Popular Culture

Although a loose category, popular culture essentially prioritizes entertainment and comedy above education, cerebration, and serious issues. The category also implies in earlier times works of anonymous rather than specific authorship, apparent in diverse historical genres, such as the medieval drama, the fabliaux, and the broadside ballads, which became popular from the Elizabethan period. The modern forms are most obviously the farce, the cartoon, the comic, the soap opera, the sitcom, and rap. The earlier forms, especially the fabliaux, tend to be surprisingly immoral in content and coarse in language. The entry for the medieval period discusses religious drama, which is often shocking in its blasphemy and crudity. The broadside ballads (popular printed ballads on various topical subjects: political, religious, criminal, amatory, and scandalous) included much racy language and slang terms like horning for “cuckolding,” humpers for “copulators,” and pip for “syphilis.” Obscenities which were sung aloud appeared in print as “I won’t F?k for a shilling,” and “F?g,” rhyming with “plucking.” Other uses were simply direct: “Her mamma called her whore and sorry dirty quean” and “the tailors all pist” (nos. 99, 58, and 39 in Holloway, ed., 1975). The popular verse form of the limerick has thrived, especially from the nineteenth century, being practiced by major, minor, and anonymous poets, using witty word-play and registers which vary, being by turns original, decent, and obscene.

The modern forms of the cartoon and the comic originally created safe, sanitized juvenile fantasy worlds, whereas the “alternative” comics of recent decades are crude in every respect. Similarly, the sitcom essentially endorses “family values” by showing that families and relationships survive stress, but the soap opera threatens them through seduction, adultery, and even violent crime. The sitcom is formulaic, with each episode reaching the obligatory happy ending, while the action of the soap opera is notoriously protracted, each episode typically ending in crisis or suspense. By convention, the sitcom permits risqué language, but the soap opera does not. More original and daring are the recent female comedies such as “Sex and the City” (Michael Patrick Long and other writers), depicting differing degrees of women’s liberation, both sexual and verbal, with the character of Samantha leading the field in both departments, and the British series “Absolutely Fabulous” (Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders), satirizing upper-class idleness, sponging, heavy drinking, and political correctness.

In recent years there has emerged a new cynical genre, exemplified by “The Sopranos” (David Chase) and “Six Feet Under” (Allan Ball). The former is set in the mafia underworld, the latter in the undertaking business, but both dramatize dysfunctional families, riven by hostility, tension, and guilt, all members, even the matriarchal, using idioms of powerful and relentless obscenity. This last feature suffuses even “Deadwood” (David Milch), a re-creation of the Wild West set in the 1870s. An English reviewer, Simon Hoggart in The Spectator , commented coyly that “everyone swears, all the time. I cannot duplicate this in a conservatively inclined magazine, but here is a bowdlerised version of some typical dialogue: ‘What you [making love] doing, you [to make love]?’ ‘Be careful, you [rooster-licker], you and all the other [rooster lickers].’ ‘You know what, your mouth looks like a [female genitalia].’ John Wayne would have been appalled, and as for Roy Rogers, I do not dare to think” (October 9, 2004, 73). The more serious objection is that such language is opportunistically sensational and anachronistic. No doubt the Old West echoed with oaths, but none of these obscenities was then current.