Bawdiness
This was going to be a post about Blackadder and Mr Bean. I dislike Mr Bean the way I dislike George Costanza. His chief characteristics seem to be pettiness and a really mean kind of selfishness. Blackadder is no saint, but at least his ambitions are slightly nobler. It's a strange thing that people prefer one to the other, but that may be just because nobody's heard of Blackadder. But, truth be told, I haven't paid any attention to Mr Bean, so any criticism would be unfair (except, perhaps, such criticism as is implied by the fact that I didn't pay any attention to him). So this post shall be about bawdiness instead.
I've always taken great pleasure in bawdiness. Dirty limericks are a staple, but I like to think that I've graduated from limericks that are tolerable only because they have naughty words in - the kind that delight eleven year old boys - to limericks that are genuinely funny if one can shut one's mind (or open it) to the filth, bigotry, scandal, and what have you. I also greatly admire limericks that scan well, even though they are not particularly funny or have anything otherwise to recommend them. Here's an example:
There was a young parson named Bings,
Who had risen above all earthly things
Save his secret desire
For a boy in the choir,
With a bottom like jelly on springs.
The way the last line rolls off the tongue is a pleasure worth repeating.
And then, of course, in similar vein, there is:
The new cinematic emporium
Is not only a super-sensorium,
But a highly effectual
Heterosexual
Mutual masturbatorium.
That heterosexual scans and rhymes is quite glorious, and, to my mind, not unlike fantastical scanning in:
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.
Unexpected cleverness is a bonus, as with the half-limerick Sweta told me:
There was a young woman named Blunt
In the ocean up to her knees...
with the explanation:
"It doesn't rhyme now, but wait till the tide comes in."
My friends tell me that I should not tell dirty jokes, at least not to new acquaintances, and particularly so if these new acquaintances happen to be women. One argument is put-your-best-foot-forward: when one meets girls, one should not smoke, or drink, or tell bawdy limericks, or do anything unseemly. This is an equilibrium: girls (and people you have just met in general) expect to be treated better than you generally behave, and they discount your good behaviour by several points. If you behave as you generally do, they think that your everyday behaviour is far worse than even that.
But I have a general principle that forbids dissimulation, so this argument I condemn as deceitful. I acknowledge that it is rational to act as this argument dictates, but I do not think it desirable.
The only other argument that I think has weight is the one that it makes listeners uncomfortable to be told dirty jokes. Yes, it does. But I hope by my evident harmlessness to set such concerns at rest. Delighting in dirt, if done in a purely academic way - by which I mean without the intent to participate in the acts at whose description you merrily laugh - seems to me to be a particularly harmless vice. Refusing to countenance marvellously constructed poems or phrases because they are not quite clean seems unnecessarily prudish, and likely to deprive me of much of my enjoyment of life. For it is true of much of life, or at least of my life, what is true of the limerick:
The limerick packs laughs anatomical
In space that is quite economical,
But the good ones I've seen
So seldom are clean,
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.
Labels: bawdiness, Blackadder, Lepanto, limericks