Fucking Day: How to Regain Your Virginity (Patreon)

Humarg! Cormegon! These are words I still understand after reading…

… How to Regain Your Virginity and 99 Other Recent Discoveries About Sex, the 1983 humor and comedy book by Patricia Marx and Charlotte Stuart. You may have heard the name Patricia Marx before. She is part of the elite tidbit squad behind 1,003 Great Things to Smile About, 1,003 Great Things About Being a Woman, and many others. They were sold in the HUMOR section of the book store, but that's only because there's no real category for three desperate women typing things like "278: Cookies aren't just for bowling anymore!" or "811: Bowling." The point is, she didn't know what sex was or what comedy was, and she sat down to write 99 sex jokes. Her mind obliterated against the task like a bag of yogurt meeting the fart of bowling. Great, she's already got me doing it.

So that's Patricia. But what of her co-author, Charlotte Stuart? Can she write humor comedy? The short answer is no, of course not. In 2013, she published one other book collecting the last thoughts of a sick dog misremembering greeting cards, but really became inspired late in life. Almost suspiciously related to the release of ChatGPT, she spent the last three years publishing over 20 novels.

In the spirit of classic comedy, I'm not saying Charlotte Stuart is DULL, but…

… one of her novels is about an insurance investigator hassled by local birds called In$urance to Die For: A John Smith Mystery. I find it almost too beautiful to think about. It's like a perfect 30 Rock joke for something a boring character would buy at the airport.

Anyway, I bought a few of her books. Let's see if I can find any signs of non-human madness.

Nope! Looks, napkin, pretty normal napkin to me! Let's forget all this and napkin dab ahead with the virgin book, napkins!

I'm not saying Charlotte Stuart and Patricia Marx are confused, but that specific word does appear thirteen times on the first page in the pursuit of no point or comedic twist. You can read those pie charts if you want, but there's nothing there. It's the dried blood stain of a dead idea. There is nothing silly or unexpected or clever, and the only thing they will add to this template as the book goes is more confusion and apathy. I haven't done nearly enough work to prepare you for how completely these women have misunderstood Earth comedy. Like Charlotte's later work, these are words assembled in a familiar way by unthinking machines with no way to know if they're doing it right. You will hate this book even after its meaningless slop has been rejected by your memory.

Here we are at our first joke. It's possibly a misunderstanding of their own premise? We can't know, and the authors definitely wouldn't. This isn't a book about zany things you can do to reattach your hymen, it's more like someone in a crowd screamed, "Polynesian jumping beans!" And the world's worst improv performer said, "I think I heard 'amnesia but only for what the word virginity means!'" And I'm sure that won't be the first time I strangle a concept to death in a swamp of language trying to explain all the ways this book fails.

Here's the followup to that first gag, and you shouldn't read it. In fact, I insist you don't. I only put it here so historians can go in and verify these women wrote 22 jokes on this page, and not a single one works:

I'd argue none of these were even trying for funny. I'm not sure Patricia and Charlotte are aware you can try. This page should be impossible. Let's ignore how they're technically professional comedy writers. If they were untrained chimpanzees making wild guesses about whether or not some cluster of words counted as a joke, they still wouldn't go a full 0-22. There are electric chair operators who accidentally do something funny more often than this.

Is this contempt? It's like two women angry at the thought of sex, but a simmering, treacherous kind of anger. Like Patricia and Charlotte sat at their word processors for hours, hissing at their own laps before typing, "Babies are found under cabbages, aren't they? Look at what you made me say, you foul gash! Aiieeeee!!!"

Am I still doing comedy? I think so, because I originally said "spitting" on their own laps and changed it because that was more hot than funny. That last part wasn't comedy; just a fun peak behind the curtain! Where was I?

Oh fuck, we're only on the second fucking joke!? And it's just them mistaking the word virginity for food, maybe? Fuck!

I don't know if this is specific racism lost to time or mirthless wrongness in a new direction. We all get these aren't jokes, but is it even still writing? Charlotte and Patricia express thoughts like an old woman trying to keep her legs under her as she falls down a hill. Only, wait, I think the old lady is also in a diarrhea contest? There's no clean analogy for it, but it's hard to give notes on what is obviously a below average mind opening its cervix and spraying Persian disassociation.

