The S**t Show

I was watching basic cable recently, and three separate commercials came on that used one of our favorite versatile curse words. One I had seen before, for Frank’s Hot Sauce. A young guy is just trying to get a bite to eat and everyone is slapping his food away because he didn’t put the sauce on it. In one case, another guy slides his hot dog out of its bun in a creepy sexual visual. The tag line is “I put that s**t on everything!”

Then there is the Bull Shot spray that claims to eliminate carpet and upholstery stains without scrubbing. After several impressive demos, filmed with “a 4K, HD camera capturing the action up close", the presenter says, “this ain’t no buuulls**t.”

Finally, the advertiser who’s thrown the most s**t through the airwaves, Pfizer, has a new campaign for its fall COVID-19/flu combo vaccine: “I got my s**t together.” It’s the most clever of the s**t slinging slogans, as it substitutes the word “shot” into the common phrase. “Most” clever, but not very clever.

As a younger man, I would have welcomed this language into the plastic world of advertising. Actually, the magic word is always bleeped out in these commercials, so I would have preferred hearing the real deal.

Today, it just feels like another angle to look edgy, like when they used hippie language in the 60s and rap in the 90s.

There was an episode of South Park where the cop show NYPD Blue was allowed to free the s word from its shackles. It dropped tons of s bombs and its ratings soared, resulting in the release of demons onto Earth. The word shit was an actual curse, so saying it so many times opened the gates of Hell.

Am I so old that this word offends me? Or is it the bleeping? I tell myself that if I were ever on a TV talk show, I wouldn’t curse even if I knew they would just bleep me later. Why should the live audience have the privilege of hearing all the words I say but the TV audience gets the usual electronic din? Yet all those late night hosts fire off Fs and Ss like they don’t sound stupid on the other side of the screen.

I found another trend in censored language on TV years ago. Comedy shows would have sketches with kids in which adults were cursing and/or sexual situations were implied. We here in TV land heard the bleeps, but I’m sure the kids heard the words. So what’s the point of the bleeps, those auditory guardians of children’s ears, when child actors aren’t protected by them? What’s the point of the advisory labels prefacing shows when child actors are exposed to the content?

As much as I think I want every English word to be treated equally, I feel uncomfortable when someone is cursing or talking about sex in front of a kid. That’s why I thought the 10pm “curfew” on bleeps for the tamer curses was a good thing. Let that be “our” time, when Tony Soprano doesn’t have to sound like he’s speeding through 10 tunnels on his cell phone.

Of course this touches on the greater dangers for kids that are sanctioned by society lately. The loony left doesn’t care because it’s hanging on to that old Simpsons joke where Helen Lovejoy, the uptight wife of the town minister, cries, “What about the children?” in opposition to violent cartoons. That question became a meme before social media and represented hysterical right wing mothers.

But those cries have only gotten louder, because the stakes are higher. At a shiva (Jewish mourning gathering) I attended 2 years ago, someone was complaining that the local “nut job” parents made a stink about drag queen story hour, and said something like “What’s the big deal?” (I need to write a whole post from a disaffected liberal perspective on why it’s a big deal.)

My aversion to this language lately may have an even worse explanation: my body/mind/spirit is trying to make moral sense of the universe and trying to actually keep some order to it! Who the fuck am I?

I’m not the hall monitor. I don’t remind the teacher to assign us homework (anymore: I only did that once. Once). I don’t even have kids.

Actually, I’m not trying to ruin anyone’s fun. I just want kids to have their own innocent fun for as long as possible before that jaded adult outlook inevitably falls over their eyes. I want the curses to be mysterious to kids; they should be heard infrequently enough to be exciting when kids finally hear them.