The Funniest Sex Scenes From TV and Film

Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty/HBO/Universal
Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty/HBO/Universal
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As The Daily Beast celebrates the month of Sextember—it’s September, we’re writing about sex… get it?—the team at Obsessed thought we would contribute from our area of expertise: TV and movies.

Last year, we handed superlatives for some of the most memorable (read: weirdest) scenes, from best sex with a ghost to best sex scene in a graveyard. This year, we’re making a hard (heh) pivot to the scenes that made us laugh the most.

Here’s our team’s picks for our favorite funny sex scenes from TV shows and movies, including porn stars, werewolves, and Jamie Lee Curtis stripping (oh my!).

Michael Sheen’s Hot Vampire/Werewolf Sex in Underworld: Rise of the Lycans

This one was probably not intended to be funny, but I’ll never forget the shrieks and laughter my friends and I let out when we first saw it in theaters during high school. Things start out pretty standard, as a newly freed, lycanthropic Michael Sheen begins making passionate love to his secret vampire love, Sonja (Rhona Mitra). Everything is awash in that blue light everyone was using in 2009, the music is slow and mysterious, and we’re mostly treated to brief glimpses of someone kissing here or caressing there while the other moans. Knotted in one another’s arms and writhing against trees, it’s all expected until, all of a sudden, Sheen’s werewolf character Lucian lies back off a cliff, his back suspended in midair while Sonja rides him. The position is ludicrous enough, but it’s the face-splitting, gleeful grin on Sheen’s face that put us all over the top—and it’s also that face that will probably remain seared into my memory until the day I die. —Laura Bradley

Two Porn Stand-Ins Bond While “Getting It On” in Love Actually

Does it count if there’s actually no sex involved? When it comes to “funniest” sex scenes, I’m going to say yes, because I’m a big fan of the awkward intercourse in Love Actually. It’s a meta sex scene, a scene inside of a scene. Two stand-ins (Joanna Page and Martin Freeman), for a steamy moment in an upcoming porno spark a connection, while they’re nearly naked and fake boning for the camera. If that’s not a meet cute, I don’t know what is. The couple share the least amount of screentime out of all the many couples in Love Actually, though they’re the ones who deserve a spinoff. There’s never a moment in the movie where they aren’t fake humping. In the end, their connection—through moans and groans—is so strong. If you can fight through the awkwardness of seeing a stranger naked, you can fight through anything. Cheers to them. —Fletcher Peters

Marnie and Elijah’s Failed Tryst on Girls

You could argue that HBO’s Girls, along with its older, more glamorous counterpart Sex and the City, revolutionized outrageous sex scenes in prestige television. While both series shocked and amused audiences with their graphic nudity and hilarity, Girls’ depiction of sex always relied on a level of awkward realism that made them even more comical—he funniest of which was Marnie Michaels’ (Allison Wiliams) failed hook-up with a gay man. In Season 2, Marnie has a very brief sexual encounter with her bestie Hannah Horvath’s (Lena Dunham) ex-boyfriend Elijah (Andrew Rannells) after a house party. Aside from the obvious ridiculousness of this pairing, it perfectly highlights how desperate and emotionally lost these dysfunctional twentysomethings are. They also have an underlying disdain for one another that’s revealed about 30 seconds into their “lovemaking.” After Elijah gets annoyed with Marnie and retreats, she condescendingly tells him, “You don’t have to be something you’re not,” clearly referring to his sexuality. “Neither do you,” he shoots back, referring to her pretend-Charlotte York existence. Ironically, this moment is also the hottest the sex scene in the entire first two seasons. —Kyndall Cunningham

Catherine Tramell’s Speed Race Through London While Getting Fingered in Basic Instinct 2

There are a lot of things about the Basic Instinct 2 that can only be described as “stupendous,” like when crime author Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) flat-out tells an investigator that she writes about “the lurid, the sexual, the violent: the basic instincts.” But none of the campiness in the sequel to Paul Verhoeven’s iconic 1992 erotic thriller can come close to its opening scene, in which Catherine uses another man’s hand to finger herself while speeding through London. Catherine revs both the car’s engine and her own, pushing the pointer finger of the near-unconscious man in her passenger seat between her legs as she accelerates. The streets of London are bizarrely empty, and the car is veering around corners with all of the expertise of a professional driver in a Porsche ad. Stone’s dubbed-in moans give the sequence an added layer of sensual surreality, before the two passengers crash into the Thames, just as Catherine reaches her orgasm. It’s got all of the lurid scuzziness of Cronenberg’s Crash, but none of the artistic value—and damn it, that’s beautiful. —Coleman Spilde

Jamie Lee Curtis’ Strip Tease in True Lies

The R-rated action comedy was at its peak when James Cameron made 1994’s True Lies with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis. The film is about a family man (Schwarzenegger’s Harry) who’s been living a double life as a secret agent and his bored wife (Curtis’ Helen). Harry stages a spy mission for Helen, where she has to seduce a shadowy figure in a hotel room (who turns out to be Harry). Curtis goes for broke with a strip tease, channeling, as Helen, the kind of erotic free spirit the wife wishes she could be. She’s thrusting and bucking against a bed post when her hand slips and she falls to the floor—only to quickly get up and continue gyrating as if nothing ever happened. Sure, it’s not a full-on “sex scene,” per se. But it’s sexy as hell and absolutely hilarious. (Not to mention relatable; who among us wouldn’t face plant if they tried to, without training, do an athletic strip routine?) Last year, Curtis said about the moment, “It will always be the single greatest laugh I’ll ever get in my life.” A legacy well-deserved. —Kevin Fallon

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