We sit in our respective easy chairs – “Remember when we first got these things?” I ask, “And as soon as we got them home, we sat in them and ended up falling asleep for the entire afternoon?” – a bowl of popcorn between us, separate soft blankets over our respective knees, and tune in to the bedroom-hopping-turned-murderous opening scene of A Shot In The Dark.

As comedies go, it is both classic and outdated; an untimely (and un-sexy) sex comedy that dates itself in funny – and “Was that EVER funny?” – ways.

For those unfamiliar with the movie: Maria Gambrelli, maid in the household of the wealthy Ballon family, is found in her bedroom holding a smoking gun over a dead body. She doesn’t know how it happened. She swears she did not shoot anyone, especially not her lover (see: aforementioned dead body), and even though the police commissioner is certain she’s guilty, Inspector Clouseau believes Maria Gambrelli to be innocent — “…of any crime…” he hastens to add; the idea that Maria Gambrelli would be ‘innocent’ by other standards is clearly meant to be laughable. She has at least two lovers in the household, after all. (One she claims she didn’t kill, and another Clouseau is convinced she’s protecting.)

At one point, Ms Not-Innocent – drunk after a night on the town with Clouseau and alcoholically amorous – is being carried up the stairs of the inspector’s apartment, eyes half-closed and arms flopped wide, when she declares (clearly with the intent of non-protestation), “I’ve given up sex!”

The thing about old-school comedies is that they anticipate their audience. There is a pause – not in action (Peter Sellers continues to stumble up the stairs holding a dead-weight Elke Sommer) but in sound. The director has left a space of quiet in which the audience is expected to react.

And I can imagine that pause – that 1964 not-yet-revolutionized-sexual-era pause – in theaters of the time being filled with the reaction of tittering laughter and ‘ahem’-ing of throats and an occasional guffaw of disbelief.

In my own home viewing room, the pause is filled with a shared look between my spouse and I. A raised eyebrow. A grin.

“I’ve given up sex,” I say to him.

He laughs.

Because the concept is, on some level, as ridiculous in life as it is in the movies.

Obviously-enamored, clearly oversexed, naturist (there’s a whole nudist colony scene in the movie that actually *is* funny in parts) females just do NOT suddenly – after only two days of no sexual activity and obviously only two minutes from renewing sexual activity (with a new partner, to boot!) – declare themselves celibate with any level of seriousness any more than amourously-intentioned, hypersexed, nudist sex bloggers do.

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Or do they?

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