The Farrelley brothers+ new filthfest Me, Myself and Irene opens this week. John Patterson hails its lavatorial lineage Whenever I meet someone who doesn+t consider 1980+s Caddyshack to be a pinnacle, an apogee, an Everest among vulgar American comedies, I find I must immediately reconsider the terms of our relationship. If they also find Bob Clark+s egregious, excrescent 1981 sex-farce Porky+s to be tasteless and lavatorial, then I won+t even have them in the house. Out! Go on, get off my lawn. Caddyshack was written by a master laureate of American vulgarity, Doug Kenney, editor of Harvard Lampoon and founding editor of National Lampoon, which in the early 1970s was the funniest magazine in the United States. Its covers featured men pointing guns at sad-eyed basset hounds and saying -Buy this magazine or we shoot the dog,+ or a cutie dressed as Santa purring, -Buy this magazine and I+ll show you my tits!+ Kenney also co-authored Bored of the Rings, a satire for Tolkien-phobics, featuring Dildo Draggins.
Only in his 30s, he was intensely nostalgic for his halcyon bachelorhood in the suburbs and at college. First he wrote Animal House, then Caddyshack. Then he did tons of coke, forgot to cash lots of huge cheques and either jumped or fell off a cliff in Hawaii in 1982. People mourn John Belushi. Better to mourn Doug Kenney. But he left his monuments, including this review of Caddyshack from Monthly Film Bulletin: -There are jests about vomiting and nose-picking, while the most elaborate gag sequence involves a chocolate bar falling into a swimming pool and being mistaken for a turd … a sustained exercise in tiresomeness.+ Until those last five words, I thought I was reading a rave review. Bill Murray, having drained and scrubbed the aforementioned pool, picks up what the audience already knows is only a candy bar, sniffs at it cautiously, then sinks his teeth into it, to the horror of the country club+s assembled brass. Genius. Hey, MFB, keep your nice clean hands off my shit-jokes. Back then you could occasionally enjoy this sort of scatological stuff at the movies in the US, but it was entirely absent from the public realm and from TV. The US has only recently lost its prudery and censorious cast of mind. It was only two years ago that TV scriptwriters were finally permitted to use the 70-year-old term -scumbag+ (to understand its offensive original meaning, remove the -s+). The US came late to tasteless jokes and toilet humour (the British, by contrast, built an empire on them), but in the last few years they+ve taken to it like ducks to water. But that+s not to say it wasn+t always there. Just listen to tapes of the old Friars+ Club Roasts of the 1940s. For instance, Milton Berle on King of the One-Liners Henny Youngman: -Here+s a guy so generous he+ll go out, get two blowjobs, come back and give you one of them.+ But this was in darkened, smoky nightclubs, not under the bright klieg lights of the movie set or the TV studio. Well, things change, and if one thing accelerated the long overdue vulgarisation of American civic culture, it was the traumatic process of learning what the president got up to with Monica Lewinsky. National tolerance levels were ratcheted way up as pre-schoolers learned about dirty words and cigars from precisely the same idiot-box whose executives had striven so long and hard to maintain their innocence. Across the land, infants looked up from their bowls of Wheaties and asked: -Mommy, what+s a blowjob?+ Other signs of the thaw include Austin Powers+ literally shit-eating grin (-Nutty!+) in The Spy Who Shagged Me, the pastry-based erotic idyll in American Pie, the foul-mouthed tykes of South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, and the Farrelly brothers, whose latest comedy, Me, Myself and Irene opens this week. In it, Jim Carrey plays a split-personality (-he+s nuttier than squirrel-turds!+) whose two personalities, mild Charlie and unbuttoned id-monster Hank, go to war with each other for the affections of Rene Zellweger+s Irene. Besides an extravagantly funny performance from Carrey, there are excrement jokes galore, and that+s what we+re after. There are also black midgets, albinos called Whitey, gigantic, anatomically precise dildos, cow-strangulations, outrageous sexism (Hank+s endearments include -candypants+, -cheese-tits+ and -my little pussy-fart+), and three huge black teenagers, all geniuses, whose every utterance contains a bracing obscenity. This is where the genially dirty-minded legacy of Kenney has come home to roost – or to crap on our heads, depending on your degree of prudishness.