathos are almost too big, too expansive to be contained within the show’s limited runtime of four and a half hours. The podcast by Nikki Boyer (who executive produces the TV show) and the real Molly Kochlan (who died in 2019), funny as it was, felt sharpest when the two’s anger, cynicism, and hurt took centerstage. Dying for Sex the TV series allows for its characters to rage, for the negativity to sear across the screen, but it doesn’t wallow in it. “We’re gonna figure out a way to not be so angry,” Molly tells Nikki after a particularly demoralizing stretch. Nikki takes this in stride, confronting the doctor who years earlier wrote off Molly’s concerns about a lump on her breast as hysterical. Her voice in turns quivering and acidic, she shouts at him across the street, “I forgive you! Fuck you. I forgive you!” This is not an either/or comedic or dramatic scene. It’s both.

After all, death, the glorious equalizer, is the ultimate punchline. But Dying for Sex’s kinky, simultaneously tonally jumbled yet sweeping execution helps breathe new life into a genre about dying, particularly as the series reaches its deliriously heartstring-tugging, life-affirming, and, yes, human conclusion. Molly is placed in hospice in the final episode, and her nurse Amy (Paula Pell) outlines the no-frills process of dying with the excitement of a child: the body is remarkable and powerful; it can bring us masochistic pleasure when in pain, it can bring us peace when exhaling our torturous last breath. As Amy readies the sedative that will ease Molly into unconsciousness for her final few hours, Molly tells her mother Gail (Sissy Spacek) and Nikki at her bedside, “You know what? Honestly, it’s not that fucking serious.” Nikki and Gail laugh, and cry, because it’s a joke, a white lie, and a harsh truth all at once. Seconds later, Molly slips into unconsciousness, into the void. She’s gone. A perfectly kinky ending to a perfectly kinky life.

Michael Savio is a freelance critic and former editorial intern at Paste.