Fuck's Fucking Fucked

Navigating a confusing and frightening post-fuck world

Fuck had run its course. For the beloved curse word, the future did not bode well. Gross overuse of fuck had continued to degrade TV and film, music and prose. Rap, the musical genre in which fuck had become most parodic was a fat, ripe, slow-moving target and was the first to be hit. Pop a cap in your bottom? No, not that dire. The minor profanities seemed fine. Even the nastier ones looked to be okay. Only the fucks were fading. What were fans saying?

Soon to follow their fuck-dependent rap brethren, standup comics would feel these winds of change, a gentle breeze starting to gust. Most starkly and notably, the fuck that is used by the comic to get the repeat-the-punchline second laugh, a laugh as good as guaranteed, no longer seemed to be working.

You know the bit, we all do.

The comic delivers his punchline, which is, let’s say, “The guy has no clue.” As the audience laughs at the punchline, the comic walks the few steps to his stool for a sip of bottled water. Lifting the bottle to his lips as the laughter generated by the “no clue” punchline begins to wane, the comic aborts his sip and says, “No fucking clue.”

According to a longstanding formula, the repeating of the punchline here, reinforced by the strut that is fuck, should be an easy second laugh. Not anymore. Such was indicative of the diminishing power of fuck, no longer getting those easy second laughs. The comic may hear more chortle than laugh, a laugh of manners, a laugh forced not earned, or, there may be no laugh at all. Among the comics, fears of fuck failing in its role as reinforcer is why deliveries of the fuck-dependent repeated punchline would usually occur during the sip of water, for should you find yourself sipping in silence at least you’d have something to do.

This was the moment in entertainment when audiences were letting it be known that they were not finding fuck funny or shocking or dramatic anymore. To the artist, the audience was saying, “We need more than your cursing. We don’t find it impactful. We’re not twelve years old. It’s kind of insulting.”

For comedians, the message was clear enough. The comics abandoned the formula that is the fuck-supported repeating of the punchline but it didn’t stop there. Even the fuck-supported first laugh, the fuck-supported laugh in general, was losing traction, losing its cultural standing, the comics coming to fear that to even use fuck, let alone overuse it, had become cliché. The “fuck comics,” the comics who continued to use fuck, soon became less appealing to audiences and then unappealing. There was no question by this time that with rappers and comedians blatantly beginning to tidy up their vocabularies the demise of fuck was upon us. The people were not just tiring of the word, they were telling artists they needed to do more than lean on the creative crutch that is fuck.

For fuck, the writing was on the wall. Amongst themselves, the fucks were talking.

“Now what the fuck are we supposed to do?”

“Fucked if I know.”

All fucks were nervous, all were concerned. The fucks knew that a cultural shift of this magnitude would result, more or less, in their immediate extinction. There was confusion and fear. Lots of questions. The union would be of no help on this one. There were jobs, families. The future.

“Fuck. Fuuuuuck. Bro, this fucking sucks.”

“And like, zero fucking warning, bro.”

“And that German fuck. He didn’t fucking help. That German fucker fucking fucked us.”

“Not only him, fucking him and a whole fucking movement.”

The “German fuck” was Dr. Kalba Brenin, the German linguist and film critic. Dr. Brenin engaged the fuck catastrophe innocently enough. He had commented on his podcast that a limited series he had been watching and was intending to review used fuck so often that he stopped watching after two of eight episodes. A highly touted series about sexy young corporate lawyers dispatched to the world’s largest cities to ply their trade in the name of defending and sustaining capitalism, Dr. Brenin became frustrated by the “near constant” use of fuck that would commence in any scene that “required dramatic acting.” Rolling his eyes and ultimately laughing at fuck-choked so-called dramatic scene after fuck-choked so-called dramatic scene, the excessive fucks turning the drama into unintended comedy, instead of a review Dr. Brenin wrote his now infamous essay, A Welcome Overstayed, in which he called for fuck to be banned from all entertainment, not for reasons of censorship or profanity but “for the sake of preserving what human beings have for five millennia called art.”

In his essay, Dr. Brenin transcribes an exchange from the lawyer show.

“Becca should be told this case is now a fucking homicide.”

“Becca’s in the Andes, mountain climbing, off the grid, how the fuck am I supposed to get in touch with her?”

“Well she’s fucking president of this firm, you fucking better find a way.”

“Fuck you, Tristan.”

“Fuck you, too, Emma. And fuck Becca.”

Exeunt Tristan.

Dr. Brenin was relentless in his criticism.

“Fuck is anti-art. Fuck is an art killer. Writers, remove fuck from your lexicon. Distance yourself. Save yourself while there’s still time.”

Dr. Brenin referred to the breaking point that led to the writing of his essay being a key scene in the show’s second episode involving lawyers in a boardroom engaged in heated discussion, a scene that Dr. Brenin called a “fuckfest.” As well, despite the extensive research he had conducted for his essay, Dr. Brenin said he could not pinpoint when, exactly, it had become presumed that audiences would “engage in Pavlovian giggles like naughty children” whenever the word fuck was spoken.

