J. Davidson - Planet Word

Richard : So, Stephen, when you put your hand in the water, I’d like you to repeat that word at an even, steady pace. Keep your hand in as long as you can and take it out when you’re ready.

Stephen : That is cold actually. Functional. Functional.

Functional. It’s beginning to hurt. Functional. Functional. It begins with the right leg. Functional. Oh fuck.

Richard : Don’t swear.

Stephen : I’m not to swear, I’m sorry. Functional. Functional. Functional. This really hurts. Oh this is not funny any more. Functional. I’m going to get hypothermia. Functional. Oh God, I can’t take it, I’m sorry.

Richard : Right. OK I’d like you to do that again. This time I’d like you to tell me a word you might say if you hit your finger with a hammer.

Stephen : Well, I’m afraid I’ll be dull and it would be ‘fuck’. That would be the first one that would come, and then the many others would stream afterwards … And here we go. Oh yes. Good. Fuck. Ah ha. It’s all right for the moment.

Brian : Is it worse this time?

Stephen : It’s still cold and my hand … Oh fuck me. Oh fuck this for a game of fucking soldiers. Fuck. Fuck the fuck.

Brian : Terrible language.

Stephen : I’m so fucking sorry. Fuck it.

Brian : This is going to go all over the world. You’re going to lose your reputation as an elegant person.

Stephen : Oh fuck, fuck, fuckedy fuck. Ooh. It feels better actually saying fuck. It actually doesn’t feel so bad. Fuckedy. Ooh. Ooh. Very tingly. I think I’m ready to bring it out at any fucking point now but … you know I can keep it in here in a way that I couldn’t before. I genuinely mean that. That’s quite extraordinary. It just lets you. It does, doesn’t it? I think I’m ready to take it out now.

Richard : Brian, you’ve seen the procedure; we’ll do the same thing again. So we’ll start with the word that you might use to describe a table.

Brian : Wooden.

Richard : Wooden. That’s a good choice.

Stephen : And no swearing. No swearing.

Brian : Right. Oh, it’s lovely and warm. Wooden. Wooden. Wooden. It is cold, isn’t it? Mustn’t swear. Oh, wooden. This is horrible, isn’t it? Wooden. Wooden. Wooden. Oh, fuck.

Stephen : No.

Brian : Oh no, no wooden … Wooden. Wooden. Wooden … I’ll take it out.

Richard : OK, Brian, and so this time I’d like you to use a word that you might use if you hit yourself on the thumb with a hammer. Can you give me your word that you might use?

Brian : Yes, I’d say bollocks. Fuck it.

Richard : Just one word.

Brian : Bollocks … Here we go. I always get terrible fucking wind. I’ll be all right in a minute. I don’t know why the fuck I do that. I get terrible wind. Here we go. Right. Oh bollocks. Oh bollocks. Bollocks. Bollocks. Bollocks. Oh bollocks. Is that all I can say is bollocks?

Richard : Steady, even pace please.

Brian : A steady even … Fucking hell, man. Bollocks. Bollocks. Bollocks. Bollocks. Oh fuck it.

Richard : That’s great. Thank you … This couldn’t have really gone any better.

The results of the experiment are revealing. Stephen is not an inveterate swearer, so, like the majority of people who have taken part in the test, he tolerated pain better when he swore. He kept his hand in the icy water for thirty-eight seconds with his neutral word but for two minutes and twenty-nine seconds with his swear word. Brian, on the other hand, is an habitual swearer, so swearing appeared to have no effect on his pain threshold at all. In fact, he kept his hand in for five seconds longer when he shouted ‘wooden’ than when he swore.

When uttered at the right moment, a rude word can suddenly bring an otherwise dull and lifeless sentence dramatically to life. In the rather dry world of humour research, this is known as a ‘jab line’. It adds emphasis and a touch of the unexpected, a necessary component of humour. It is often particularly funny when coming from an unlikely source, such as the mouth of a sweet old lady or a seemingly innocent child.

One of the best-loved comedy sketches on British television is The Two Ronnies ‘The Swear Box’, a masterpiece of innuendo, in which the anticipated expletives from two men in a pub were bleeped out by a volley of increasingly strident beeps. That was in 1980, when swearing on television was still uncommon. There had been a sprinkling of ‘bloodies’ and ‘damns’, including the forty-four ‘bloodies’ repeated in an episode of Til Death Us Do Part in 1967, after which the broadcast standards campaigner Mary Whitehouse declared ‘This is the end of civilization as we know it.’ And, of course, there was the famous late-night ‘fuck’ uttered by Kenneth Tynan on live TV two years earlier, which caused a national uproar and prompted one Tory MP to suggest Tynan should be hanged.

Today the use of expletives on television after the 9 p.m. watershed is widespread. Nowhere has swearing been taken to such operatic levels as in the BBC’s satirical political sitcom The Thick of It , with its foul-mouthed Downing Street spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker. The Thick of It has been described as the twenty-first century’s answer to Yes, Minister , the gentler but equally witty sitcom of the 1980s. Both programmes satirized the inner workings of British government; their language is very different. ‘Gibbering idiot’ is about the most extreme form of abuse used by hapless MP Jim Hacker in Yes, Minster , whereas ‘Please could you take this note, ram it up his hairy inbox and pin it to his fucking prostate’ is a typical ‘Tuckerism’ from The Thick of It.

Armando Iannucci is the show’s creator, writer and producer. He says he is simply reflecting the language of the government’s inner circle in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

‘There was that world which lived off a twenty-four-hour news cycle, it lived off a “we’ve got to control every media outlet possible” and therefore every second was a battle, which is why the language started getting more hot-tempered. But it’s different for different factions. I’ve done a bit of swearing research and [Prime Minister] Cameron’s troops don’t swear as much as Gordon Brown’s troops. When we were doing In the Loop [the film version shot in USA], I established that the State Department didn’t really swear that much, but the Pentagon swore like dockers, they were absolutely filthy, so we injected that into it. So it’s really there to reflect the reality … There is something enjoyably childish about it … it does feel like you’re breaking a rule somewhere, but nobody’s dying as a result, you’re not causing any physical harm.’

Jesuit-educated Iannucci shares the concerns of those who worry that the overuse of expletives devalues the language of comedy.

‘The last thing I want is every programme I watch to be like that; that would be boring apart from anything else … I’m not a swearer although I do find swearing funny; I see the funny side of it but I do find it quite tiring. If I’m watching a stand-up who is just f-ing and blinding every other one, I find it a little bit dull because it just becomes sort of incessant and numbing …so I like the creative use of swearing.’