In recent years, social media has revealed a new prudery among younger movie watchers, too tiresome to describe in much detail, but kind of boiling down to a directive that sex scenes are only permissible in movies if they “advance the story.” Now, of course, in the genre of sex comedy, sex IS the story — whether there are scenes overtly depicting the sex act or not. Over the next several weeks in his new series The Summer Of Sex Comedies, Decider contributor Glenn Kenny will provide a guided tour of the permutations of the sex comedy (from innuendo to full frontal nudity) as well as its various luminaries (from Marilyn Monroe to Jennifer Lawrence). So even if no noteworthy new sex comedies come up in the next few months, you can still have a pretty hot cinematic summer.

This survey began with the relatively timid sex comedies of the 1950s. Whose protagonists were invariably adults. Given the actual mores of the era, it could not have been otherwise. If teens had sex in a ’50s film, it meant one thing: unwanted pregnancy and its ostensible consequences. See 1959’s Blue Denim, in which comely Carol Lynley gets knocked up by Brandon De Wilde and there is much agonizing and seeking out of illegal abortionists until the crazy kids are persuaded to do the right thing and settle down and raise the damn kid. (Sounds a bit like my own origin story, except since both my parents were raised in strict Catholic households an abortion wasn’t even considered. Thanks Pope Pius IX!) 

As I’ve also mentioned, the birth control pill and James Bond changed all that. Animal House and Fast Times at Ridgemont High faced up to that change, treating teen sex as a reality and not much of a big deal. At the turn of the century, the odd upshot was that the sex comedy belonged almost exclusively to the teen. Adults were served the rom-com: see When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail. Yes, the principal characters in these pictures had sex, and in the case of Harry Met Sally, at least one of the parties had expertise in the Fake Orgasm, but doing the deed wasn’t nearly as important as FEELING THE LOVE. The Bridget Jones movies, beginning in 2001, being British, were a little more sassy and cheeky in the departments of snogging and shagging, but come on. How carnal do you expect modern spinoffs on Jane Austen to get, anyway?

That said, the sex comedies of the mid-’80s starring John Cusack (who’d had bit parts in both Class and Sixteen Candles), beginning with The Sure Thing, the directorial debut of Rob Reiner, gave the horny males in the audience some teachable moments. On a road trip to ostensibly hook up with blonde bombshell, yes, “sure thing” Nicollette Sheridan, Cusack’s character finds a true romance affinity with his spiky van mate, Daphne Zuniga. In 1985’s Better Off Dead, he’s jilted by blonde Amanda Wyss and picked up on the rebound by Diane Franklin; if you’ve seen the twisted horror picture Amityville 2 you know that he’ll have no complaints. And in One Crazy Summer, playing high school b-ball wanna-be Hoops McCann (yes, writer-director Savage Steve Holland got it from the Steely Dan song), he wins Demi Moore. It was good to be John Cusack in these movies. And yet, when he co-starred in The Grifters in 1990, he seemed relieved to be out of the demographic. Even if his character gets punched so hard in the movie’s opening scene that he gets a stomach hemorrhage. 

The mid-’80s also saw the release of a teen sex comedy actually directed by Robert Altman, O.C. and Stiggs, based on a series of fictions published in National Lampoon. In addition to bawdy hijinks, it also features its lead character booking Nigerian superstar King Sunny Ade to play a block party. Unfortunately, the movie is almost impossible to see but we’ll keep you posted if that changes. 

In any event, this was the Reagan era. The biggest comedies were Ghostbusters and Back to the Future films. In the latter, the point was AVOIDING having sex: remember how Michael J Fox met his very attractive future mom Lea Thompson in the 1950s? The 1990s didn’t yield much, and when it did, it either went weird indie (David O. Russell’s 1994 debut, Spanking the Monkey, in which the lead did NOT avoid sex with his mom) or faux-daring  (Exit to Eden, in which director Gary Marshall had Dan Aykroyd and Rosie O’Donnell infiltrate an S&M resort). 

Director Paul Weitz (he and his co-writer brother Chris were the sons of fashion designer John Weitz and actress Susan Kohner, who achieved screen immortality while barely into her twenties in Douglas Sirk’s 1959 Imitation of Life) concocted a turn-of-the-century breakthrough with 1999’s American Pie. Semi-schlub Jason Biggs became a Tom Ewell for the new millennium, so sex-curious and hard up that after hearing that intercourse is like putting one’s gadget into a warm slice of, well, pie, he actually tries it. To the considerable consternation of his dad, played by comic genius Eugene Levy. 

