”These words have no power. We give them this power by refusing to be free and easy with them. We give them great power over us”. George Carlin
The C-word has become speakable in mixed political company. No, not ‘cunt’ which pervades the U.K. like cloudy weather. You hear it first thing in the morning under-their-breath from shirt-and-tie drivers. They prefix it with ‘silly’ and refer to someone who beat them to a parking space. Or on the London tube. “That stumbling cunt tread on my toe.” And so it continues echoing at the counter with your first coffee to extend the boost of your wake-up milky tea. It doesn’t stop till you fall into bed bitched flat-out at the witching hour, “poor cunt”.
No, the stubborn C-word is “capitalist”. Of course, it has been around and spoken aloud for ages. But no politician of “liberal sensibilities” would boast about it being one of the reasons to give him your vote. Ronald Reagan if asked in 1980 would have said he believed in capitalism. Pamela Harris said more without being asked in an interview of October 8, 2024:
“Let me tell you something. I am a devout public servant. You know that I’m also a capitalist, and I know the limitations of government.”
The story of these verbal taboos falling like fig leaves in one of those cutely named storms is one of the boasts of the present. Best not pursue whether we are not coming down too. The F-word has reached glory in ‘Unleashed’, the recent 750 page memoir by that inflated c..t, (I’m old fashioned), former UK PM Boris Johnson. He records that when PM David Cameron threatened to “fuck you up for ever“ if Johnson backed leave in the Brexit campaign, Boris thought to himself:
“Did I want to be fucked up? For ever? By a prime minister equipped with all the fucking-up tools available to a modern government, and thousands of fucker-uppers just waiting to do his bidding?”
The recent history of the F-word and its derivatives differs in spirit in the UK and USA. In the north Atlantic islands it had aspects of a sporting contest. Sport is a mask for other doings there. In the outre-Atlantic republic it was more a battle between lawyers. The courtroom drama is the original American art form. Both played “gotcha” with poor old “f—k”. But the first aimed to raise it to respectability, the second to put its users in jail.
Let’s begin with Kenneth Tynan, a brilliant critic who writing for the London ‘Observer’ did much to change the direction of the British theatre and bring about the founding of the National Theatre on the Southbank. Pass on his obsession with nudity and certainty that spanking was the summit of carnal bliss for both parties. He went along with the common belief that he was the first to say “fuck” on British TV in 1965. But it wasn’t true. Tynan was only the third. The honour went to drunken Irish writer Brendan Behan. On a Panorama program of 1956 he displayed a vocabulary he had honed in jail for IRA activity. Hundreds of viewers complained that his Dublin jailbird lingo was incomprehensible. Not one objected to his “fook”, which he murmured using an Irish u like foot or full. In 1959, moreover, Ulster TV broadcast an interview with Brum Henderson. His job was to paint the endless railing along the River Lagan. He would do one end to the other in twelve months and then go back and start to do it again. The interviewer, thinking hard, asked Brum if it wasn’t a bore. “Of course it’s fucking boring,” came the reply.
In sober print, James Joyce in ‘Ulysses’ of 1922 was the first to use “fuck”. He would be punished by the censors who kept his book out of the USA while lawyers harrumphed until 1932. But Joyce had only used the word as in the expression “fuck it”, mimicking the speech of a character. Britain relented in 1936, but there were obstacles to procuring the ‘Ulysses’ in Ireland until the 1960s.
D.H.Lawrence had greater ambitions for the floundering word. He wanted to drag it up the slope of literary propriety. In ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, he wreathes it with posies. Some readers were embarrassed not by the word that they were all too familiar with but to see it in the context of hearts and flowers. It was like a long term resident of purgatory finally making it upstairs only to find he didn’t have the right clothes or small talk.
The book was privately printed in Florence in 1928, but an unexpurgated edition in Britain had to wait for a Penguin Editions printing in 1959. It was challenged as obscene and after a ballyhooed trial by jury at the Old Bailey in London, three women and nine men jurors declared the book not guilty and readable for the public of the United Kingdom. At the same time in the USA where it had been banned since 1929, Grove Press published an integral edition. The Post Office found it obscene, but in a 1959 trial Grove defeated the Postmaster General of the City of New York. District Judge Frederick vanPelt Bryan seemed to relish the Lady’s adventures and declared them obscenity free.
