There is a character in Christina Stead’s novel, ‘The Man Who Loved Children’, of whom Stead says that because none of his oaths were profane. In other words, because he couldn’t say “shit” or “Christ on a bike”, he had to make do with “gee whillikers”, “leaping lizards” and other such goofy neologisms. Out of the whole (as I remember it) dreary novel, that is the one quotation I remember, I think because I’m a life-long comic reader. Comics and TV have the same problem; they aren’t allowed to say what real people say when they swear, but swear they must.
Different people cope with this in different ways. I remember the creator of Biggles, Captain W.E. Johns, came up with a commando character called Gimlet who was supposed to be a harder, tougher character than Biggles. Making someone harder than Biggles isn’t a tall order and one of the things that set Gimlet apart was swearing. He called the bad guys “rats” in a very sweary way (the other thing that set him apart from Biggles was that he shot more people. I mention this so you can sleep at night without wondering). The appalling Clive Cussler has a similar trick; his phenomenally bland hero Dirk Pitt calls bad guys ‘slime’, which impresses them more than you’d expect. Now that I have a kid, I have the same problem at home. I’m still paying for using the Mr Bean-ism “Oh bosoms!” in place of what I really wanted to say in front of my son, who now says “oh bosoms!” with monotonous regularity.
And so we come to the arcane world of British comic swearing. Funny comics like the Beano have a kind of house style that seems related to P.G. Woodhouse, all full of ejaculations like “corks!”, “crikey!” and “gad!”. Do I need to explain that a lot of these are modified blasphemies, from a time when you couldn’t just use the Lawd’s name in vain; “gad” from God, “crikey” from “Christ” and so on? 2000 AD has become much naughtier since its’ inception in 1977, but the swearing has stayed pretty much at the level of Stead’s hero; strange because it can’t be strong.
This is no bad thing in a lot of cases. I’ve always liked the swearing in Judge Dredd’s Mega-City One. There was “stomm” which sounded kind of Germanic to me and was nicely versatile. You can say “stomm!” with surprise or you could ask characters to ” cut the stomm”. Of course it can’t do everything; nobody has very been told to go stomm themselves. Early on, there was the exclamation “My dok!”, which Dredd usually said when something was about to destroy half the city or when he met yet another deeply odd perp. “My Dok” seems to have gone the way of Mac the talking computer and Maria the lovable housemaid; I haven’t heard Dredd say it for a long time. There’s the classic Drokk, which sounds nicely futuristic as well as resembling a modified blasphemy. Drokk seems to be a noun and a verb; people can drokk themselves, “drokk you!” is very popular, as is “drokk off”: Drokk is also an adjective; we have drokking difficult jobs and drokking hot weather.
Apart from the world of Dredd, there is the excellent “snek”, as in “snek off”, “snek it”, “snek you” and “No I snekking can’t “. This sounds dirty and futuristic but has been tracked down by some 2000 AD message board scholar to Shakespeare and is actually an abbreviation of “Christ’s neck”. I’m betting this is a coincidence. Sinister and Dexter have the innocuous-yet-dirty “funt”, used exactly like the f-word.
A notable recent bad swear is “funk” in the otherwise excellent Invasion series by Pat Mills. It is used in the same way as the f-word but it just sounds silly and there’s no getting around that. No matter that Tharg protests that swearing changes over time (true) and that ‘funk’ wouldn’t sound silly to hard man Bill Savage. Savage doesn’t have to read the comic now. We do, and every time he says “come and get some more you funks!” I keep thinking of James Brown and the Parliament of Funk.
Name-based swears are also not so successful in comics. To me they usually add to the anachronism that Block names bring on. I mean, in the late 70″s stories, the blocks have names like “Billy Carter” block, now they have things like “Martin Amis” block. This is quite noticeable in the likable Nikolai Dante stories. It’s the far future, the world is much changed and there don’t seem to have been any famous Russians since Boris Yeltsin to judge by the number of times people swear by “Yeltsin’s Liver”.
Swearing by actual characters from within the world of a story makes for an easier suspension of disbelief. From time to time people in Dredd’s world swear by Cal, the crazed Caligula-like Chief Judge, who was about to kill them all until thwarted by guess who. That reminds me of Jeff Kennett, a state politician in Australia so unpopular people were complaining that they hadn’t had a Jeff in weeks and sending cars back to the shop because they were “completely Jeffed”. I’d like to see more of this, although it wouldn’t work with Judge Death, since his name is already a word there would be the same problem encountered by ‘funk’. “Death me senseless, I’m deathing hungry!” Hmmmm, I can’t see it.
Munce is nice as a swear word because it arises naturally from the Dredd stories (munce being a plant which is a kind of future spam).
Me, I’m hanging out until they bring back “my dokk” but it’s not Jeffing likely.
P.S. There is a pub in South Australia called the Excelsior, which has a dining room dedicated to the Phantom. It’s in a suburb of Adelaide called Brompton and the proprietor has said that he wants to give diners the feeling of being watched over by the Ghost Who Walks. Yet another reason for visiting Adelaide (are you here for the arts festival? No, I’m here to eat dinner whilst being watched over by the Ghost Who Walks). The website is here.
Oddly enough you cannot get a glass of milk at the bar. This is what the Phantom usually orders when he’s in bars, especially tough ones.
-Floyd Kermode
(This column comes from an idea mentioned by Gordon Rennie in the 2000 AD chatroom)
