(~9 minutes to read)
Note: I have tried to write this in a way that won’t cause offence to most people. It does not contain any “bad” swear words until the very last line, but alludes to them several times.
During my research for this article, I was shocked to discover that there is a significant and very vocal body of people whose opinion of what constitutes profanity is much less tolerant than mine. Rather than risk this article provoking a similar debate, I have decided to include the following request.
If you are someone who may confuse religious and/or political beliefs with secular opinions on arts and culture, I recommend that you stop here and go and browse some of my other articles. That way, I can continue to respect your right to hold those beliefs in the same way that I would expect you to respect my right to have my own belief system.
When I’m sitting at my computer writing dialogue for my plays, I obviously have to consider how the various characters would express themselves, and that frequently includes consideration of various forms and levels of profanity.
While I’m not a potty mouth by most interpretations of the term, there is only one “bad” word that I rarely use and one other that I never use. There are many other words that I use only in appropriate company, and then only occasionally.
I’ve created my own “line in the sand” and I try not to cross it. Either side of me there are the theoretical lines in the sand drawn by my characters who are on the one side more conservative than me and on the other side, more liberal.
(As an aside – can lines in the sand that are only figurative be theoretical as well?
Write your answers on a piece of toast and place it on your nearest bird feeding station.)
How should I approach and cross the no man’s land between my line in the sand and my fictional characters’?
That’s the thought that triggered this article. And as usual, I’m intrigued by the history of the subject.
Back in the Good Old Days
When I was young, there were lots of words that couldn’t be said on TV. Because they were bad words, it was fun saying them with your mates. We would sing songs containing most of those words while sitting in a section of unused 36 inch diameter sewer pipe that happened to be in the school playground, directly below the staff room window three floors up. I was ten or eleven at the time, growing up in the dilapidated Victorian row housing just east of London. I don’t think my parents ever learned about those particular musical gifts of mine.
(As an aside – These songs are known as “rugby songs” in the UK for some unfathomable reason – perhaps they’re mandatory repertoire for pupils at that famous public school. Or perhaps not.)
Coarse Language on TV
Back then, the first “F” word on British TV had only just been uttered (Nov 13, 1965), but racial and sexual-orientation slurs were acceptable. The Sex Pistols upped the ante substantially in December 1976 when guitarist Steve Jones fired off a stream of profanities at show host Bill Grundy, who admittedly had encouraged the Pistols to shock him. The interview cost Grundy his career. If you’re curious about what went on in that interview, it’s on YouTube here. Be warned – it contains the “F” word and several other not-niceties.
In 1972 in the US, George Carlin wrote and performed a monologue called Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television. The performance got him arrested for disturbing the peace at Summerfest in Milwaukee. His list of words went on to become an informal guideline for what cannot be said on radio and TV, and six out of his seven words appeared in a bill introduced in the American Congress in 2003 aiming to designate certain words as profane in the U.S. Code.
Today, I’m pretty sure I’ve heard every one of Carlin’s words on TV; even the “C” word, which I have to say, shocked me. Shows such as The Sopranos (which I never saw) and the UK’s The Inbetweeners either pushed the barriers back or revelled in the new freedoms.
Coarse Language on Film
Before talkies, the actors could say what the #*!* they liked – only lip readers would know. And they did, as this story about a 1916 silent movie attests.
In the 1930s, along came the “damn” word, and the story (myth?) that Clark Gable had to emphasize “give” and not “damn” in his final line in Gone with the Wind.
Since the 1970s, things have got to the point where people measure movie dialogue in “fpm” – the number of “F” words per minute. Did you know that there are websites dedicated to rating movies via various profanity indexes, including fpm, total “F” count, the ratio of bad words to total words in the movie, and so on?
Apparently, the current record holder is the movie Swearnet: The Movie; it has 935 “F” words in its 112 minute runtime. This movie also has the dubious distinction of being Canadian. Gosh, that makes me proud!
Another movie, The Wolf of Wall Street apparently has 506 “F” words spread over 180 minutes.
Wikipedia even has an article that ranks movies by their “F” word content.
Why people would devote time and effort to creating and maintaining such websites eludes me, but the normal answer where the internet is concerned is, “because they can”.
Coarse Language on Stage
Shakespeare used the word “pissing” in King Henry VI, Part II (Act IV, Scene VI). Other than that, his coarse language was largely limited to the taking of the (Christian) Lord’s name in vain in various ways.
