Cursing can be fun. Liberating, even. In the right hands, it's almost artful. In the wrong hands, well, you have a million bad rap songs. It's all in who says it, we guess. In the hands of uptight comedians, hipsters, or cartoon eight year olds, it's giddy inducing. In other hands, it's only confirmation of our worst suspicions. All of which is why when we heard that the Edinburgh Castle was going to have it's First Annual "Swearing Festival" we knew we had to go. If there was any place that would do cursing right, it would be the Castle as it would be sure to feature lots of literary types, smart hipster types and Scottish types. We love hearing Scottish types curse. How could this event not miss?
It did. Unfortunately, while the concept was brilliant, the execution wasn't.
The problem wasn't in what was scheduled; it was in how long it took for what was scheduled to take place. Long fifteen minute or so breaks in between short bits just doesn't hold one's attention and the crowd was getting progressively antsy and bored the more the night wore on. Since the Castle was set up for the festival, it wasn't a typical bar night with typical bar night atmosphere and that left most of the people there with nothing really to do other than talk to each other and who wants that? If we wanted that, we could have gone to another bar. No, we wanted some mother f'ing cursing.
The night began with a symposium about cursing featuring SF literary fave Beth Lisick and a couple other guys (Dr. Jonathan Hunt and Andrew Orlowski) held up in the back room on the second floor. When we first got to the Festival we were into the idea of going to a symposium but we got up there late when it was entirely too crowded and too hard to hear. Then we realized that we came to a bar to drink and not to listen to people discuss academic things. So we went back down to our table to drink. From what we heard from a friend of SFist, the only thing we really missed was that the idea behind the festival made it so that cursing out loud and at speakers was the night's "Freebird." Remember what we said about how cursing could be bad when not done right?
Image from Ed's Rants
Afterwards, the action moved downstairs. The night began with somebody dressed up like a priest giving a benediction to the crowd, in this case a benediction of "And I say... f--- that." A good start. That, however, was followed by, not much of anything. Not a good start.
In between something happening, there were long, long waits. They tried to keep things going by they playing songs that fit into the general cursing milieu (songs like "Too Drunk too F---" or Prince's "Sexy MF") and curse words were projected onto a screen behind where the pool table usually is, but there was way too much of nothing and not enough of something.
The bits of something included two playwrights singing a song from their play "Co-Ed Prison Sluts" which didn't really do much, mainly because nobody knew it (it's hard to sing something you don't know) and there was also an open mic bit where twelve people came up and cursed something out. Some of it was rather fun in a primal sort of way (somebody cursed out an ex-husband), some of it probably choked off due to stage fright, and some of it dumb (yeah, we know, the President sucks).
They also showed various film clips, including one of Rowan Atkinson doing a bit on stage where he's a teacher teaching a class full of inappropriately named kids, Bob Saget doing his version of the Aristocrats joke from "The Aristocrats," and the poet laureate of cursing, George Carlin, going on about words that aren't dirty but could be. Another bit had somebody taking found footage and making it sound like President W. and Tony Blair were saying all sorts of nasty things. And another bit had them showing images of various figures to let people go ahead and curse away at them. Primal therapy, in a way. We thought this was interesting, not as much for what it was, but what it showed about its audience and various world leaders. Not so surprisingly, Bush got much louder curses than Osama, Clinton got cheered, Saddam drew nothing, and Gavin got nothing but laughs.
There was a bit more that was supposed to go on that night, including what was billed as a dance, but it was getting kind of late-ish. Or more like it felt kind of late-ish when in reality it was a little after 10. But we had been there since a little after 6 and had mainly heard "Sexy MF" a bunch of times for our troubles. As we sat and contemplated whether to stick it out and see if the night could be rescued, we also realized we still had a Season 1 of "Battlestar Galactica" DVD at home and as much as we wanted to see what laid in store for the Festival, we realized we cared a lot more about watching Gaius Baltar get even more weasle-y. So we left.
One more thing. One of our disappointments was that we felt they missed so many things. How could you show clips about cursing and not show anything from a Tarantino flick? Or anything "South Park" related? Those guys are such the masters of cursing they managed to turn obscene language into a foreign policy manifesto for the 21st century in Team America. And if there's anything funnier than the "Uncle F-----" song from Bigger, Longer and Uncut we don't know what it is. All of which shows why there will probably be a Year 2. And not just because the bar was pretty much standing room only all night and people were turned away. But because there's just so much still out there to be mined and appreciated. After all, cursing is fun.
We'll probably be there too, hoping that they got the kinks out of their first ever run.
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Looks like you stuck around a little longer than I did. The problem was that there were too many video clips and not enough theatrical/audience participation pieces. Nobody goes to a bar to watch television. (Or at least nobody goes to a swearing festival to watch television.)