A naÄŹve girl loses her virginity to a man who might have a prosthetic penis, a masturbating man is interrupted by his dream girl, and a drunken woman first pees in her pants and then threatens to vomit on a man unless he has sex with her.
These are real stories told by real people willing to expose their most embarrassing sexual secrets through puppetry. And their intimate, at times humiliating thoughts can now be shared with millions of strangers in a new Bite TV webseries called Felt Up.
Creator Simon Glassman, a working caricaturist and cartoonist, revealed a stroke of genius in using puppets instead of humans to tell the irreverent, R-rated tales.
After all, puppets wield a strange power. By using fabric figures, the puppeteer can say and act out things that would be tricky to perform otherwise.
“A lot of the stories are understandably awkward when telling them, but they are universal. There’s a certain comfort in hearing other people’s horror stories even if they are awful, gross subjects,” says Glassman.
He conceived the idea when studying video at Grant MacEwan, rebelling after the final assigned project was a documentary film.
“They weren’t specific about what to make. I knew what everyone else was making and I didn’t want to make a typical documentary. I thought I’d like to get sex stories and weird stories and dramatize them with puppets.”
He approached friends, including comic buddy Jon Mick, a former Morinville resident. Mick, the perfect candidate, had wanted to tell his stories for a long time.
“You always have embarrassing stories you love to tell no matter how poorly the light shines on you. I wanted to share the stories to make it less mortifying. If you share them, it’s not such a weird secret. It becomes a funny story to share with people,” Mick says.
In the segment Technology, Mick had developed a Facebook relationship with a girl. After they broke it off, he got plastered one night and sent her a barrage of messages.
“They were particularly salacious,” he recalls.
Unfortunately, his ex had the same name as his mother.
“Two days later my mother quit Facebook, I was mortified and embarrassed that my mother read my e-mails. But because it’s an embarrassing story, it’s also quite funny.”
In another segment airing this coming Monday, Mick was dating a different girl. After a heavy drinking party, they walked home and stopped for a sandwich on the way.
“Mine was an egg salad sandwich, which was a mistake. In the middle of the night, I started to feel ill. I got sick all over myself, over her and the bed. I couldn’t say anything but ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’”
She took a shower, cleaned Mick up and laid clean blankets on the couch adjacent to the bed for him. In the middle of the night, he rolled over and fell on her.
“She managed to slide out from under me, but I almost accidentally smothered her.”
The next day, they moved in together.
Most of us would blush to the tips of our hair roots revealing our bedroom faux pas. Yet, Mick, although prone to getting himself in unfortunate situations, is quite philosophical.
“I make a living telling embarrassing stories and this is just one of them. It’s both a blessing and a curse being a comedian. I would rather they not happen, but it makes writing material a lot easier.”
It was exactly this gossipy fodder that helped Glassman win an international award at the Banff World Media Festival in 2010.
In the middle of this “orgy of buying and selling television series” Bite TV offered a deal.
“The humour is lowbrow, at times really gross and it often deals with body fluids, yet it’s oddly innocent,” Glassman notes. “No matter what acts the puppets engage in, it makes it feel weirdly alright.”
Sex is still a blush-worthy topic, yet Felt Up is opening up new avenues of discussion.
“Relative to any other show on TV, our approach to sex and relationships is probably the most realistic on TV,” Glassman says. “Even in reality TV there is some artifice, but with ours you get to hear stories from the people it happened to. There’s something beneficial to understanding relationships and analyzing them and taking them seriously.”
