Profanity and Profundity
Before I get started, a big thanks to everyone who downloaded Dig. My little book ranked number 2 on the Kindle store for humorous dark comedy.
Profanity and Profundity
I forget which great aunt or uncle or second cousin twice removed offered this bit of advice, but it went like this: “Use profanity so sparingly that when you say ‘shit,’ the listener can smell it.” You can read this two ways, I think. First, and most obvious, this little aphorism champions a stoic sort of wisdom and a profound sense of self-control. Bo-ring! The other way to read it, the more fun way, I’d argue, is that profanity is all about context.
If you carpet bomb “fucks” and “shits” and “dick noses” into every conversation, it becomes white noise.
The best use of profanity optimizes the particulars of the situation. What follows is a list of experiences where I feel that the use of profanity was elevated to high art.
A Virtuous Gut Check
I was in Los Angeles. It was 8am on a beautiful spring morning, sunny blue skies, 65 degrees Fahrenheit with a light breeze. I was there to interview a woman with HIV for a documentary that was raising awareness about testing and treatment. It was a rewarding project to be a part of. I felt good about it.
I was halfway through my cup of coffee, and I was waiting in front of a donut shop to meet up with the director. A woman walked past me, maybe in her fifties. She was smoking a cigarette and wearing a Scooby-Doo t-shirt. I’m not sure if she was homeless, but her particular brand of bedhead looked like it was caused more by cardboard and not at all by a down pillow.
Because I was feeling so good about my day thus far, I offered her an enthusiastic “Good morning.” She stopped, her brow furrowed, and she said, “Fuck you!” And then she kept walking.
I’ve met precious few prophets or sages in my time, but I believe this woman was one of them. Whenever I think I’m doing the lord’s work, I remember her retort and I stop taking myself so seriously.
Who Let the Dogs Out? A Potty-Mouthed Grandma Did.
My mother-in-law taught second grade for decades. I’ve seen her former students, now with children of their own, fawn over her and regale us with stories of her spirited support and gentle touch. I’ve known her now for about 25 years, and I’ve only seen her hair not perfectly coiffed after my brother-in-law and I couldn’t take it anymore and threw her into the whitewash of a beach on Kauai.
What I’m saying is this: she’s pretty squeaky clean, and she always puts her best, pedicured foot forward. Except the time she didn’t.
She was at our condo not long after our son was born and our daughter was a toddler, learning all kinds of new words. Our dog at the time, who you may have read about, was a shitbird who constantly barreled out the front door to eat kitty McNuggets in the greenbelts. When she got out, it took twenty or thirty minutes to retrieve her, so we took great pains to keep the little bitch inside (the term “bitch” is being used here technically and pejoratively).
As you’ve probably already guessed, my mother-in-law accidentally let the dog out and punctuated her faux pas with an “Oh, shit!” The best part of this slip is that my two-year-old daughter heard it and instantly began working the word into every possible conversation. Here’s the evidence:
The odds that my daughter’s first curse word came by way of my mother-in-law and not me—the guy with revenge fantasies, the accidental Walmart model, the man who dreams of clown testicles—were astronomical. If Vegas offered that bet, you could have laid down a dollar on my mother-in-law and purchased an island with the winnings. My daughter is now a teenager and she can string together a list of profanity that would make a Teamster blush, and my lovely my mother-in-law is a central figure in that origin story.
Buttoned-Up Buddy Boy Blasphemy
In high school, I was on the basketball team. Our coach was a nice guy, well put together. If he and my mother-in-law had tea, they would have one heck of a time. Still, he was struggling to get respect from some of our players. My school was in Lake Elsinore, which isn’t exactly known for its impact on polite society or its adherence to laws regarding violent crime.
At one point, our coach had to come down hard on one of our teammates, rightly I might add, for his disrespectful attitude. The teammate upped the ante and replied, “Man, fuck you.” It got really quiet, and everybody’s eyes bulged as we waited for what was sure to be a buttoned-up response from our coach. But he surprised us.
“Fuck me?!” he repeated.
And there was a pause. It was as if he had racked a shell in a shotgun. We all waited to hear what came out once he pulled the trigger. Finally, he added this: “I tell you what, buddy boy—fuck you!” And he punctuated the retort with a pointed finger. The entire team fell down laughing.
It was the “buddy boy” that turned the pedestrian I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I response into pure poetry. It was as if Quentin Tarantino had revised a scene in an episode of Leave It to Beaver.
Wedded in Wit
I’ve probably had a net negative impact on my wife’s manners but a net positive impact on her creativity and linguistic dexterity. We were watching the news a while back, and the weather girl was droning on about high pressure systems and warm fronts and blah blah blah. My wife turned off the tv and said, “Ugh.”
“What’s wrong?”
“That weather girl.”
“What about her?”
“I wanna bitch slap her accent.”
I love this idea! That you can isolate individual parts of a person's identity and subject it to profane attacks. It’s just this type of behavior that makes me fall in love with my wife all over again. Related, this is the secret to a great marriage. You fall in love, you grow together, and you continue to reveal new and exciting aspects of this beautiful life, like when you find yourself in agreement that someone’s accent or fashion sense or music tastes should be bitch slapped with impunity.
Holy Place, Unholy Chase
I had an uncle who was a degenerate gambler and alcoholic. He lost all his money at an Indian casino and started a fight with the dealers. It got out of hand and the cops were called. A chase ensued. There was a church across the street from the casino, which made a lot of sense for both sides from a business standpoint.
My uncle ran into the church, and they were in the middle of the alter call at the end of service. Two cops were on his heels, so he ran down to the pastor, got behind him and pointed over the pastor’s shoulder at the cops and screamed, “Sanctuary, mother fuckers!”
They arrested him immediately. Apparently, the laws and customs my uncle recalled from Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame don’t carry much weight in modern day America.
Cluck You!
If you’ve been following All Kinds of Funny since the beginning, you probably know we raise chickens. Whenever we go to someone’s house for dinner, or whenever we need a thank you gift, we usually bring a carton of freshly laid eggs from our flock (Larry Bird, Goldie Hen, The Duchess of Yolk 3.0 [versions 1.0 and 2.0 didn’t make it, story for another time] Yolko Ono, Cluck Norris, Bob, Et Al.).
Recently, upon offering a bounty of eggs, the male recipient asked my wife this: “Do the eggs ever hatch?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“We don’t have a rooster. Because roosters are dicks.”
“Oh, so you need a rooster for the eggs to hatch?” You’d be surprised how many people with college degrees have engaged us in this exact conversation.
“Yeah, the egg has to be fertilized.”
“How does the rooster fertilize the egg?”
“He fucks the chicken.”
The use of the verb “to fuck” applied to chicken husbandry is the pinnacle of profanity practice. That my wife used it to provide our friend with a lesson in sex education is an endless source of joy and amusement.
More Profanity, More Profundity
I’m looking at my notes for all these profane anecdotes, and it occurs to me that this is just the fucking beginning. There’s too much here for one Substack post, so it’s going to have to be a series—an ongoing celebration of naughty words matched with contexts that add texture, nuance, and poetry. I’m not sure when I’ll revisit this series, but just know that when the shit hits the fan, you’ll definitely smell it.
Thanks for reading. If you have any stories of your own about a time when someone elevated the use of profanity, please fucking share it.
When in Ireland and in a pub. Parents brought their kids. And I never heard the F Bomb so many times. I also heard feck a lot . thanks for the laughter. Menerva
I’ll add one-
In the car driving my 9 year old son home from school - he asked, “Mom, what’s the F word?” I answered, “what do you think it is?” He answered sheepishly in almost a whisper, “ is it ………fart?” 🤣