On a street in Edinburgh, a woman I\u2019ve only just met is quizzing me on my sexual fantasies. \u201cDo you want softcore or hardcore? What positions do you prefer?\u201d asks Cameryn Moore, a former phone sex operator turned playwright from the US, along with other, less printable, questions.<\/p>\n
Her business plan is simple: for \u00a320, punters can tell Moore what turns them on. She will then bash out a piece of bespoke erotic fiction for them on her typewriter. \u201cI listen to their content then spit it out on paper \u2013 no punctuation, very stream of consciousness,\u201d she says. \u201cI also offer to read it out loud to them \u2013 and they walk away grinning from ear to ear because nobody\u2019s ever asked them what they like when it comes to sex. So that\u2019s what I do every day at the fringe: sit down for four or five hours a day and crank out dirty shit.\u201d She calls the service Sidewalk Smut.<\/p>\n
double quotation markA common sex confession at Smut Slam involves people falling asleep during threesomes<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not all Moore is doing \u2013 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\u2019s a segment in the show in which anonymous sex stories are dropped in a bucket and picked out to be read aloud. \u201cOne story that comes up a lot lately is someone finding out that their hook-up is radically rightwing.\u201d Others have involved people falling asleep during threesomes or nipple rings going astray at sex clubs. \u201cI am forever amazed at the variety that exists in the human sexual experience,\u201d laughs Moore.<\/p>\n
\u2018What positions do you prefer?\u2019 \u2026 Sidewalk Smut\u2019s Cameryn Moore quizzes our writer. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
It is Smut Slam\u2019s first trip back to Edinburgh in seven years, and it\u2019s not the only sex-laden show in this year\u2019s 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\u2019s An Alphabet of Me alights at some rather filthy pit stops.<\/p>\n
Most telling of all is an Edinburgh comeback for Julian Clary<\/a>, after 17 years away, with a show called Fully Dilated. \u201cThat means I\u2019m opening up to the public,\u201d says Clary when we meet in a pub garden. \u201cAnd once you have dilated, that\u2019s when everything comes out.\u201d<\/p>\n Clary is well aware that he\u2019s best known for a smutty joke: at the 1993 British Comedy<\/a> Awards he told the audience he had been \u201cfisting Norman Lamont\u201d (their shocked laughter drowned out the punchline \u2013 \u201ctalk about a red box\u201d). The new show reflects on the run-up to this gag, in which Clary\u2019s life was split into two wildly different sides \u2013 soaring to mainstream TV stardom on the one hand, tending to his friends who were dying of Aids on the other. \u201cThis isn\u2019t going to sell me any tickets,\u201d he says with a smile, \u201cbut I\u2019m talking about loss. It\u2019s uncharted territory for me, and something I could never have done at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n Actually rather erudite \u2026 Tom Read Wilson limbering up for his bawdy A-Z. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod\/The Guardian<\/p>\n 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 \u201chuge hero\u201d and namechecks a joke he once made at the London Palladium panto: \u201cHe came on dressed as an enormous bloom and said that he\u2019d woken up with stamen all over him.\u201d<\/p>\n Read Wilson\u2019s alphabetical tour may sound crude \u2013 W is for Willy, after all \u2013 but it\u2019s 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<\/a>). What makes his love of words especially infectious, though, is his Honor Blackman-esque purr, not to mention a rather Wildean flourish. It lends itself to smut throughout his Edinburgh performance, from his opening line (\u201cThank you for your warm hand on my opening\u201d) to his selection of penis jokes (describing one penis, he says sympathetically: \u201cIts two neighbours are nuts and it has an arsehole living at the back\u201d).<\/p>\n We can\u2019t even escape innuendo during our chat. \u201cYou know,\u201d Read Wilson says at one point, \u201cthe trouble with the lexicon of smut is that it becomes indelibly seared on your mental retina and it doesn\u2019t wipe off.\u201d When our internet connection starts to glitch I find myself saying: \u201cI\u2019m just going to take you downstairs \u2026 do you think it\u2019s your end or mine?\u201d<\/p>\n Smut can be fun and frivolous, but for Chelsea Birkby, a young comedian performing her third show at Edinburgh, filthy gags are more than just a way to get laughs. \u201cAs a teenager I used to hate standup because of the sexual humour,\u201d she says. \u201cBut that\u2019s because I grew up feeling ashamed about sex.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018Now we\u2019ve got new rules about consent, how can we have a laugh?\u2019 \u2026 Chelsea Birkby at Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod\/The Guardian<\/p>\n