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"This is filth! FIIILTH!" (whacks Blake with book)

SEX.

Now that we have your attention...

Porn is a staple for sitcom gags, as writers love coming up with punny names. Characters will watch Good Will Humping, Thighs Wide Slut, or Men in Backnote  There's often a shot of the protagonist staring at the television while cheesy music blares. If ever we see actual footage, it will be random shots of couples in such a preliminary stage of sexual intercourse that they're often still pretty much completely dressed.

Male sitcom characters often tell each other dirty jokes whose punch lines we never hear, because they are interrupted by the appearance of a lady. It is left to our filthy imagination. Alternately, we just hear the punch line, which is perfectly meaningless and innocent on its own. See Orphaned Punchline.

The iconic three-page fold-out is also a strong visual image used in many series. Turning the magazine to make sense of the image optional.

See also Innocent Innuendo, Home Porn Movie, Porn Stash, The Internet Is for Porn, and Parallel Porn Titles. Not to be confused with The Filth. Or the book Filth. Or literal filth.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 
  • Master Roshi in Dragon Ball enjoys watching porn. It's even how Krillin bargains his way into being his student: by bringing a filthy magazine as a gift.
  • Naruto:
    • Kakashi Hatake is introduced reading Makeout Paradise... and continues to do so even while he kicks the collective ass of his future ninja team. He puts away the book when he faces Sasuke, and when he does the test again with Naruto and Sakura after the timeskip (and even uses his Sharingan that time). Incidentally, in this last instance, Naruto comes up with a way to pass the training handily: rush Kakashi and tell him spoilers of the latest Makeout Paradise album! He has to not only cover his ears, but also close his eyes since the Sharingan allows him to read lips more easily.
    • Naruto's other mentor, Jiraiya, writes the series. He occasionally takes breaks from training to "research" the next volume.

    Comedy 
  • Margaret Cho talks about this a couple times. Her parents own a bookstore, and one of her most famous routines is describing her mother sorting through the gay porn ("Margaret, what is...Assmaster?"). Her short-lived sitcom touched on this as well, with her mom dropping a Free Your Willies movie in disgust. In Notorious CHO, she also talks about how her boyfriend was ridiculously late returning a porn movie which she had to take back herself, leaving the video store clerks to think she's addicted to masturbating.

    Comic Books 
  • In The Authority: More Kev, Kev Hawkins and his team are at one point forced to visit the perpetually-unpleasant Froggett at his home, where it turns out that he has a massive collection of porn films, including The Magdalene Fisters, 2 Ass 2 Curious, and Smokey and the Ass Bandit.
  • In The Filth, the Hand has a whole division devoted to regulating porn. At one point, Slade is deployed alongside them after a genetically-engineered porn star with extremely potent sperm ends up in the hands of a misogynist lunatic.

    Fan Works 
  • In the Empath: The Luckiest Smurf story "My Unsmurfy Valentine", Empath's friend Polaris Psyche mentions that there is an Imaginarium fantasy setting called "Psychelian Love Slave" among the more adult-oriented fantasy settings that the male Smurfs engage in.
  • White Sheep (RWBY):
    • Quite a lot of humor comes from the novels Blake is always reading, which are apparently filthy smut. Nora often casually blackmails her just by describing what the book she's reading is about. Everyone knows she keeps them stashed under her bed... which is why no one ever finds the much worse ones she has stashed elsewhere.
      Blake: [reading] I'm busy.
      Nora: Oh, is that the one where he bends her over the desk and—
      Blake: Never mind, I'd love to help!
    • To Blake's horror, Ruby eventually becomes interested in such things after Blake doesn't notice Ruby following her into the adult section of a bookstore. Blake is convinced that Yang is going to kill her for corrupting her little sister, and only agrees to help her procure them after she promises to never tell Yang. She then orders the books for her online and helps her hide them.
      Blake: Is this what being a drug dealer felt like?
    • After the teams meet back up in the latter half of the story, Weiss yells at Ruby for stealing her credit card to buy "Mistralan smut."
      Weiss: Some of us do read our bank statements, you know.