“This must stop,” Dr. Brenin roared. “Fuck has become an artistic and cultural crisis, a great lowering of the bar, a crime even, a crime against art and culture.”

For the linguists and pop culture scholars who attempted to explain the decline of fuck, the similarities to tattoos were often cited, that the way in which tattoos had lost their edge, their cred, their cool, should have been seen by fuck as a cautionary tale, a sign to maybe lay back a while, watch, do some recon.

Tattoos had gone from ships-at-sea and prisons and cheap boarding rooms to spas and moms and pretty junior bank tellers with full sleeves. The tattoo had been defanged. The tattoo had been corporatized and commercialized (“Rebellion plus tax”) and, of special concern to men, feminized, as tattoos had become, near the final stages of the tattoo era and the rise of the tattoo removal era, more popular with women than men. Once the lone province of the hairy forearm, the tattoo spread all over the body, a metastatic migration that could only result in homogenization, the most virulent (and fatal) form of cultural cancer. Fuck was on a similar trajectory. The word had become homogenous. It was as if once the entertainment industry was finally permitted to say fuck, after years of censorship, fuck was all they wanted to say. Now, after decades of non-stop fuckery the people were tired, they had heard enough, they didn’t want to hear it anymore. Fuck had been used ad nauseam and the translation from the Latin seemed about right: “to a sickening degree.”

Podcasters provided additional early warning when even the most redneckian toned down their fucks. Even podcasters whom one might presume would be unable to speak without saying fuck, they were cleaning up their acts, somehow sensing that their listeners had had enough. For direction, the legions of young, head-phoned male podcasters look to their leaders, to their bald, t-shirted, heavily stubbled elders but no directions are issued. Not even the elders were sure of what to do in the midst of what had become an industry wide fuck freefall. The podcasters, ever the opportunists, even coined the phrase that described their own demise—fuckfall. These were the times of The Great Fuckfall.

The entire broverse was watching.

The broverse, appearing undethronable in its caves of bewitching bromantasy and redlining platonic love, was nevertheless linguistically vulnerable. Of course they were watching. If fuck was in trouble, they wanted to know—was bro next? Thirty percent of all sentences that brocasters utter begin or end with bro, plus bro is generously dispensed elsewhere in a sentence. When a brocaster uses bro in a sentence, there is a forty percent chance he will drop a bro in the next sentence and a fifteen percent chance that he will drop one two times. Bro is the primary form of address among males throughout the sector. Yes, the broverse was concerned that bro might travel a path similar to fuck should the people come to tire of an overused word.

When the murmurings began that bro might be next, that’s when media-at-large truly took notice. There had always been issues with fuck, that wasn’t new, fuck was accustomed to opposition and controversy, fuck would survive, it always did, but could the younger, more innocent bro withstand a cultural backlash of similar scope?

No one ever thought bro would be in danger. Both the textual and aural smoothness of bro, its warmth and malleability, how bro can so seamlessly change places in a sentence, these were seen as great benefits, especially in the dawn of the podcast era where the podcasters themselves were not known for their rhetorical dexterity. Bro helped these untrained hosts to relax and to communicate more effectively and with more confidence and feeling. Bro (see brother, brotherhood, brothers-in-arms) was the wubby they needed, their comfort word and slowly the protective bro zone began to form around bro and its utterers. Bro also gave easy-to-use conversational options, allowing for elaborate placements of accentuation that required little to no in-the-moment thought.

“Bro, you can’t be serious.”

“You can’t be serious, bro.”

“You can’t be—bro—you can’t be serious.”

Beginning, middle or end, this was vocabularic mobility at its finest, yet, despite its shape-shifting utility and all-around usefulness, bro had begun to show signs that, like fuck, it may be suffering from simple overuse. No complex levels of reasoning required.

For context, one should note that if both fuck and bro were to fall out of public favor at the same time, at least half of all podcasts would in effect be rendered mute. The podcast sector, which in record time had become a trillion dollar industry in a quadrillion dollar media universe, would be rocked to its core. With no fuck and no bro, the clamorous and chatty broverse would grow space-like quiet, a silence that would be duly noted by the up-til-now-blank-check-writing corporate media overlords.

But for now it was fuck, not bro, that was in trouble. Fuck was down. Fuck was down on the pitch and squirming as bro watched helplessly from the sidelines in wide-eyed disbelief. Fuck, as all knew but none wanted to say, was dying. The people’s court had slammed its gavel. Speech had spoken. Fuck, the perfect curse word, the founding swear of postmodern profanity, was over. Hard to believe.

The F word.

The F bomb.

The original four-letter word.

Verb, noun, adverb, adjective.

The swear, the legend.

The finger, for that matter. The fucking finger!

Fucking over. Fucking just like that. Fuck was gone.

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Other satiric ramblings by Brutus Macdonald that you may enjoy.

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I am also here plugging my novel, perhaps you’ll have a look at Chapter 1.

Yours, -Brutus

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