Air Sex Competition Makes Us Want to Start an Air Abstinence Campaign

Air Sex is a novel and intriguing concept. "It's like air guitar, but sex," the Austin-based creators of a national touring Air Sex competition like to say, and with that explanation come the mental pictures of people idiotically humping, sucking, and rubbing up on air. It's practically inevitable to think, hey, that's kind of genius. I should go to that.

Don't.

Unfortunately, it was too late to give this advice to the packed house at the Independent in San Francisco Wednesday night. Everyone had already bought their $20 tickets. They were already drinking themselves silly before the empty stage soon to be overrun with air fuckers. And at that point, I, too was still hopeful that the show would be as hilarious as the concept seemed to promise.

"We want sex!" the audience began to chant, and Color Me Badd's "I Wanna Sex You Up" blared as the host of the evening, Chris Trew, presented himself. Shaggy and bearded in a white button down, he loosely resembled Jesus on a day at the office.

"This is not a fucking game, San Francisco," he said.

Trew then invited the judge, Joel Keith (pictured below), to the stage. "Now you may be wondering, how in the shit did he get this job?" Trew said. Well, he just happened to have fucked air better than anyone else at last year's competition, held in Austin, Texas.

Keith's opening monologue was telling. "I want to see that down and dirty shit!" he screamed. "I want to see that seductive shit! I want to see that crazy shit!" Then he stretched, ripped off his pants to reveal black boxers decorated in silver sequins, and began an air sex routine, which involved a lot of tongue flicking, rolling around, and even throwing an imaginary partner up in the air, then pretending to catch her -- on his dick.

It wasn't too shabby, actually. Keith moved crisply and energetically, and it was easy to understand why he was the champion. But from there, the performances went way downhill.

First up, a contestant named Dick Oxygen in tighty-whities and a blood-stained shirt stole Keith's best move! He threw his imaginary partner into the air, and it looked like she landed hard. Why he had blood on him, nobody really understood.

"Are you a doctor?" Trew asked after the performance ended.

"A rapist!" an audience member shouted.

"Hey," Trew cautioned. "Doctors can be rapists, too."

Others thought it was supposed to be menstrual blood, but Dick Oxygen explained that he had been injured during the toss. Derivative. Weird. Next.   

A man in a hotdog uniform, who called himself "The Footlong" fucked a tomato pinata for his full two minutes on stage.

It wasn't exactly air sex, and it wasn't exactly funny. Others followed suit. A priest and an Indian took turns fucking a woman in a white dress, and pretending to pull random objects out of her vagina, including a plastic rat. A robot fucked an iron, a lava lamp, and some other stuff. A guy dressed as a waiter took a whip cream cannister up to his pelvis, then fed its contents to female audience members.

A friend I brought, who was beginning to slump, said, "this doesn't feel like air." The contestants apparently didn't get that randomly and aggressively humping objects and each other was only funny on drunken nights in college. The also failed to understand that the best possibilities for humor with air sex are in the interaction with the imaginary.

Finally, a young woman who called herself Pandora's Box took the stage and did Air Sex right. She hadn't planned a thing. She hadn't even chosen her own music. She had no props. She simply pretended she was getting fucked, pretended to get bored, pretended to put on a strap on, and pretended to fuck the bejesus out of a pretend guy.

 

It was a simple concept with a story line, and Pandora's Box performed it with confidence. Had everyone else taken a similar approach, the Air Sex Competition could have been delightful. But because it was open to anybody, and most people who yearned to enter this air sex competition didn't seem familiar with what makes for good physical comedy, the show or at least the one in San Francisco, was a bust.

Pandora's Box, who is actually a teacher from San Francisco named Britt, won Wednesday night's competition handily. She'll be flown to a city yet to be determined for the finals, where she'll likely face some, uh, stiffer competition.

 
Photos   |   Christopher Victorio