    Films — Animation 
  • A subtle example from Beauty and the Beast: As Gaston flips Belle's book on its side, Word of God has it that he's looking for a centerfold.
  • In Osmosis Jones, the title character, a white blood cell, is reading an issue of DNA Monthly, admiring a centerfold of a double-helix molecule.
    Jones: Nice genes. You've got the chromosomes in all the right places.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • This bit of dialogue from the Marx Brothers play Animal Crackers, preceding Captain Spaulding's big speech, was probably removed from the movie even before it was edited after release to comply with the Production Code:
    [Spaulding and Mrs. Rittenhouse enter]
    Spaulding: So there was only one bedroom in the farm house and the farmer had three daughters and only one traveling salesman...
    Mrs. Rittenhouse: Captain Spaulding, what kind of a story do you call that?
  • The scene from Clerks in which Randall orders new movies for the video store is a phenomenal example of how colorful fictional porn titles can get.
  • In Dirty Work, Mitch and Sam get revenge on the manager of a movie theatre by swapping the films for suspiciously similar porn movies when his supervisors are doing their inspection; films like "Men in Black... Who Have Sex With Each Other."
  • Goodbye Lenin: When the Wall comes down, Alex and several other East Germans walk over to West Berlin to see for themselves what the West is like. He's astounded to see a store where graphic porn films are being sold.
  • Kiss Kiss Bang Bang features an old film, in the box of a porn film called "Lord of the Cock Rings".
  • The "listing of fictitious typical porn titles" joke is used in the farce No Sex Please, We're British.
  • The Last King of Scotland: Amin and his inner circle are seen watching a private showing of Deep Throat in his palace. He asks Nicholas (a doctor) if it's medically possible for a woman to actually have a clitoris in their throat. Nicholas replies that in nature all aberrations are possible.
  • Layer Cake: A bunch of wannabe gangsters from The Duke's gang are shown watching a porn film while guarding a batch of stolen ecstacy pills in a warehouse.
  • Red Heat: In his hotel room, Soviet cop Ivan Danko (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who's on a mission in the USA, puts the TV on, and it happens to broadcast a porn/erotic film. His reaction?
    Danko: Capitalism...