Viewers who thought that Frank Tashlin demeaned Jayne Mansfield via objectification in The Girl Can’t Help it and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? should check out the treatment Pie gives to a foreign exchange student played by Shannon Elizabeth. The wildly popular movie also brought the anagram MILF into the lexicon. Both that phrase and “Stifler’s Mom” are more or less lingua franca these days, and the portrayer of Stifler’s mom, Jennifer Coolidge, also a comedic maestro, made her into a meme. The movie ended with a message, which wasn’t so much that love trumps sex, but that the accessible girl, whom the male hero is suited for and may come to love, turns out to be as much of a horny freak as he is. Best of all possible worlds and such. 

Pie spawned three sequels, but you could see the franchise had its limitations when we got to the third picture, called American Wedding. Married sex is not boring by default, but it is, generally speaking, kind of a given. The motor of American Pie was desperate yearning and subsequent futile pursuit. (If you find the “love will win out” conclusion of Pie unconvincing, may I direct you to the most pessimistic teen sex comedy ever made, which is not really a comedy, ultimately: 1982’ s The Last American Virgin, in which the aforementioned Diane Franklin breaks the heart of the title character in a conclusion that avers that hormones rather than love will triumph in these situations.)

The Farrelly brothers, Peter and Bobby, actually beat American Pie to the punch in the inappropriate substances in inappropriate places department with 1998’s There’s Something About Mary, which features a famous ejaculate-as-hair-gel gag. Also a grisly gadget-in-a-zipper special effect. The Farrellys went on to explore sex relations as they are affected by split personalities, body-shaming and being a Siamese twin, before going definitively off the rails with an ill-advised remake of The Heartbreak Kid in 2007. (For this viewer, they regained some mojo with a reboot of The Three Stooges in a 2012 film featuring supermodel Kate Upton as a sexy nun. She was hilarious!)

By the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, the Apatowization of the sex comedy was well underway. Apatow had been the creator of the cult TV comedies Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared, and he made his feature debut as director with 2005’s The Forty Year Old Virgin. Which was, as its title indicates, not a teen comedy, and will be treated at further length in the final installment of this series for reasons of thematic coherence (we’re still considering teens, and that movie is called, you know…). Apatow tapped one of the top directors of Undeclared, Greg Mottola, to direct Superbad, from a script by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. Rogen had worked on Apatow’s other sitcom, Undeclared, and his script was so nakedly autobiographical that its lead characters were named Seth and Evan. Seth and Rogen are funny, sweet-natured high-schoolers (although Seth is inclined to camouflage his essential decency behind a curtain of filthy sex talk) played by Jonah Hill and Michael Cera. Seth ogles Evan’s mom’s cleavage — MILFs aren’t the exclusive province of the Weitzes. These guys are MUCH more erudite than the horny teens of yore — they reference the Coen Brothers, Orson Welles and The Beatles before the first ten minutes of the movie are up. But they’re equally obsessed with hooking up. Their beloveds are actually friendly to them — Martha MacIsaac as Becca for Evan, and none other than Emma Stone as Beth. The obligatory nerd, perhaps the greatest in the canon, Christopher Mintz-Plasse as “McLovin,” even manages to almost achieve a form of fulfillment. But the ultimate point is that the opposite sex is invested in moving beyond virginity too. They just have a different process. And guys, if they can understand that, will have better luck than they might otherwise. 

The beguiling Stone, on her way to becoming one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World, would star in a solo sex comedy Easy A, in which her character tries to get ahead socially by feigning to be more sexually experienced than she actually is. While not Apatow-adjacent, it is certainly the funniest of all films derived from Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, largely on account of Stone. Watching it you knew she was going to be a star. 

IN THE NEXT INSTALLMENT OF “THE SUMMER OF SEX COMEDIES”: Judd Apatow escapes the television mines and strikes gold by becoming the 21st century’s Golden God of Sex Comedies as both a writer/director (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up) and producer (Forgetting Sarah Marshall).

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for at a bookstore near you.