Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of R-rated sexual content and cursing.

“Christmas movies couldn’t be that hard to make, right? They were almost like porn.”

This passage displays the humorous tone that will be sustained throughout the novel and delivers the first of many jokes about the porn industry. The suggestion that Christmas movies are like porn suggests that they both have the same generic content and predictable action along with the requirement to deliver pleasure to the viewer, in keeping with the novel’s message endorsing The Pursuit of Pleasure in a variety of avenues. The humor lies in the cultural incongruity of this comparison, in light of different moral values traditionally attached to these different genres.

“The people who watch those vanilla-ass excuses for movies are definitely not the same people who have Bianca von Honey underwear for sale in their search history.”

Sunny’s sardonic joke is a comment on the perceived wide divide between the consumers of sweet, holiday-themed romance films and the kind of adult content that Bee creates. This contrast is a source of irony and humor from the very beginning, when Bee straddles both worlds. By the end, however, the events of the novel suggest that these audiences might include many of the same people: those who enjoy love in both its sweetly romantic and graphically erotic expressions. Indeed, the meet-cute between Nolan and Bee relies on exactly that crossover.