Comedy

Fuck in comedy

Comedy runs on breaking expectation, and the word is a one-syllable break. That is why the history of the word on stage is mostly a history of comedians, several of whom were arrested for it.

Lenny Bruce

Bruce was arrested for obscenity repeatedly between 1961 and 1964, in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, for routines that used the word and others. His 1964 New York conviction stood until he died in 1966; he was pardoned by Governor George Pataki in 2003. The trials are the reason every later American comedian could say the word on stage without a squad car outside.

George Carlin

"Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" (1972, on the album Class Clown) listed shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits, and analysed each with the attention of a grammarian. Carlin was arrested after performing it in Milwaukee in July 1972 (the case was dismissed). When New York's WBAI broadcast a version in 1973, a complaint led to FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (1978), in which the Supreme Court upheld the regulator's power to restrict "indecent" broadcasts in daytime. The word "fuck", Carlin observed, was "a very important word. It's the one magic word", and could serve as every part of speech, a point this site has borrowed.

Britain

• Derek and Clive (Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, 1976–78): three albums of improvised, drunken filth, in which the word is a structural element. Derek and Clive (Live) was the first comedy record to carry a warning sticker and was banned from most shops.
• Billy Connolly: from the 1970s the most important British user of the word as rhythm rather than shock. His stand-up demonstrates the infix, the intensifier and the interjection in a single sentence, and he has argued that Glaswegian is a language in which the word is a comma.
• Alexei Sayle, Rik Mayall, the Comedy Store generation: alternative comedy from 1979 took the word from the working men's clubs and gave it to the middle class.
• Jerry Sadowitz, Frankie Boyle, Roy "Chubby" Brown: comedians for whom the word is the least offensive thing in the act.
• Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi, The Thick of It, 2005–12; In the Loop, 2009): the most inventive swearer in British television history, written by Armando Iannucci, Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Tony Roche and the credited "swearing consultant" Ian Martin. Tucker's lines ("come the fuck in or fuck the fuck off") work because the word is placed with metrical care.
• Father Ted: the whole show is a demonstration that a substitute word (feck) delivers ninety per cent of the effect at teatime.

Why it works

Three mechanisms, roughly. Surprise: a taboo word in an unexpected slot, especially in a formal or refined context (a vicar, a duchess, a nature documentary). Precision: the word placed exactly at the stress peak of a sentence, which is why great swearers are usually great at timing. Recognition: the audience hearing on stage what they say in private, which is the engine of Connolly and of most observational comedy. The word fails when it is the joke rather than part of one, which is the standard critical complaint about comedians who lean on it, and a fair one.