My word. Last night Ruffian and I watched part of an old Richard Pryor comedy tape we rented. The use of profanity was simply astounding. It felt like at least half of the adjectives normally used in a sentance were replaced with the words “mother f**king” (and spoken very quickly, too). It’s not that I have much against cussing - I do lots of it myself - but it just seemed a bit overused. That and not a whole lot of what he was saying was funny. What’s the deal?
And I can’t mother f**king spell “sentence”
Well… It’s motherf**king funny!
Jeez, I thought you were going to say he’s dead.
Well, it was funny for about five minutes. Then it was old. Then it was boring. Then it was time to stop the tape and find something more interesting to watch.
You know what you are getting when you rent the video, if it offends you, don’t rent it.
I wasn’t offended, Archer, and if I may speak for DeathLlama here, neither was he. It was boring. And it wasn’t really even shocking to me either; we both knew he had a foul mouth. I was just expecting typical stand-up fare–cussing, crudity, and funny stuff. We got one of the three. (I also looked for a Chris Rock video–I really like his stuff–but they didn’t have anything.)
Swearing just isn’t something that offends me, usually. They’re just words. And I think that’s why it was so dull and unfunny to us–because we weren’t offended, because we weren’t shocked, it just wasn’t funny.
[Homer Simpson]BOR-ING[/Homer Simpson]
You said it was an ‘old’ video. I assume it was filmed when Pryor was at the height of his popularity. As I recall, he was loved and revered for his indiscriminate use of profanity. That, along with his physical expressions and tonal inflections are what endeared him to fans at the time. You probably would’ve thot it was funny when it was new, no? Tastes change and audiences are fickle–especially when it comes to humor. IMHO.
Chris Rock’s really good. I still love Sinbad–even watch reruns of his performances.