IDIOT BOX SAVANT Sue Johanson will sex you up!

Thursday, March 13, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Idiot Box Savant: Foxy grandma!

By Andrew Kiraly

Every once in a while, The Savant feels a deep spiritual need to take a journey--a journey that requires a bold spirit and the remote control to be dug out from underneath the sofa cushions that, I'm always surprised to discover, are made of flesh and attached to my ass-bones. At any rate, I shore up my courage, sharpen my wits, holster a box of microwaveable buffalo wings, and venture away from the safe wobbly Swedish milkers of network television, except when my spider-sense tells me the commercial with the hot mom from NBC's "Meet My Kids" is on. But besides that, my most recent expedition took me to the Oxygen Network, the channel with programs that empower women between empowering Swiffer Wet Jet and Biore strip commercials.

So there I was the other night, wearing my special buffalo wing-eating tarp diapers, ready for a gynotastic dose of fist-pumping femme-powerment, when instead I came across a sweet old lady saying--with a certain professional, matter-of-fact glee--words like anal beads, ejaculate and schmegma. What the? My rigid sense of propriety was so rattled I had to get into the closet and eat some Easter candy early to right my offended blood sugar (sorry, Jesus). For a second, I thought I was accidentally getting a feed of some new AARP-sponsored Spice Channel franchise airing "Geriatric Jam 2003," but it turned out it was actually the Oxygen Network's oh-so-popular call-in show, "The Sunday Night Sex Show" (cable channel 55, Sun.-Fri. 11 p.m.). It features renowned Canadian sex specialist Sue Johanson fielding phone calls about Doin' the Nasty. Who knew Canadians had sex? I always thought they accreted like algae or something.

From one wan sofaborg to another: You owe it to yourself to watch "The Sunday Night Sex Show," if only to blanch in exquisite horror at what decades of a dismal absence of sex ed in our public schools has wrought. The show should be renamed "Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Too Busy Hitting Your Head with a Hammer to Ask." I mean, one guy actually asked if having sex with his wife more than once a day would help his chances of having twins. Run for your lives! The stupids are breeding! The stupids are breeding!

The sad/funny thing is that questions like that represent the norm on "The Sunday Night Sex Show," though there are some other interesting queries, mostly variations on that classic, "How can I turn my girlfriend into Blowjobitronic Inhalebot 3000?"

Johanson's answer, more often than not: "You can't make your partner do anything!" Welllll, apparently Ms. Sue doesn't have a partner named Maggie "Gums" Isenberry who lives off 15th and Fremont and really, really needs that $25. At any rate, it's a bleakly funny show, just don't watch it while eating cottage cheese or tapioca pudding, as Johanson has a habit of busting out Tourette's-like with her fixation on the word "schmegma." Otherwise, it's perfect weeknight TV for the munchie-inhaling bongzilla crowd. ("Heh. Dude. She said 'ejaculate.' Heh," and so on.)

And on that front, it isn't long before the show's novelty wears off. But make sure you stick around to the end at least once, because, in the review portion of the show, Johanson--I shit you not--usually pulls out some kind of enormous, sinister-looking insectoid vibro-sex toy that will add sizzle to your life by inspiring heated, passionate arguments about the skyrocketing power bill. Tension-breaker codephrase: Wonder Twin powers...ejaculate!