In the first chapter of her 2010 memoir, The Bedwetter—a book as unrelentingly winsome as its author—comedian Sarah Silverman recalls how as a 4-year-old she broke up a room by telling her grandmother, who had offered her some brownies, to “Shove ’em up your ass.” Remembering this incident, Silverman writes, makes her “nostalgic for the days when naked obscenity was enough for a laugh, and didn’t need any kind of crafted punch line to accompany it.”
Obscenity can still crack people up today, but, as Silverman says, it requires more artistry than in the good old days when Lenny Bruce riled up the cops by saying “schmuk” and “cocksucker” in a nightclub, or when the FCC censored George Carlin for reminding everybody that you’re not allowed to say “motherfucker” on broadcast TV. More recently, Larry David climaxed a season of Curb Your Enthusiasm with what some have called a “profanities opera,” and David Simon transformed the word “fuck” and its close variants, repeated in sequence exactly 33 times, into the most iconic modern representation of detective work on The Wire. Just speaking a dirty word doesn’t do much for anybody anymore, but Silverman, like these gentlemen, hopes to recapture the delightful punch that four-letter words once possessed.