Sid the Sexist
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Sid the Sexist (real name Sidney Smutt) is a character from the English comic book Viz. Sid and his mates (Baz, Bob and Joe), who are all Geordies (meaning from Newcastle) spend a lot of time at the pub using outrageously crude lines in attempting to chat up women. In an early issue of Viz, Sid approached a woman with the line: "How Pet, my name's Sid d'ya fancy a fuck?" When she answered with a definite "No!" he continued "Well would you mind lying down while I have one?" They brag continually about their sexual prowess, particularly Sid. Sid's secret is that he is in fact a virgin, and each strip centers around his struggle to lose his virginity, which he never does (often due to the fact that he still lives with his mother).
The character was based in part on a friend of the Viz editor Chris Donald, Graham Lines, whose endless sexual bravado and imaginative chat-up lines masked his shyness with the opposite sex. An invitation to "go out on the pull" usually involved a few quiet beers, a takeaway dinner, and a late night spent watching Laurel and Hardy videos.
Like most comic book characters Sid never appears to age (nor do his friends). He is stuck in a limbo of being a desperate 30 year-old virgin: although one strip did state that he had turned 31 last week, his age has somehow returned to 30 a few months later. It is generally left to the imagination what his job is, and the usual implication is that he doesn't have one or takes a series of casual jobs - in one episode he attempts to chat up a woman by telling her that he works as "an assistant to a well-established provider of goods to the younger end of the market"; despite being exposed as an elf in Santa's grotto in a local department store by his derisive mates, he still desperately attempts to keep up the pretence that his job brings him success with women - "Y'see lasses fancy summat a bit special". He seems under-educated, knows little of the world outside Newcastle, and is sometimes barely even literate. He is physically very unfit, cowardly despite his pretence at macho aggression, and always comes off worst in a fight - he is often beaten up by the boyfriend of a woman he tries it on with. Although his 3 companions do sometimes succeed with women, they are much like him in their yobbish, misogynistic outlook and never marry, or expand their stagnant social circle.
The recurrent format of Sid's misadventures is that he believes he has found a new approach to women which will secure him a sexual conquest at long last ("This time... this time! It HAS to be this time!!") - and he invariably ends up being humiliated, often by a very painful injury to his genitals.
The strip was created and mostly drawn by Simon Donald. After Donald left the magazine in 2003, Paul Palmer took over as the strip's artist.
Examples include:
- Going horse riding, in the belief that posh female jockeys are always horny after being rubbed up by their saddle. An upper-class looking woman did indeed offer him a roll in the hay after riding, but when Sid cried out with excitement, a nearby horse was shocked and kicked him hard in the crotch - sending him to hospital, where a doctor cruelly points out the smallness of his battered penis to a group of medical students.
- Buying a dubious self-help book, one of many purporting to teach the art of success with women by a self-proclaimed super-stud. He brags to his friends that he will reveal the amazing secrets it contains only "when me cock's fallen off!" His overconfident attempt to attract a nearby girl using the method in the book, and a vile-smelling pheromone spray supplied with it, only results in a very rude, embarrassing rejection. Later that night, Bob Baz & Joe have all pulled girls - while Sid wanders home alone, miserable and still smelling foul.
- Making a £1000 bet with his friend Baz that he can seduce a woman within a week. He attempts hypnosis on a nun, who kicks him in the balls; buys another pheremone spray (Pig Piss) which only attracts a blind woman's guide dog to bite his genitalia; and makes a desperate approach to fat, bald, ugly uber-feminist Millie Tant, who repays him with yet another vicious kick to the nuts. The final frame has Sid begging his mother for £1000 to pay off the grinning Baz...
- Going to Barcelona, Spain for his friend Joe's brother's bachelor party, because he knows bachelor parties generally involve at least one sex show. Even though Sid is the best man, all the other guys just want to booze themselves silly. Sid finally cracks and outright demands to go to a sex show, and pays all the entrance fees. At the show, a beautiful woman wants a volunteer for a "strip" - Sid instantly jumps on the stage. The woman blindfolds him and asks him to bend over - and while everybody is watching, a man dressed in a gorilla suit bangs him from behind. Sid still didn't score, but everyone got a good laugh.
- Sid and his friends travel to Bangkok after hearing that the prostitutes there will sell themelves for as little as a pound. Sid is robbed at gun point by one of these ladies of the night after being tied to the bedpost. The final scene shows Sid trying to earn his flight home by working as a homosexual prostitute. Just ten more goes and I'll have earned the fare to the airport.
- Setting up his own driving school, in the mistaken belief that the film Confessions of a Driving Instructor is a documentary. When a woman signs up he gets her to drive to a country lane, where he unzips his pants. She ends up panicking and speeding off towards a busy intersection. Sid discovers too late that the dual-controls he's had installed in his car don't actually do anything, and a huge pile-up is the result. To add insult to (literal) injury, Sid ends up getting fined for not being a registered driving instructor and not even having a driving licence. Not to be deterred, he watches another "documentary" in the series and sets up business as a window cleaner.
Sid also starred in a spinoff animated cartoon in 1992 (also called Sid the Sexist) which was aired on channel 4, which was released on DVD in 2004 which contained all five of the fifteen minute long episodes.