Both Joyce and Lawrence introduced “fuck’s” little sister, “cunt”, into their books. With Joyce backed by the polymath Ezra Pound and the pious Thomas Stearns Eliot, it was hard to naysay him. As for Lawrence, his draping intercourse in flowers made challenging him a sin against romance. Noisy conflict over naughty words would have to be left to the American stand-up comedians of the 1960s and 70s. A social rebel like Lenny Bruce was regularly arrested for obscenity. He simply used the words that fit his skits and routines. They were common enough but outlawed on stage. He felt, “Life is a four letter word,” and
"Take away the right to say ‘fuck’ and you take away the right to say ‘fuck’ the government.”
He made his point of view clear in his book ‘How to Talk Dirty and Influence People’, 1965:
“I want to help you if you have a dirty-word problem. There are none, and I'll spell it out logically to you.
Here is a toilet. Specifically-that's all we're concerned with, specifics-if I can tell you a dirty toilet joke, we must have a dirty toilet. That's what we're all talking about, a toilet. If we take this toilet and boil it and it's clean, I can never tell you specifically a dirty toilet joke about this toilet. I can tell you a dirty toilet joke in the Milner Hotel, or something like that, but this toilet is a clean toilet now. Obscenity is a human manifestation. This toilet has no central nervous system, no level of consciousness. It is not aware; it is a dumb toilet; it cannot be obscene; it's impossible. If it could be obscene, it could be cranky, it could be a Communist toilet, a traitorous toilet. It can do none of these things. This is a dirty toilet here. Nobody can offend you by telling a dirty toilet story.
They can offend you because it's trite; you've heard it many, many times.”
Bruce was monitored and harassed on all sides. He took his act to London and was afterward barred from entering the United Kingdom as an “undesirable alien”. In Australia a woman in the audience asked him to talk differently and not only about America. Bruce replied, “Fuck you,” Madam. Is that different enough?” He was banned from several big US cities. His many arrests included one for using the Yiddish word ‘shmuck’, which apparently can sometimes mean penis. But the good old American regulars rolled off his tongue like bad breath. His final tussle with the law was a six-month trial that found him guilty of obscenity on November 4, 1964. Sentenced to four months in jail, he was freed on bail and appealed. He died of a morphine overdose while awaiting a decision. ‘Playboy’ commented:
“One last four-letter word for Lenny: Dead. At forty. That’s obscene”.
When Lenny had been arrested at Chicago’s Gate of Horn club in 1962, George Carilin, 25, a spectator, was also hauled off in the police Paddy Wagon. He would follow in Lenny’s staggering footsteps. In 1972 Carlin noted that Lenny’s arrests were due to his saying nine words, “ass, balls, cocksucker, cunt, fuck, motherfucker, piss, shit” and “tits”. Carlin then delivered a monologue entitled ‘Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television”. He repeated it in various forms for the rest of his career. He would ask his audience if additions or deletions to the list were in order. He would subject each word to scrutiny and ridicule. At one point he decided the list was incomplete and contemplated adding “fart, turd” and “twat”. He had doubts about keeping “tits” among the original seven. It sounded too much like a pet name (“Hey, Tits, c’mere!”) or like a snack product (“New Nabisco Tits! ... corn tits, cheese tits, tater tits!”). Finally he told the public to keep tuned:
"Some of your favourites might make the list this year!”
Broadcast on the radio the routine provoked litigation that went as far as the Supreme Court. That august body, in a bit of unconscious humour, ruled 5 to 4 that it was “indecent but not obscene”.
The routine would in fact get Carlin arrested seven times. He left out Lenny’s “ass” and “balls” as suitable for mixed-gender get-togethers and family reunions, but said:
“Those are the heavy seven. Those are the ones that'll infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war”.
Like Lenny Bruce, George Carlin dared to stray into big issues. In 2004 he published a book called, “When will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?” He chose the title because it offended all three major religions. He was much funnier than Boris Johnson.
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