    Literature 

    Live-Action TV 
  • 30 Rock gives us "The Lovely Boners," "The Hind Side," and "Fresh-Ass: Based on the Novel 'Tush' by Assfire."
  • In All in the Family, Edith read an issue of Playgirl in a hospital that Archie handed her unknowingly.
  • An episode of Blackadder, had a classic take on the "blackmail photograph"— Blackadder puts a drugged cleric in a compromising position in front of the "fastest painter in Europe". The resulting picture is never seen but is implied to be quite... exotic. To say nothing of the fact that the other person in the painting was a coerced Percy in drag. Said noble is "The Baby-Eating Bishop of Bath and Wells", a self-confessed "Colossal Pervert": "Animal, Vegetable or Mineral I'll do anything to anything!"
    • And then there is his descendant Mr. B. who is quite an avid reader according to the main titles with a preference for cheap romance novels where he appears to be the dashing hunk in the cover.
  • On one episode of The Carol Burnett Show, they parody The Hunchback of Notre Dame. A recurring gag involves the repetition of the first two lines of a poem which is never completed: "There once was a girl from Paris / Who danced all night until three...."
  • To list the number of times this happens on Coupling would have us here for hours, so here are four of the most pertinent examples:
    • Susan finds one of Steve's porn tapes — "Lesbian Spank Inferno" — which leads to a falling out between the two and results in Steve having to describe the plot of the movie in a way that makes it sound classy. In the middle of a dinner party attended by all their friends.
    • Patrick is revealed to have videotaped every sexual encounter he's had, including those with his ex, Susan, which leads to Steve getting angry when he finds about its existence and Susan getting angry when she finds out she's been taped over.
    • Patrick finds out his ex-girlfriend used him as the "primary model" for a sex toy company.
    • Jane decides to do the "wearing only a trenchcoat" thing with her new boyfriend... only to find he's holding a dinner party the night she tries it. She ends up spending the rest of the evening trying to get a dress without leaving the bathroom.
  • An episode of CSI had Jim Brass talking to various people staying on the same hotel floor as a murder. One man justified his precise recall of the time he heard something suspicious with the following:
    Man: I was watching a pay-per-view movie.
    Brass: Yeah? Which movie?
    Man: Armagetiton.
    Brass: You mean Armageddon.
    Man: No. Arma-Get-It-On.
    Brass: Was it any good?
    Man: [shrugs] Worked for me.
  • The badly edited low-budget porn movie that Joan's subletter makes in her apartment (very much without Joan's consent) in an episode of Elementary. The audience knows nothing about the "plot" or particular kinks, except that they used Joan's spatula as a prop.
  • Happens a couple times in Firefly. In one instance, Simon and River sit down at the dinner table just in time to hear Mal delivering the punchline, "So then the Shepherd says to the Companion, "Well, a good goat'll do that."
  • Friends:
    • "Buffay the Vampire Layer" starring Phoebe Buffay. Actually her twin sister.
    • "The One with the Free Porn". Joey and Chandler discover that a porn channel on their TV is unblocked, giving them free porn (a big deal pre-internet). They refuse to turn off the TV for fear that whatever glitch gave it to them will correct itself. Due to the continuous exposure, they eventually stop enjoying it and even notice some negative effects, but still hesitate to turn it off because they don't want to be "the guys who turned off free porn!" When the finally do turn it off they take a deep breath, then immediately turn it back on again to see if they still have it.
    • Ross and Chandler fought over authorship of a dirty joke submitted to Playboy, which the audience never gets to hear. Apparently, it's offensive to women, doctors and monkeys.
  • The Golden Girls:
    • Limerick variant: a character mispronounces Blanche's last name, Devereaux, as if it rhymed with "bucks." Dorothy corrects him that it's only pronounced Deverucks in limericks.
    • Also a cake-based version, when Rose unwittingly buys a welcome cake from the Erotic Bake Shop.
      Rose: I thought it was in the shape of Florida.
  • On Happy Days, we hear half of a joke about sailors and a nurse in the shower in a letter from Richie to Fonzie.
  • In an episode of Head of the Class Darlene blackmailed Arvin by threatening to expose a VHS rental of his: "Buns of The Magnificent Seven."
