On a street in Edinburgh, a woman I’ve only just met is quizzing me on my sexual fantasies. What positions do you prefer?” asks Cameryn Moore, a former phone sex operator turned playwright from the US, along with other, less printable, questions. Her business plan is simple: for £20, punters can tell Moore what turns them on.
She will then bash out a piece of bespoke erotic fiction for them on her typewriter. So that’s what I do every day at the fringe: sit down for four or five hours a day and crank out dirty shit.” She calls the service Sidewalk Smut. That’s not all Moore is doing – her custom erotica stand is an innovative way of drumming up support for Smut Slam, her nightly session of dirty storytelling that has travelled the globe since she started it in a Boston Irish pub in 2011.
There’s a segment in the show in which anonymous sex stories are dropped in a bucket and picked out to be read aloud. It is Smut Slam’s first trip back to Edinburgh in seven years, and it’s not the only sex-laden show in this year’s lineup. So, are we currently simmering in a summer of smut?
Californian performer, writer and director Bryn Woz has a show simply called Smut, while English TV star Tom Read Wilson’s An Alphabet of Me alights at some rather filthy pit stops. Most telling of all is an Edinburgh comeback for Julian Clary, after 17 years away, with a show called Fully Dilated. The new show reflects on the run-up to this gag, in which Clary’s life was split into two wildly different sides – soaring to mainstream TV stardom on the one hand, tending to his friends who were dying of Aids on the other.
It’s uncharted territory for me, and something I could never have done at the time.” Bawdy humour has been around since at least the ancient Greeks, but the kind we know so well in Britain is best associated with music hall and pantomime, where actors used innuendo and nudge-nudge wink-wink humour as a way of avoiding prosecution for obscenity. This style perhaps reached its zenith with Clary, who used smut as a way to slip the realities of gay sex into homes around the country. He has become something of a smut godfather, and you can certainly trace his disciples.
Read Wilson describes Clary as a “huge hero” and namechecks a joke he once made at the London Palladium panto: “He came on dressed as an enormous bloom and said that he’d woken up with stamen all over him.” Read Wilson’s alphabetical tour may sound crude – W is for Willy, after all – but it’s actually rather erudite. His word-of-the-day series on social media sometimes incorporates smut and slang (fuck-a-doodle-do was once analysed, alongside less rude offerings such as pettifogging). What makes his love of words especially infectious, though, is his Honor Blackman-esque purr, not to mention a rather Wildean flourish.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
