Going Blue - Jason Alberty (the rosie project txt) 📗

Okay. Seriously. I have a problem. It's a problem many writers and comedians have. Some who generally love language also deal with it. Fourteen year old boys have this problem, too. In my business it's called "going blue."
Blue is my favorite color for sundry weighty reasons. Comedians use the phrase "going blue" to mean "said something dirty." But there are various levels of going blue. You can look at comedians like Andrew Dice Clay and Pauly Shore and even Bob Saget who go blue simply for the visceral shock. They don't really do anything else. They are just plain filthy. I don't personally find that funny. It's the sort of cheap blue that would cause the principal to put bag over your head and beat it with a stick.
Then there is the intelligent blue, like George Carlin. His "Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV" sketch was brilliant! And it was brilliant without being filthy. It was dirty, but not filthy. He took an objective look at language and dealt with it in an academic way that sort of sanitized it but still made people uncomfortable. That's my favorite shade of blue.
Then there is simply what I call the internal juvenile blue. This is the dangerous one, the embarrassing one. It sneaks up on you when you least expect it. It makes you snicker. It’s power lies in one of the things I love about language: the malleability of its meanings, using puns and double entendres. Twelve years ago when I started teaching The Adventures of Ulysses to high schoolers, the phrase "Ulysses just wanted to grab some booty and run" would only illicit glazed eyes or a quizzical shrug. Today if I said it in a high school...actually I think you could get fired today for saying it in a high school. You know, I nearly choked on my tongue the first year I had a student named Felicia. You might have to say that name out loud to get it. You know what I mean.
Some people think that going blue is a relatively new invention. They think that Lenny Bruce invented it. Or George Carlin, or Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy. Lenny Bruce didn't invent going blue, he was just jailed for going blue. It’s been around a long time.
Because people think going blue is a modern invention, some say, “Oh, Millicent, I yearn for the good old wholesome days of classic theater. Like Shakespeare.” Seriously? So when some Bianca says to some Kate, "Would it were I who did sit upon his joint stool," she just wants to rest and kick her feet up, right? Well, kind of. What if I told you a joint stool had three legs? You see, Shakespeare was the lord of lewd. He was the baron of blue. Romeo and Juliet is absolutely filthy. What is Romeo's last name? Right, Montague. What does "Ague" mean? Right, "fever." In Shakespeare's time the word "mont" was a slang term for what some people call "the mont of Venus." Anyone? This is the part of a woman's body — on her pelvis — where it rises and crests just before plunging into the crotch. Mount of Venus…ague. Mount-fever. Come on! Don't even get me started on “the blind boy-boy’s butt shaft” (RJ 2.4.16).
Okay, let's go back further then. How about the Romans...well that's no contest. How about the Greeks? Medea and Oedipus. Surely that was good, clean fun. Well, Aristophanes wrote himself a little play called Lysistrata. In the play, the men walk around with humongous engorged... Well, it's a bit more Andrew Dice than, say, James Joyce, who also went blue, by the way. “Is that a spear you're holding or are you just happy to see me?” That was Aristophanes.
And here we are. It is all around us, my friends. Not just in my head. Going blue permeates the whole of our culture. One of the most influential cultural powers today is music. Does it go blue? I submit some lyrics from the singer Kelis: “My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard.” It doesn’t take a semantic sleuth to guess she’s not talking about a 16 oz. chocolate malt. How about Black Eyed Peas, “My Humps”: “I'ma get get get get you drunk, get you love drunk off my hump.” Again, Fergie isn’t some deformed Quasimodo bent over a rope in the bell tower. It is, like some National Geographic moment, a coded, thinly veiled as it is, mating call. This one uses double entrendres instead of a fanned tail-feather flutter, although I presume that does figure prominently in their concerts as well.
"But that's hip-hop," you say. You're right, you're right. That is the music of the terpsichorean devil.
How about some classic rock?
Well, I naturally have to go with "Whole Lotta Love,” perhaps the quintessential, in your face, sexual innuendo song of the late half of the 20th century. "Gonna give you every inch of my love." Nice. Led Zeppelin was, of course, the poster child for taking the music world blue. Don't forget the "Lemon Song," otherwise known as "The Killing Floor," one of my personal favorites. "Squeeze my lemon 'til the juice runs down my leg." Lovely. Oddly enough, they stole that phrase from the great Robert Johnson who stole it from a song called "She Squeezed My Lemon," recorded by Robert Sykes in 1937! "When my baby squeeze my lemon, she never breaks the skin." Well, thank god for that!
Which takes me to the first half of the twentieth century. Who was blue baron then? Cole Porter. You better believe it. "Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it." How about "Love for sale. Appetizing young love for sale." Or the most popular, "They say that Spring means just one little thing to little lovebirds. We're not above birds — let's misbehave."
Surely nothing before that, right?
Robert Morley, 1595. "Now is the month of maying when marry lads are playing, fa la la, each with his bonny lass upon the greeny grass fa la la."
Going blue has been around a long time. You know what’s newer than going blue? Being offended by it, that's what's newer. It's a relatively new trend to be offended by the blue bird of humor. Look, Blue has been around since at least the Greeks. It's a way to play with words and their meanings. It's way to get back to a couple of the fundamental aspects of being human: our sexuality and our bodily functions, which I think we should talk about more anyway. The more we can talk about something the more we demystify it. So, you can choose to get offended by it or laugh with it. Your choice. But remember, laughter is a much better medicine. Besides what would you rather have? Someone who doesn’t know language, who can’t speak to save their life, who couldn’t put two interesting thoughts together… or would you rather have a cunning linguist.

Text: Originally printed in ETC: A Review of General Semantics, Vol. 65, No. 4, Oct. 2008.
Publication Date: 08-03-2009

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