"That's twenty!" said Charlotte after her and Patricia's six hour brainstorming session. "Now, all we need is something to do with them. A poem? A parody song?"

"What? No, you stupid bitch, we're already done," said Patricia. "Laity. The word laity is the whole bit. Fucking luster, you idiot."

"You're right," conceded Charlotte. "Ha ha spurn," she added. A single moth fluttered against the inside of her skull, shaking the dust from its wings. It would soon be time for the little mother to lay her eggs. Her hope radiated like the light of a thousand bulbs. The word "capitulate" echoed through the cavernous chamber, though she had no more understanding of it than its author.

Patricia and Charlotte thought, "What if we made up a silly, or funny, thing a fetus might do during each month of pregnancy?" It was far, far beyond their means, but at least they made it to 7 before one of them said, "Let's have the fetus fuck, wait no, that's crazy; let's say it can fuck but doesn't, and then let's not delete any of this idea and leave the whole thing in the book."

After nine insane, confusing swings at comedy, they may have stumbled into a coherent joke. Mandy fucks everyone! It's sort of a good bit to say "here are the six most common places for people to have sex" and they're all near Mandy's house. Except I'm not sure that's the bit. They might be listing the places where specifically Mandy has sex, in which case the surprise doesn't work. It's only a girl having sex in and around her home. But whether this is two idiots being accidentally fun or two competent ladies calling another one a whore, I think we can all agree it's weird to have sex in the same room as your blind aunt. I doubt that's even a category on por– never mind, I looked it up; it's called Louis Braille gooning, but it's a "curious Ray Charles" if you're in a group.

Look, I don't know what's going on. How could I? This is irreverence untethered from any sense of humor. It's a deconstruction of comedy by women trying to do the opposite. It's a sudden nude child advice column where they wrote both parts and no jokes! All I know is Patricia and Charlotte were free from structure and reason, able to say anything about sex they wanted, and it only took 11 entries for them to get to their third kid one and second incest one. Underage nudity doesn't really lend itself to observational comedy, but I think if Jerry Seinfeld was here he might say, "What's the deal with this pleasant, perfectly ordinary book about normal thiiings!"

"I'm just going to start typing stuff," said either Patricia or Charlotte. "Fruits or something, ask your Mom for a knife if you don't have a missile, whatever, we can fix this all later."

The other one said, "Oh, this is a child in this premise? Then I have the perfect next line. What you do: 1. Take off your clothes."

And then the first author replied, "This is a true story. In 43 years when someone finds this book, they'll try to make fun of us by saying the most outlandishly disgusting, criminal thing, and type out literally what we did."

"Fuck," I will realize. Fuck.

Here's the last part of the home sex experiment. "What did you learn? Did you have an orgasm?" the two women asked the hypothetical child they asked to disrobe twice. "Comedy!" they assumed?

I know what you're thinking. What? And you're right! A lot of their gags start as purposeful mistakes, like misreading "organism" as "orgasm," and then letting their consciousness wander off. There's not a single element of this approaching comedy, and it's groveling too hard for cute to ever work as anti-comedy. If you pitched this to Adult Swim in 2005, they'd say, "Ma'am, you dropped your dementia patient's very sad final letter to their fish."

"I am in the fucking weeds on this one. What's a big number, only funny?" asked Patricia.

"Korean war deaths," said Charlotte.

"Ha ha yes! Another one done!" replied Patricia.

These are mundane thoughts from a reality disconnected from happiness. Patricia and Charlotte wrote "THE BABY VIRGIN." and it inspired nothing, six different times. These are not jokes. These are haunted bogs of meat in a dead imbecile's brain. If you die reading this page, worms won't eat your body. Oh good, speaking of dead bodies:

I sort of like this one. It's nineteen panicked attempts at fucking a dead body in a funny way, failing each of the 19 times, and then ending it with "Solution: There is no solution. Death is final." I don't know what to call it, but it's unique to these very strange circumstances. You simply couldn't get this if you asked talented or smart people to write a multiple choice quiz about having sex with a corpse.