  • Even Home Improvement got into the act in later years, which only made sense, with three mid-to-late teenaged sons. One of their titles included "Shakespeare In Lust".
  • In Mad Men, the men from the agency are discussing a Volkswagen advert. After a while, one of them comments that they've spent fifteen minutes discussing the ad and not the rest of the magazine- Playboy.
  • The Man in the High Castle: In the last episode of season 3, Wyatt visits an old friend of his in New York City to ask for his help, who has since become a pornographer. Wyatt is seen skimming through a pinup magazine called Raunchy Rich, and notices a camera pointed at a BDSM room, while mockingly noting that his interracial content, smuggled in from the Pacific States, could get him in trouble with the Nazi authorities.
  • In a scene from Married... with Children, Al and Peggy visit a video store for a movie they can watch together. Not surprisingly, Peggy's suggestions consist entirely of Chick Flicks, while Al's preferences are such titles as Schindler's Lust and Mrs. Assfire.
  • M*A*S*H:
    Colonel Potter: Then she said, "You must be the Boy Scout, because you're the one who..."
    [Father Mulcahy appears]
    Potter: ... "who, uh, uh... helped me across the street."
    • Similarly when Colonel Potter is in the communal shower singing about swimmin' with bow-legged women ("and swim between their legs!") when Father Mulcahy walks in.
  • Max and Paddy's Road to Nowhere, has Charlie's Anals and Willy Wanker and the Chocolate Factory.
  • On Monty Python's Flying Circus, the Tudor Jobs agency turns out to be a front for a dirty bookstore. A vice squad agent manages to slip into the store by dressing in Tudor garb, but everybody starts treating him as if he was Sir Phillip Sidney. When he goes out of the back door of the shop, he finds himself in Tudor England. Going along with that, he goes home to his Tudor wife, who is reading "Gay Boys in Bondage". She hides the book when he comes in, but he sees it and asks what it is. She tells him it is one of Shakespeare's plays, so he asks her to read to him Shakespeare's "Gay Boys in Bondage". He appears to not realize it is porn, and says that Shakespeare can really write. Unfortunately, he is caught and arrested by his vice squad partner.
  • Only Fools and Horses:
    • There's a entire bunch of gags on Sexual Roleplay in one of the Christmas Special episodes.
    • "Danger UXD" revolves around blow-up dolls which have a tendency to explode as they've been filled with propane instead of air. And a sex shop proprietor called Dirty Barry.
  • The plot of one Privileged episode revolves around Rose buying The Bone Identity in order to learn a few tricks for a (presumed) sex date. The impression Rose gets is that great sex involves bending over backwards for your guy. Literally.
  • Queer as Folk (US) had Emmett sitting Mike down in front of the TV with a remote control and a new video called Schindler's Fist. Michael was only mildly amused.
  • Roseanne gives us the classic "Romancing the Bone."
  • On Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Quark seems to be a proponent of the "Vulcan Love Slave" series of holosuite entertainments.
  • The Steve Harvey Show mentions "Saving Ryan's Privates" and "Legs Wide Shut".
  • Supernatural: This is a frequent joke in the series, both with the "Casa Erotica" porn film series and the "Busty Asian Beauties" magazine that Dean is a fan of. When the world is about to end (again), Sam catches Dean Drowning His Sorrows and looking at Hentai. In another incident, Castiel the Angel is confused about a porn film with a Pizza Boy Special Delivery scenario.
    Castiel: Why does the pizza man keep slapping her rear? [Beat] Perhaps she's done something wrong.
  • The Tony Randall Show had an episode in which the main character, a judge, was reviewing a film titled Snow White and the Eight Dwarves to determine if it was obscene. He wasn't particularly interested in the movie, but every other man who entered his office was entranced.
    Judge Franklin: Well, I don't think this is obscene ... eight little men chasing a beautiful girl around a jacuzzi.
    Court Reporter: Wait till they catch her.
    (About ten seconds pass, while another fellow comes into the room.)
    New guy: They caught her.
  • Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps has erotic literature including Lust of the Mohicans, MacBiff and The Count of Monte Cristo - except it's not 'count'.
  • Wings:
    Brian: And then the hooker said to the gynecologist, "My hourly rates might be higher, but..."
    [Fay appears]
    Brian: "...but that's the way it goes!" Hahaha.
    Fay: Hmm, it was much funnier the way I heard it.

