From Spencer “Spenny” Rice, one half of the country’s hottest comedy team, comes the saga of a man’s relationship with his remote control, his DVDs and an inordinate amount of tissue paper. A largely improvised, thoroughly filthy and surprisingly sweet comedy, Confessions of a Porn Addict makes its world premiere March 29 at the Canadian Filmmakers Festival.

Serving as writer and star, Rice made the film in collaboration with director Duncan Christie. The two hashed out the story during smoke breaks while Christie worked as an editor on Kenny Vs. Spenny, the much-exported series that pits Rice against long-time foil Kenny Hotz in contests that are only occasionally as lurid as the contents here. Obviously, the idea of making a film about a compulsive masturbator invites a high level of skeeze, which this film certainly reaches.

“It’s an obvious joke to say it was great fun researching this project,” says Rice in a phone interview with the duo. He admits to having “a healthy amount of pornography in my life over the years, probably just like any other guy.”

What’s unexpected is the sweetness and sadness in the story of Mark Tobias, who deeply laments how his addiction cost him his marriage and longs to be reunited with wife Felice (Lindsey Connell). “What we wanted to do was play with the romantic-comedy genre,” explains Rice. “We wanted to put it in the most unromantic context it can possibly exist in — porn.”

That context also helped to broaden out Mark’s tale. “I feared it would be a bit limited if it was just a guy talking about his obsession with porn addiction and trying to cure himself of masturbating,” says Christie, laughing. “I felt like we had the opportunity to really make a movie.”

Due to events largely caused by the documentary filmmaker telling Mark’s story (played, of course, by Christie), Mark and his Porn Addicts Anonymous sponsor Bob (Yuk Yuk’s boss Mark Breslin in a hilarious performance) end up travelling to American porn’s geographical epicentre: the San Fernando Valley. There, Mark tangles with Rob Black, the motor-mouthed president of his favourite porn company, Extreme Associates. As Rice notes, “He is not an actor — that guy is 100 per cent real. He’s actually the most prosecuted of all pornographers in the United States.”

The kind of character that no writer could invent, Black and his porn-biz cohorts very nearly hijack the movie, their participation further blurring the line of what’s real and what’s not. “Those guys really had no idea what we were doing,” says Christie. “They thought we were interviewing them for real for a documentary about porn. They didn’t realize we were basically getting in there and putting them in these situations and getting all this great stuff. It was pretty cool that as far as getting a real porn guy to play himself, we got the most cartoonish guy of all.”

“Which is not to say that Rob is an idiot,” adds Rice. “He’s far from it — he just doesn’t care. The only reason he participated in it on any level was because he saw this as an opportunity to promote his brand. So it was a very weird and unconventional project from the beginning.”

Weird and unconventional it remains. But if you ever wondered what would happen if Larry David made a movie with Larry Flynt, then Confessions of a Porn Addict will tickle you in all the right places.