Not for the first time, I forgot these morons have no idea how to land a joke and I found myself saying, "That's it!? THAT'S FUCKING IT!?" Part of what makes me magical is I never lose my sense of wonder at the idiocy of Patricia Marx and Charlotte Stuart. It is limitless, and so is my fascination with it. For instance…

… look at this. It's the final part of a 3-page section called GROWING NUMBER OF FRIGID WOMEN PRESAGES NEW ICE AGE.. They thought the wordplay of "frigid" women causing the Earth itself to get colder was not only an idea to be shared, but worth multiple pages. And they end it by saying, "It will warm up if they fuck again, the end." It… look, let's maybe talk about some basic comedy writing.

You can use the phrase "is that anything?" to try to rescue a bit if you've underwritten it or only made part of an interesting observation. For instance, "New York uterus bridge map, is that anything?" Whatever, bad example, the specifics don't matter. Cliches are never an ideal way to write a punchline, but if you can add "Is that anything?" to most of a joke and it works, fine. However, more importantly, the question acts as a test. The answer could very well be "No. Absolutely not. And now that you mention it, you piece of shit, how dare you not know. You soulless worm, fuck you." Anyway, we'll call it the "Is That Anything" test, and maybe it can help us if we start applying it to Patricia and Charlotte's careless shrugs at comedy.

New York uterus bridge map, is that anything? It turns out it wasn't! This is the same joke missed the same way eleven times! Comedically speaking, this is like writing a multiple choice quiz about having sex with a corpse and then publishing it.

I hate having to admit this, but "test tube babies are mostly pizza cutter" very much passes the "is that anything" test. To be clear, I don't think it is. In fact, I'm almost positive "test tube babies = pizza cutters" isn't anything, but I feel honored to be included in the discussion.

There's simply nothing to grab onto here. These are symbols and meanings unharbored from all we know of them. It's two women having sex with a dead body and saying, "It's a joke, we're kidding, gawd!" Oh shit, there's more.

"I think I have one! A drawing of a chair means… chair," said Patricia as her skittering eyes settled on a chair, then a second chair.

"Oh, that's good! I'm adding that right now," said Charlotte.

"You wrote down 'nude children'," said Patricia.

"Nude children? I barely know her!" said Charlotte.

"Oh, that's going right in the book," said Patricia.

"Who the hell is Book?" said Charlotte.

"Chair, chair, what else…" said Patricia.

It's like someone was forced to write a comedy book with their family at gunpoint, and they all got shot by entry number 5. What was once an audacious senselessness has strayed so far from whimsy. It's shriveled into some kind of melancholic incorrectness. "Aphrodisiacs… will have a vote in the U.N." one of them says.

"Ha. A nude child and a dead body voting," added the other.

Ugh, fuck this. Whatever this is. This sounds like something first generation autocomplete would text if you were wrestling a phone away from a sex criminal.

Yeah, we can't do many more of these. This book is so much less than not anything. I can feel it training my mind to ignore words, to abandon memories.

It's unreal. These two comedy writers, writing a comedy book, made it through an entire page about automobiles having sex without even trying a joke. Wait, excuse me, I missed the tortured date rape joke the ladies wrote in the left caption. This is monstrous. This is something the sun would say to a baby left in a hot car.

I was physically stunned by this. The raw chaos of it, the precise way they chose random words without ever landing on absurdity. It's a picture of a t-shirt that says "g-shirt" included right alongside their other tries of "j-shirt" and "w-shirt?" It's a barely bad drawing of Sonic the Hedgehog wearing the w-shirt without a pregnancy. I don't know how to explain it, and feel myself becoming a worse person every second I try.

I don't… fuck. God damn it. I think they're taking old jokes and dismantling the mechanisms that make them work? This could very well be the worst a book can conceivably be, and one of the authors generated an AI detective novel about an insurance adjustor named John Smith.

And now they're finding common signs that maybe, with great intent and generosity, could have sexual connotations, then leaving it up to the reader to invent them. Who is their intended audience, and how amazing must their life be if YIELD SIGN is a complete dirty joke to them? This is somehow worse than their stream-of-consciousness ones because now you kind of see what they were going for and how they just didn't bother. It's not a good sign that we're not halfway through the book and they've already used the worst one in their maybe pile. Oh Jesus fuck, not halfway through?

T-that's the whole thing? No. No no no. No no no no no.