    Music 

    Pro Wrestling 
  • Val Venis, the WWF's wrestling porn star, was celebrated for his film career, at least by the commentators of Sunday Night Heat, Al Snow and Johnathan Coachman.
  • FMW commissioner Kodo Fuyuki forbid Hayabusa from using his gimmick after he came to power, insisting he didn't want any "superheroes" in the promotion, then gave the Hayabusa gimmick to Mr. Gannosuke, who Fuyuki cast in several pornographic films in an attempt to destroy Hayabusa's legacy.
  • Jessicka Havok claimed Reby Sky's prior career, presumably the glamor model part, was so repulsive it was a disgrace for SHINE to employ Sky.
  • While officially, Kenny King has not done anything more explicit than erotic dancing, Eric Young would have you believe King's delved into things too disgusting even for late night television (TNA).

    Theater 
  • Older Than Steam at the very least, as not even William Shakespeare was above Double Entendres and dirty jokes to amuse the "groundlings" (like the old drunken doorkeeper in Macbeth, who expounds upon the cruel irony of alcohol making men impotent and lustful at the same time). Granted you have to be a student of early modern English to get most of his jokes.
    • Some scenes are almost solid allusions. Now, the Elizabethans had more ways of referring to female genitalia than to male, which is to say a lot more than we do because the Victorian age hadn't happened yet, but this was an era of coarse jokes in mixed company even in high society, and also the heyday of the pun — playing on words was the heart of wit, and people were pretty good at it, to "torture one poor word ten thousand ways."
    • By the way, wit was a euphemism for penis.

    Video Games 
  • Bungie has long promised a Sid Meier's Pirates! type of game called "Pimps at Sea." It was eventually used as the code name for Halo 3.
  • Some of the random junk laying around in Borderlands is Girls & Guns type magazines... Grunt and Gun-Ho 'Girls Gone Commando!' and 'Full Metal Corset' being the cover stories respectively, and Heavy Fire having 'Bigger is Better' and '300 pounds of oomph!'
  • Breath of Fire 3 has the party running to the top of Momo's tower to escape some pursuers. She explains that the top was her dad's library, and he would go up there to tinker all the time, for hours at a time. But when you check the bookshelves, they're all stuffed to bursting with pornography. Momo doesn't seem to get the point.
  • The Elder Scrolls:
    • The Lusty Argonian Maid is a recurring semi-pornographic play about an Argonian maid, her human lord (who is an expy of the book's in-universe author), and his 'spear'. It was popular enough to spawn a sequel, as well as a Gender Flipped version for the ladies, The Sultry Argonian Bard.
    • Several other in-universe books also fit. Halgerd's Tale, a heavy armor skill book, is a bard's tale about a man more agile and skilled in full plate than without, and ends on an allusion to how he was better able to satisfy his wife fresh from a tournament than he was before.
    • Morrowind has "Boethiah's Pillow Book", a book apparently so pornographic that "no words can describe what you see, or what you think you see". It's involved in a Thieves' Guild quest where you must steal it from the daughter of a Dunmer noble, with the Quest Giver intending to use it as blackmail against them.
  • Fallout 2 has a minor side quest to find ten issues of a pre-war porn magazine and deliver them to the proprietress of the brothel in New Reno. Successfully doing so (which is a bit of a Guide Dang It!) earns not only some cash but also unlocks the option for the Chosen One (regardless of gender) to go on a date with her after beating the game.
  • Final Fantasy IV included a Developer's Room Easter Egg item that was basically a porno magazine. It goes by names such as "Smut" and "Lustful Lali-ho" and was originally cut out of the original North American SNES release but restored in later remakes.
  • In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the Gayborhood has a porn theater and on the marquee is the rather unimaginitive Wizard of Ass.
  • Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning has a quest called "Long Overdue" where the Fateless One has to find the 10 missing books in the late Brother Til's collection of lewd literature. The player can read the books, only to find that they are very tame by modern western standards.
  • It's possible to buy an interspecies adult magazine in Mass Effect 2, which features a provocatively posed hanar on the cover (though you can't read the magazine itself). Lair of the Shadow Broker reveals that several of your crew members are fans of an asari porn video series.
  • A weapon in the Metal Gear Solid games. Leave the "magazine", "book", or in MGS4, "Playboy" open on a flat surface, and watch as the guards are unable to look away from it.
  • Implied in Paper Mario, of all things, with a mysterious tape that Mario is asked to deliver. The Running Gag is continued with a mysterious package in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and a "You-Know-What" in Super Paper Mario.
  • In SaGa Frontier, there is a book in the library that is implied to have some sort of erotic material. While the contents are never elaborated upon, one can pick up hints as to its nature from the various characters' reactions to it.
  • The Valsena Library in Trials of Mana is home to many a book, including a "naughty novel" on one of the shelves. In the original cut, Charlotte is the only one who is confused because she's too young to understand half of what's in it. In the remake, the Faerie reads enough to tell her that she should wait a few years before touching it again. Every other character knows what they're looking at, and is appropriately shocked.
  • Wild ARMs has bookcases scattered throughout the game with short passages you can read. One of these books is called "Erotica." When you try to read it, the game tells you, "Not yet!"