It’s unlikely that playwrights such as George Bernard Shaw or Noel Coward would have considered having one of their characters utter the “F” word or the “C” word. Having said that, the phrase “not bloody likely” caused a furor when it was uttered on a stage in England in 1914. The play – Pygmalion – the playwright – George Bernard Shaw.
Evidence of the next major milestone eludes me, unless it’s the abolition of theatre censorship in the UK in 1968. That seemed to be the trigger for shows such as Hair, and for mainstream TV presenters and comedians to use the worst of the bad words.
In the interests of keeping the length of this article manageable (and its publication date in this century!), I’ve chosen not to examine the adoption of coarse language on stage elsewhere in the world. Perhaps a future update will do so.
Coarse Language in Other Media
“Those words” have appeared on the radio and in books and video games, but itemizing them here really won’t contribute anything further to the thrust of this piece, so we’ll move on.
(As an aside – would anyone construe “thrust” as coarse language?)
What About the Characters in My Writings?
Yes indeed.
At the time of writing this article, I’ve written four plays that have been or are about to be produced on stage.
The first, a British pantomime, contains nothing that isn’t family-friendly (but needs updating).
The second, Julia, is the story of a woman of a certain age who receives a call from her husband informing her that he’s leaving her. I felt her character would use the “brown word”, so she uses it seven times. At one point, in a cry of hopelessness, she utters the “F” word once.
The third, Act III tells the story of three ladies of a certain age who enter into a pact to help their respective husbands adjust to retirement. Although one of the characters is somewhat less inhibited than the other two, none of them uses any bad language, other than one “crap”. There is some innuendo, but no coarse language.
The most recent, Trail Mix and Chips, is about a young couple who get stranded in the back country of the Rocky Mountains after running out of gas. It contains four instances of the “brown word”, one of which occurs when “he” reads the title of a book about back country camping etiquette. The other three are distributed – one to each of the three characters. Would the script stand up without them? Possibly – this play is fresh off the printer and doesn’t go into rehearsal for another four weeks yet, so I might remove some or all of them.
One of my Works in Progress (WIPs) is about a rock band whose members are contemplating reforming after 30-odd years. Having watched interviews with many bands, and having been in bands myself, I envisage the need for a lot of colourful language, but my gut tells me that my plays’ usual audiences won’t be comfortable, so I now have to make a choice: script the thing how I believe it should sound in order to be authentic; script it using my own substitute words, such as “cuff” and “shik”; or throw the WIP in the shredder and start work on another synopsis.
At the end of the cliché-ridden day, a writer has to be comfortable with his or her subject matter and characters. The market I’m writing these one act plays for is largely comprised of community theatre groups that want something different to enter into a competitive festival. My experience of these festivals is that adjudicators look for something that’s edgy, or that pushes the boundaries a little. Having a recovered drug addict who spent ten or fifteen years playing rock gigs around two or more continents say something like, “We must be out of our cuffing heads if we think we can tour with a shik set list like that.” just doesn’t seem authentic to me, but the alternative, when multiplied by the number of lines in a 30-minute play, might be too much for some audiences and adjudicators.
#%!*^#!**!
These days, it seems that words that are considered racist, or that are disrespectful to the LGBT community, are more offensive than “F” or “C”. Agatha Christie wrote a book called Ten Little Niggers (which is now called And Then There Were None), but I’m sure she would never have contemplated a sequel called Ten Massive F____ers. By contrast, these days, a theatre production can get away with the odd F-bomb here and there, especially if the audience is expecting it, but my impression is that a playwright or Director or Producer needs to think long and hard before including the “N” word.
Given that coarseness of language is only one of countless choices a person has to make when crafting a credible play, I have to ask, “Who said writing is easy?”
Post Script: Why “Coarse Playwright”?
Many people involved in amateur drama in the UK will have heard of a book called, The Art of Coarse Acting, one of a series of The Art of… by humourist Michael Green. The book is still available on Amazon (and likely elsewhere).There are Wikipedia articles on the book and the author.
Being aware of my relative inexperience and exposure to criticism, I’ve chosen to refer to myself as a “coarse playwright” for the purposes of this article primarily because I was amused by the pun.
Your Turn
Where is your “line in the sand” in real life? What are your thoughts on characters using authentic vocabulary, even if that includes “bad” words? Have you watched plays, movies or TV shows that have used “bad” words gratuitously? If so, which ones? What are your thoughts on less ancient “bad” words (I provide these as examples because they’re less well-known and I can’t think of a way to hint at what they are: “clunge”, “smegging”, “fricking”, “fracking”.)
Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment.