As Michel Foucault pointed out in his History of Sexuality, the Victorian Era actually loved to talk about sex and tell dirty tales and discuss other people's sex lives.
The Secrets of Sports Direct told, via Harry Wallop, a dirty little tale of a dirty big business.
But The Saturday Review's Hollis Alpert famously described it as "a dirty fairy tale," and Ann Marsters of The Chicago American allegedly told Wilder in person that he had made a dirty film.
The ethnomusicologist, Mr Dimov, worries about this danger: "If you're born post-1990 and your life has been filled with [chalga's] dirty fairy tales, you may mistake it with reality".
That in mind, we asked some folks who have had their coitus interruptus-ed by a third party to tell us their dirty, funny tales.
"The Apprentice" — Libby's 1996 entry in the long and distinguished annals of the right-wing dirty novel — tells the tale of Setsuo, a courageous virgin innkeeper who finds himself on the brink of love and war.
Directed by Arthur Penn (who staged the original), this tale of dirty rotten swindlers in San Francisco in the late 1800's brings to mind a car that has been in the garage for a couple of decades.
Neville underplays the gag – everyone calls the conflicted cop Jack – and there's precious little else to laugh about in this tale of dirty politics played out in a post-ceasefire Belfast where ancient animosities fester and everyone has a price.
It's not an unreasonable aim, though the obvious danger is to use a parable to preach, at which point the tale becomes dirtied, and a lesser thing.
Lincoln is eloquent in the manner of the self-taught provincial prodigy he was, his speech informed by voracious reading and also by the tall tales and dirty jokes he heard growing up in the frontier country of Kentucky and Illinois.
