Member-only story
Melon Farming for Beginners
A brief history of swearing in the movies
Back in the early days of cinema, audiences at packed picture houses gawped at the latest offerings from the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle and Harold Lloyd, to the accompaniment of suitable piano music. For in those days movies were silent, and the only dialogue came via printed captions that were shown on the screen. Let us imagine a scene from one film, in which a stereotypical villain, dressed in top hat and cape, twirls one end of his moustache and then points a finger skyward as though an idea has struck him. The audience is told what his thought is in the form of a caption displayed on the screen, which reads: “I’ll get even with that motherf — “. Cut!
Of course, this never really happened, because, for one thing I’m not sure how popular the ‘melon farmer’ word was back in those days (although it is said that the word can be lip-read, drowned out by a honking horn in the 1936 Fred Astaire film, Swing Time), and for another there was to be no mainstream on-screen swearing for many years to come.
The audible voice came to film with the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927, in which Al Jolson uttered his now immortal line, you ain’t seen nothing yet. How different the history of on-screen profanities may have panned out, had Jolson said you ain’t seen jack-shit…
