I remember hearing my former spouse, herself Chinese, react to some quotidian annoyance with a loud mutter of ‘For fuck’s sake’, and wondering where she had got that from, and of course realizing the source was likely very close to home. I am moderately sweary in my private life, particularly sharing close spaces with people who don’t tidy, or in that particular case two people who didn’t tidy.
When it came to my twenty-one years as a comedian (2001-2022), mind, I took scrupulous pains to avoid bad language. Oh it didn’t start off like that – my early shows had the usual juvenile jokes about ‘midgets’ and cocks. But that language pretty soon seemed other people’s idea of comedy rather than my own. I had no moral objection to working blue, it just wasn't me.
It struck me early on that if I used bad language less it would mean any bad language I did would have more of an impact; by using swear words sparingly or never, I was allowing myself another comic tool. I could establish myself as a clean act, a polite one even, who paid a great attention of to detail to language and then, just like after periods of sexual drought, the odd fuck became all the more compelling.
The opposite seems to me evidently less preferable, for diminishing returns set in pretty quickly for self-elected ‘shocking’ acts. If you’ve barrelled through a broadside of expletives in your opening number, if you’ve hit coprophilia, felching and dogging in your opening five, where are you going to go after ten? You can’t really go back to clean stuff after that as your persona by then makes such material sound inherently sarcastic.
Even some of the most defiantly outré comedians of all-time didn’t just do extreme stuff; no less than Bill Hicks opened his first filmed special, one which builds up to vile act-outs of pornography, with friendlier material about driving. Even the dirtiest masters knew you had to give yourself somewhere to fall into the mud from.
This principle of restraint applies to pretty much any set-up; horror films that use horror sparingly are scarier, action films which aren’t all action are exciting, perhaps even the small talk at the beginning of pornos has some kind of structural use. Anything to create tension then break it, which is of course something that marketing executives fail to understand; an ‘all-action’ movie is dull whereas one with a build-up to the shooting kicking off is a good time.
Jerry Seinfeld said that he once dropped a joke because he saw it wouldn’t work without a swear word. He didn’t like the idea that only the expletive was getting a laugh. The opposite logic applies tho too. It’s equally a skill to know when a joke really could do with a swear word, where a bit of cursing accentuates the comic. It’s usually a question of linguistic rhythm – I remember an act from my London days who’d come on stage and open with, ‘A lot of people ask me, P____, why don’t you just fuck off’, and the pleasure came from the way the speech pattern fitted that of a more conventional opener. Sadly the rest of his act never topped that, but how could it.
I’d go further than that; I’d argue that a certain type of restraint and withholding of vulgarity creates positive things in everyday life. I’m talking, really, about manners; if you generally try and be affable and non-judgmental with everybody, people will tell things to you and, by the act of nodding your head and letting them talk, you’ll gain the reputation as being a good listener. People well tell you things, which is more useful for comedy than practicing bits on them. Restraint creates trust; the boy who cried wolf is, in this analysis, a story about a failure of manners.
And I contend it’s good for the erotic too – I’ve always had a strategy of ‘polite until I get to the bedroom’, where I, let’s just say, adopt a rather different register. I reckon this has greater impact because I withhold that side of me so much in my everyday life. Basically, dear reader, I’m absolute fucking filth. And then, when my clothes are back on and the champagne and bullwhips cleared up, I aspire to be the perfect gentleman. I even think that it’s that formality which creates space and heightens the intensity of transgressive language in private. After all, those pre-code films are often much sexier than the ‘80s softcore tit-fests which followed them.
I saw an Alfred Hitchcock film called ‘Stage Fright’ recently; not one of his very best, tho a lot of fun as even the most minor works of that particular genius are. There’s a scene when Alistair Sim’s character has a cunning ruse establish the guilt of Marlene Dietrich’s, and to do that he has to win a doll from off a fairground shooting range. Joyce Grenfell plays the woman running the ducks stall with a great line of ‘Would you like to shoot a lovely duck?’ (Joyce Grenfell was a doyenne of the postwar British stage and by all accounts a very good thing. I’m always struck by how talented those old actors are; in the clip below, Grenfell manages to extract a laugh from every line).
The scene is really funny, genuine comic brilliance, but what makes it’s so deliciously is the way it delays the suspense plot and holds up its resolution; comedy which becomes funnier from its own deliberately awkward situation in the narrative. I think that’s the same as what clean creating internal guardrails within their own act are doing; creating tension within themselves, tension they have the potential to later release to comic effect.
Working clean also trains you in greater discipline as a writer. You ask yourself: How can I make this funny without using these certain words? This could apply for non-expletives too, where you ban yourself from using punchlines which reek of eau d’hack such as the words ‘HR’, ‘Tinder’ or ‘Liberal Democrat’. It’s putting your whole writing on a different difficulty setting and demanding creativity in your choice of subjects.
Not that those working clean should be considered pacific; as Bill Burr pointed out to Seinfeld himself, clean comedians are seething with anger. The anger is just funnelled into bits about Pop Tarts and faulty shower heads - the idea that all would be right with the world if people could just get your coffee order right. Done right, that idea is funny in itself, the aggrieved polite persona. After all, to the extent that most Edinburgh comedy shows have any narrative arc at all, it’s ‘Comedian who seems relatively normal at the beginning is acting proper bonkers by the end’, and obviously a reserved style is a natural place to commence that descent into craziness from.
Generating clean material has a further advantage – what you create is useful in many more contexts. You can go to the familial afternoon café gig to the pub show without changing your act. Indeed, I’ve always found an extra transgression when standing up before late-night rowdy crowds with clean material, an audience member telling me once how much he’d loved seeing me undercut hecklers in a way which ‘wasn’t nasty’. Audiences can give you a sort of general ‘Well played’ if you’ve gone and won over a rowdy crowd with material about Humpty Dumpty or why dads sound leave answer phone messages which sound like in-flight updates. It gives punters a welcome break from all the blue and of course, makes you stand out in your style. A bit of politeness goes a long way to make you stand out on a bill full of dull dirty blokes.
And it also sets up one final possibility, the As You’ve Never Seen Them Before! show where you finally cut loose and do all your dirty stuff, because you will inevitably write dirty stuff. Smut is funny. You can have that one 45 minutes where the previous persona is subverted by showing that you can do wild and naughty gags. And that shows once again that the constraints of the cleanish persona create freedoms; after all, who would want to see ‘Roy Chubby Brown: Cleaner than You’ve Ever Seen Him’? Whereas ‘Tim Vine Goes Blue’, now there’s a show I’d genuinely like to watch.
For a comedian, I believe that if you work clean you’re putting yourself in a position to be able to do pretty much anything. You’re maximising your possibilities, because clean can go dirty but dirty can never go back to clean. Clean is the comedic equivalent of an adaptor plug; such a frequent story, that in limitations and artificial constraints more creative freedom is found.
Very good, and you are right. I can remember going to gigs in the early 80s when ‘alternative’ comedy was all the rage, and for so many of the acts, ‘alternative’ just meant using the f word in the first gag and the c word in the next one.
Whereas Peter Cook and Dudley Moore as Derek and Clive were, in the late 70s, shockingly hilarious.