<em>My Dad Wrote a Porno</em> Is an Ode to Bad Sex

While watching the HBO comedy special My Dad Wrote a Porno recently, I recognized the look on Jamie Morton’s face as he read passages aloud from his father’s self-published erotica series, Belinda Blinked. The furrowed brow, the pursed-lip grimace, the eyes narrowing as the brain wrestles with the appalling imagery it’s processing—that look is the specific countenance of someone who’s encountered a truly horrific sex scene in fiction. I know that look because I bore it for several days last month while , a 522-page colossus filled with sandwiches, expensive consumer goods, and one privileged English aristocrat’s attempts to deflower his Albanian maid, all from the same writer once compelled to liken a character’s penis to “my very own Christian Grey–flavored popsicle.”