My family never subscribed to any of the premium pay channels when I was growing up. This left me, pre-internet age, and bereft of a creepy older brother, with limited options when it came to finding some good old-fashioned sexual content. One thing I did have was a very wiggly version of HBO's Real Sex. After my parents would go to bed, I'd catch scrambled moments of it, all the while thinking how cool it would be if we'd only get HBO like the McColough's, or better yet, Skin-a-max or Showtime, so I could watch something like Softly From Paris, or Emanuel, which really would have been, well like, totally freaking awesome.

So while my friend was watching the real deal soft-core from the comfort of his couch, I was at my house, a foot from the screen, staring at a wobbly green and purple mess, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. However, despite that fact that I'd watch with a wide-eyed sharp intensity my grasp of what Real Sex was all about was never any clearer than the blurry and fuzzy version I had to be content with. Most of my just-pubescent mental capabilities were occupied in trying to figure out if the green blob on the wavering purple smear was a nipple. What remained of my hormone-addled powers of concentration was centered away from the audio of the show. Instead of listing to what was being said, I'd keep the volume near mute, my thumb on the channel-down button on the remote, and my ears pricked so they could register the creak of the third to bottom stair coming down from the second floor, just in case my dad or mom woke up and came downstairs. So what did I know about Real Sex? Well, that it was apparently a show about sex, and that if my parents weren't so cheap (or smart) that that wiggling purple thing would be static and flesh colored, and most likely a breast . . . or perhaps maybe an ass . . . maybe?

Then I got older, went to college, graduated, lived with roommates, got my own place, and then finally fulfilled my pathetic childhood dream of getting my very own premium channel: HBO. It was only then that I realized that what Real Sex was and is: one of the funnier programs on television.

One of the reasons Real Sex is funny is that while real sex can be sweet, intense, loving, playful, aggressive and a dozen other pleasant things, it is also, for the most part, inherently ridiculous. If done right, it's an undignified and awkward mess of an act. Everyone knows it, except the one or more individuals actually involved, and even they have their suspicions. Compounding this, Real Sex doesn't concern itself with run of the mill hanky-panky. Each little vignette on the show deals with a lurid niche of the sexual world--a niche that can usually be defined as either a fetish, a lifestyle, a business venture, or a piece of not-at-all legitimate erotic art. In other words, Real Sex isn't involved with "members" and "fringe," but the members of the fringe, and their escapades are flat-out goofy.

On the show, the "goofy factor" is perhaps most initially obvious when the segment is about some fetish or other. Fetishes are silly, but the real comedy isn't in the goofiness of the act, but in the passion and verve the generally-not-so-bright practitioners go about their particular proclivity. A typical example: a proponent of pony play, a type of fore-play that amounts to a woman riding a man around as he whinnies, trying to legitimize the act by disclaiming, "Ya know, pony play has been around for centuries." Cut to the sepia-toned, grainy photos or 15th century Slavic woodcuts which support the claim and prove the truism that kinkiness is not a modern phenomenon. Later, you'll have that woman's boyfriend or husband look wistfully into the camera, and bring the comedy home with a line like, "Pony play . . . is an important part of my life." It's a pretty simple comic formula: Foolishness + Sincerity = Comedy. Add the fact that the people who preach about the sense of empowerment that comes from pouring baked beans out of an industrial-sized can onto a naked woman--it's called "sploshing," by the way--are, at best, only moderately attractive and the whole affair only gets funnier. The statement, "You can do anything when you're having clown sex." is a priori amusing, but when it's delivered with manic glee by a dumpy, thirty something housewife it becomes comic gold.

But the type of fetishes that leave the normal viewer thinking, "Christ, that looks like a lot of work!" is only part of what Real Sex is about. Real Sex is also about imbuing aberrant sex acts with feel-good new-age spirituality, and this is where the show hits its stride. In moving from the ridiculous to the "sublime" the viewer can be assured that compared to the proponents of clown sex, the Tantric devotees will be even more zealous and even worse looking. And while the Kama Sutra set are usually more sophisticated, they can still be counted on to bring home the funny by hyper-philosophizing the fact that they are really inefficient about having sex. I mean, looking at them I realize they're not at all concerned with shaving or working out or buying a set of sheets with a decent thread count, but still, I just can't comprehend how after 10 minutes of slowly caressing a pair of breasts one's mind doesn't drift to thoughts like, 'Did I take that Netflix video out of my bag and drop it in the mail?' or 'You know, I really think Charles Schultz' drawing-style was really quite beautiful. Especially the early stuff.'

Following the Eastern/New-Age/Nonsense piece, Real Sex continues the pretentious fun with a segment highlighting some sort of performance or convention, like an Exotic/Erotic ball, a porn summit or a burlesque revival. These segments usually include something like a bespectacled "performance artist" with a Harvard BA explaining that what she does is a pastiche on 19th century stripping, which apparently looks very similar to awkwardly stripping in front of a rapt, unprepossessing audience. But even the most credulous viewer can see though this charade partly because no matter how seriously the live audience takes a reading of a bawdy short story entitled something like "Peasant--The Yearning," when viewed on TV its obviously just amateur erotica that unintentionally evokes memories of Tom Hank's "Tales of Ribaldry" Saturday Night Live skit.

The typical Real Sex episode is rounded out with a few people-on-the-street interviews with drunkenly honest couples, and a profile of some venal weirdo on the supply side of the sexual industry, e.g., a former artist who makes a "life-like" sex doll, an underwater sex video director, or a manufacturer of hydraulic-powered fucking machines who half-jokingly, but with half sincere pride, proclaims that his work is durable enough to hand down to your kids and grandkids.

In the end though, this high-minded hooey is what separates Real Sex from HBO's other sexploitation series, like the salaciously creepy, and severely off-putting Shock Video, and makes it a bona fide guilty pleasure. You can only watch the actually act of people incorporating restraints or food or costumes or whatever into "doing it" for so long before you lose total interest. Then you actually want a pasty, droopy-boobed straw-haired hippie guy or a wrinkled, splotchy African American woman to tell you about how polyamory or nudism or sploshing or pony-play or clown sex helped them achieve enlightenment. Its fun to laugh at these mostly lovably individuals, and in doing so you're reminded of your own laughable relationship with sex . . . especially if you grew up hoping your parents would go to bed so that you could get down to the serious business of trying to locate the boob on the purple and green woman who bent like taffy across the TV screen.