I can't… I think this is what I was trying to explain earlier? This book is like when your body has 26 non-erogenous zones and they are all your right knee? Sorry, let me deliver that joke again only I'll hit the knee part. You know, if you are 26 nonerogenous zones all located at the same spot… you might be a kneecap. Nope, still doesn't work!

A fucking shrine to failure. There's nothing here for a mind to cling to. Objects, abstractions, measurements… their meanings are obliterated long before you can relate to them. There has to be an honesty to comedy, a set of rules or a shared reality we can agree on before you twist them. Patricia. Charlotte. You can't have the premise of your joke be "you are jamming wads of paper up your hole; you're decorating your g-spot, you see" and then have the turn be "we, the joke tellers, are not sure how 'weight' works." You stupid fucking idiots, you worthless monsters.

"Do you have one for Amyamy?" asked Charlotte.

"I do. But you're not going to like it," replied Patricia.

"No, come on. How fucking stupid could it be, you cow? You worthless monster." replied Charlotte.

I'm not sure about this one. They did a fake Ann Landers with no hook or satire and their response to a woman who had sex with her fiancé was, and I quote, "You should kill yourself. The world would be well rid of you." And then nothing else. That was the whole punchline. Fuck you, Patricia. Eat shit, Charlotte. Oh great, now I'm doing it. Oh no, I've been doing it for like three entries!

Hmm…

Okay, this is going to sound crazy, but I think this one is sort of cute. I like it! Most of their entries are some bitter, confused unjoke. I figured by this point in the book they'd just be showing a picture of a gun that says "a murderer's sex toy," only they'd use the real name of a real murderer…

… oh. Oh no.

You know, if you're writing white replacement theories where Asian women use bouillon wrappers as money in rice paddies, well then you just might be a kneecap. Sorry, I really don't know what to say about this. Zebra barbershop? Zebra barbershop, maybe?

Yes, I was right. Zebra barbershop. Help. Help! Zebra barbershop!

"G spots… points… Pointillism… plants… g spots again, g spots on those plants…" says a beautiful mind wandering through the writing process. "You're done, by the way. That was the whole joke," the beautiful mind adds.

I might mean this harder than I have this entire book: goddamn it fucking what?

You know, if you think virginity has more uses than the soybean and one of those uses is only the word "PLASTICS", well the odds seem to be quite good that you… are 26 nonerogenous zones on a kneecap. Ha. Nailed it. Plastics.

The back half of the book is mostly impenetrable baby stuff. Hauntingly not funny baby stuff. "Donkeys still carry babies overland in Mexico," is something a plastic bag would whisper if it was used to suffocate a racist. It's so much worse than anyone could have expected a human author to do. It is word-for-word something a Mexican donkey would think if you put a baby on it.

You're right, ladies. Don't bother with any copy or a punchline. I'm sure the 130 baby dolls you buried up to their necks will say plenty.

"I'm done in the demon fucking room if you want to use it," says Patricia Marx to Charlotte Stuart during the most important step of their writing process.

This reminds me of one of my favorite Jerry Seinfeld bits. "Why do they call it a training bra? What's it training for? The 1988 200-meter breast stroke? And what's the deal with the ladies who grow out of them? Who are these adult ladies for!?"

Wait, wait, they did it! It took them 90 tries, but they did it! Linda's gynecologist got pelvic exams mixed up with dating and she left, so he went to her house and told her "I really liked your Pap smear." That's broken madness from a diseased brain, but funny! Not Mark Twain funny, but like a mistranslated Taiwanese toilet sign fu– oh, sweet, there's more!

"I shouldn't tell you this, especially during the movie, but my other client, Mrs. Harold Cluney, has a dead uterus," Dr. Dansey volunteers.

No response at all, she says.

"Dry as shit. I've never seen anyone so infertile, and I was on the team that chemically castrated Jim Davis," he says.

This is nuts. The good kind, I think, but I recognize I lost my mind dozens of entries ago. I might just be happy they stopped doing the kid sex ones. Oh no, that sounds like one of the lines I use to set up a horrible example of an author doing exactly that…

… God damn it, I was right. Seems like a good place to stop! Let's end it with one of my favorite comedy punchlines. "She's barren as a rock," said Dr. Dansey.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Rebrandrew, who regained his virginity by insisting the whole thing was a joke.

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