It’s profanity consultant Ian Martin and the folk singer Beans on Toast, for example, are poets of swearing, and use the foulest of language with creativity and conviction. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, playing critics discussing obscenity, satirised the belief in acclaimed artists’ right to swear, a right denied to scummy comedians and other lowlife: ‘An arsehole in Ralph Richardson’s mouth comes out as pure gold …’ they extemporise on Derek and Clive’s Ad Nauseam album, ‘and a prickin the hands of Pinter is a punctuation point, an epithet, a marvellous moment, the end of an extremely witty line … but a prick or a cunt in the hands of Cook and Moore is just a gratuitous prick or cunt.’ *
* Ironically, the posthumous canonisation of Peter Cook has made him an artist fit to file alongside Pinter in the arts establishment , rather than the representative of the low culture of comedy he would perhaps have preferred to have been, so the satire here is skewed somewhat. And to be honest, even a ‘cunt’ in the hands of a cunt like Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown can still sometimes be a pretty funny cunt. But the chef-driven swearification of modern life does mean that these marvellous words have been robbed of some of their power now, and can sound lazy and desperate.
I have no opposition to swearing in principle, though in recent years it has become fashionable amongst respectable comedians of a certain vintage to dislike it. In 2008, it appeared that Frank Skinner, the foul-mouthed Brummie comedian, a Rabelaisian alchemist of filth, had come out against swearing, inadvertently making him the subject of approving headlines in the worst kind of newspapers. Skinner is clearly gripped here by the same anxieties about his legacy that trouble Tony Blair, his chat shows being the equivalent here of Blair’s decision to go into Iraq. But the TV millionaire’s position on swearing was actually considered and nuanced. One would expect nothing less from a man whose belated and evangelical enthusiasm for the art form he once abandoned at the first opportunity has earned him, amongst younger comics, the nickname of ‘The Old Wise Monkey’. As Skinner told the Independent newspaper in December 2008, ‘I am a great champion of swearing, but I don’t want Gordon Ramsay to spoil it for comedians. That would be terrible. Used properly, swearing really can be a beautiful thing.’ Sadly, finely nuancedpositions don’t have a habit of translating over to the mass media very successfully, so Skinner’s equivocal and thoughtful statement arrived in the collective consciousness transformed into a blanket opposition to swearing generally. ‘Even Frank Skinner says there’s too much swearing now,’ summarised saloon-bar bores all around the country.
Skinner’s ‘Profanity Repudiation’, a handwritten document The Old Wise Monkey famously nailed to the door of the BBC in full view of the ashamed heads of comedy and light entertainment, has since provided further ammunition for the forces of evil to gag freedom of expression all over the world, silencing artists who speak out against oppression and crushing creative thinkers beneath the iron jackboots of censorship. As the gate clangs behind another prisoner of conscience in some repressive totalitarian regime, Frank Skinner’s irresponsible comments on swearing mean he could not be more culpable if he himself were the jailer, laughing and delivering the final kick as his victim is beaten senseless behind closed doors and left to rot in the dark.
I’m joking of course.
But having realised that I needed to eliminate all the bad words from the shocking story I was planning to inflict on the paying public, I was soon made to realise that I also needed to bleed out any bad feeling. The bruising encounter with Jesus, it transpired, needed to happen, as in the transcript in the next section, ‘at His insistence’.
The first time Bridget, my future wife, a practising
* Ironically, the posthumous canonisation of Peter Cook has made him an artist fit to file alongside Pinter in the arts establishment , rather than the representative of the low culture of comedy he would perhaps have preferred to have been, so the satire here is skewed somewhat. And to be honest, even a ‘cunt’ in the hands of a cunt like Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown can still sometimes be a pretty funny cunt. But the chef-driven swearification of modern life does mean that these marvellous words have been robbed of some of their power now, and can sound lazy and desperate.
I have no opposition to swearing in principle, though in recent years it has become fashionable amongst respectable comedians of a certain vintage to dislike it. In 2008, it appeared that Frank Skinner, the foul-mouthed Brummie comedian, a Rabelaisian alchemist of filth, had come out against swearing, inadvertently making him the subject of approving headlines in the worst kind of newspapers. Skinner is clearly gripped here by the same anxieties about his legacy that trouble Tony Blair, his chat shows being the equivalent here of Blair’s decision to go into Iraq. But the TV millionaire’s position on swearing was actually considered and nuanced. One would expect nothing less from a man whose belated and evangelical enthusiasm for the art form he once abandoned at the first opportunity has earned him, amongst younger comics, the nickname of ‘The Old Wise Monkey’. As Skinner told the Independent newspaper in December 2008, ‘I am a great champion of swearing, but I don’t want Gordon Ramsay to spoil it for comedians. That would be terrible. Used properly, swearing really can be a beautiful thing.’ Sadly, finely nuancedpositions don’t have a habit of translating over to the mass media very successfully, so Skinner’s equivocal and thoughtful statement arrived in the collective consciousness transformed into a blanket opposition to swearing generally. ‘Even Frank Skinner says there’s too much swearing now,’ summarised saloon-bar bores all around the country.
Skinner’s ‘Profanity Repudiation’, a handwritten document The Old Wise Monkey famously nailed to the door of the BBC in full view of the ashamed heads of comedy and light entertainment, has since provided further ammunition for the forces of evil to gag freedom of expression all over the world, silencing artists who speak out against oppression and crushing creative thinkers beneath the iron jackboots of censorship. As the gate clangs behind another prisoner of conscience in some repressive totalitarian regime, Frank Skinner’s irresponsible comments on swearing mean he could not be more culpable if he himself were the jailer, laughing and delivering the final kick as his victim is beaten senseless behind closed doors and left to rot in the dark.
I’m joking of course.
But having realised that I needed to eliminate all the bad words from the shocking story I was planning to inflict on the paying public, I was soon made to realise that I also needed to bleed out any bad feeling. The bruising encounter with Jesus, it transpired, needed to happen, as in the transcript in the next section, ‘at His insistence’.
The first time Bridget, my future wife, a practising
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