In the United States, the full publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover was a significant event in the "sexual revolution". The book was then a topic of widespread discussion and a byword of sorts. In 1965, Tom Lehrer recorded a satirical song, "Smut", in which the speaker in the song lyrics cheerfully acknowledges his enjoyment of such material; "Who needs a hobby like tennis or philately?/I've got a hobby: rereading Lady Chatterley".
The British poet Philip Larkin's poem "Annus Mirabilis" begins with a reference to the trial:
Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) – Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban And the Beatles' first LP.
In 1976, the story was parodied by Morecambe and Wise on their BBC sketch show. A "play what Ernie wrote", The Handyman and M'Lady, was obviously based on it, with Michele Dotrice as the Lady Chatterley figure. Introducing it, Ernie explained that his play "concerns a rich, titled young lady who is deprived of love, caused by her husband falling into a combine harvester, which unfortunately makes him impudent".[41]
In the 1998 film Pleasantville, a film that narrativizes conservative cultural nostalgia for the 1950s as a response to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, Jennifer (played by Reese Witherspoon) reads Lady Chatterley's Lover as a principal part of her character development, causing her to become "colored", the film's metaphor for personal growth and transformation.
A 2020 episode of Ghosts had Fanny (a ghost and the former lady of the manor from the Edwardian era) reading the book, and then developing feelings for Mike (the alive husband of her descendant who she otherwise thinks of as uncouth and uncultured) as he does garden work. Any pretenses of a full relationship are dashed, however, when she sees him slovenly eating a plate of nachos.
