“I’ve been accused of vulgarity. I say that’s bullshit”  – Mel Brooks

 

I am a painter and an illustrator.  I create simple hand painted images that work as a comic strip or cartoon with a one line tag. These are used as cards and posters.  I often struggle with the humor in this art.  Not because I am short on jokes.  I make up funny shit in my sleep! (see that there) The reason I struggle with humor is because I do not regularly use expletives in my everyday speech.  I speak clearly and use my education to communicate.  I love words.  I love little words and big words and spicy words and tart words.  I believe using the right word at the right moment has a certain kind of magic. I love everything about language and I love breaking the rules of punctuation to embellish the effect.  I love spelling and  spelling contests (oh yes, I am so excited about the upcoming Scripps National Spelling Bee! Thursday! Whoo Hoo!) The only thing I adore more than language is Art.  Or perhaps – “Art is language and language is Art” Who said that? I did, just now.

With that said, it’s not that I don’t use expletives its just that I reserve them for when they pack the punchiest punch!

Truth is sometimes a joke just isn’t funny without the profanity.  It just doesn’t convey the same sense of “devil may care” lightness or the same attitude of casual disregard or the same “fuck it, I’m doin’ this” bravado.

I am not alone in this debacle.  Famously in 1948,  Norman Mailer was convinced by his publisher to change all of the “f-words” in his book The Naked and the Dead to the word “fug” so as not to offend his readers.  He did make the change and it caused a huge uproar with the literary world.  I know this because I am an avid Dorothy Parker fan and she is quoted as having stated that She “Assumed he [Mailer] was a man who just couldn’t spell that word”  TeeHee.

Therefore,  I am not alone in this slippery mess.  FACT:  If I have to choose sides in the Profanity and Curses debate; I am going to be on the side of Dorothy Fuckin’ Parker!  See what I did there?  So, in other words…with this particular joke I decided to use the punch line.

The Idea – I had an itch regarding the fable of the Princess and the Frog.  My thought was why is it always the woman in fairytales that has to kiss the big hairy beast or the warty slimy frog with the faith that there is some sort of spell on a handsome prince and that the kiss will make him magically handsome again.  Why is it always the woman?  My theory is that if we were waiting for the handsome prince to kiss a toad we would have no story!   We just wouldn’t.  In Beauty and the Beast..If the beast was a big hairy woman…Nope.  Wouldn’t happen – No Magic.

So I thought this about the frog prince and decided that No, I wouldn’t kiss a frog either.  Why should I?  Does this make me a bad princess or just a princess who realizes that these nasty little things spread germs.  Seriously, gross.

So here is where I ran into the challenge of running my joke all the way to the end.  Do I follow my instincts and use the profanity? Oh Hell, Yes!

I chose to go ahead and let it rip with this particular punchline.  I may not in the future if the joke or the story can be done just as well without the expletives.  In Actuality, I just see these as words anyway.  Words that have a dark side that makes them so much more fun to play with.

Kind of like matches!

So –

I’ll let you decide.

A – My original Idea

B – Same Idea Cleaned Up

C – Try Another Approach