    Web Animation 

    Webcomics 
  • Lyle the stuffed tiger from Achewood has a taste for pornography titles that lie somewhere between unambiguous and totally nonsensical. He has been spotted with the magazine Completely Ruined Junk #28 in his back pocket. (His rationale for buying print smut is, "Think about it. The power goes out, who holds all the cards?") He buys imported Japanese porn games such as Urine Cop. Most memorably, he once left a porn DVD queued up on the TV called Breast Attack on Fuck Mountain.
  • In College Roomies from Hell!!!, April goes to a video store to rent a film which she and the others had (accidentally) been in, only to find a very different film with the three main male characters in it. It transpires that at some point during their drunken 'misery journey' (which was also responsible for their mutations and led to their being arrested by a mysterious government agency), the three of them took part in a soft core porn shoot. A later story arc involved them trying to track down where this happened, with the result that Mike nearly got forced into doing another porno, this time with April (whom they had dressed in a seifuku (schoolgirl uniform), to go with Mike's left 'arm').
  • In El Goonish Shive, Nanase and Ellen search for a movie to rent. Ellen's second choice is a "jungle movie" which is "Rated 'R' for Language, Violence and Frequent and Gratuitous Loincloth Removal."
  • Problem Sleuth prominently features Hunk Rump, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Gay porn in general turns up quite often in MS Paint Adventures. But not so much in Homestuck, probably because the main characters are 13-year-olds. Nevertheless, the Midnight Crew has their fair share of filth in the intermission. Dave's brother is the founder of Plush Rump, a website devoted to puppet pornography.
  • Questionable Content is full of porn, from Marigold's Magical Love Gentlemen yaoi anime to Pintsize's hair-raising porn collection. Given that Pintsize is, essentially, a robot that is also used as Marten's computer this becomes pretty odd. He frequently visits more /d/eviant Image Boards and considers Rule 36 to be the perfect example of humanity's creativity by their ability to make porn of literally anything.

    Web Original 
  • True Porn Clerk Stories was a blog (now published as a book) by a woman who worked in a video rental shop. Being a small, independent shop (and not, say, Blockbuster) a very large segment of their business was in porn. Some of the customers were rather colorful.

    Western Animation 
  • Beast Wars: Related thematically at least is Rattrap offering to take Silverbolt to a bar where "the serving bots are walking around minus their torso plates, ya know what I mean?"
  • Duckman: In the animated series of the same name, Duckman is universally infamous for the amount of disgusting bottom-dredged porn he owns.
  • Futurama:
    • The running gag of robot porn. Which turned out to be nothing but circuit diagrams.
    • And then there's also Robot Strippers, which don't wear cases. (Think along the same lines as the case on your computer.)
    • The fourth movie even had explicit robot sex, which consisted of a data disc being transfered from the male robot to the female.
    • In the episode which spoofs college movies, the robots of Robot House peek in the window of a sorority house, and look past the scantily clad women to the desktop computer, which gets "spanked" and has its case taken off.
    • In one episode, and educational video segues into a porno "now that we've solved the garbage crisis, doctor, perhaps you can help me with my sexual inhibitions" "With gusto." (Because the video was on the Internet and in the future, just as today, The Internet Is for Porn.)
    • Also when Fry buys a TV from the 20th century other characters comment on the low resolution, Amy mentioning that in one of those things her obscene tattoo couldn't be seen. The others giggle when she shows it, but we are unable to distinguish it.
  • Even classic Looney Tunes cartoons pull this — in at least two cartoons Bugs Bunny "switches reels" to show clips of his choosing and accidentally starts showing a "stag film" instead (of which we only see the title screen reading "Stag Reel" with a picture of... an actual stag, as in male deer).
  • South Park:

 
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"Hellish Desires"

You ''really'' seem to be enjoying that book, Al...

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