![]() ![]() In a society only now beginning to acknowledge a widespread culture of male sexual entitlement, can smut really continue to be considered harmless? “I wonder if we’re not becoming too sensitive about it,” says Stephen Bailey, a gay Mancunian comic whose own use of double entendres is restricted to the title of his current standup show, Can’t Think Straight. Photograph: Mark Bourdillon/Channel 4/PAīut the point stands. And who would buy a sausage that had sprouted horns anyway?Įnjoyed a big opening … Noel Fielding, right, with contestants in The Great British Bake Off. Can a penis itself be horny, independent of its owner? Logic would suggest not. An offer of a “horny sausage” surely fails to qualify even as a single entendre. There is also the problem that not all his smut was intelligible. Arguably more offensive was his flagrant use of the greengrocer’s apostrophe (“ladie’s”, “chicken’s”), though police appear unwilling to take action over that. An early indication that its days could be numbered came in Staffordshire recently, when a butcher called Pete Lymer was reportedly ordered to remove signs advertising “big-breasted birds”, a “big fresh cock” and the chance to “have your rump tenderised before you leave”. The question now, though, is whether this tradition can survive in the necessarily sensitive climate of #MeToo. Though if it’s parochial British innuendo we’re talking about, there is no beating East 17’s quaint spin on Prince-style seduction: “Yeah, I’ll butter the toast / If you lick the knife.” And it has penetrated popular music from Chuck Berry’s ding-a-ling to Kelis’s milkshake. It is there when a corporal tells Blackadder as he bravely faces the firing squad: “I must say, Captain, I’ve got to admire your balls.” “Perhaps later,” comes the reply. ![]() It is there in several decades of Carry On films, more than 100 years of music-hall and thousands of saucy seaside postcards by the much-prosecuted, frequently banned, George Orwell-approved Donald McGill. ![]() At its cleverest, it provides opportunities for linguistic inventiveness and dexterity. What is “stiff and hard” and “hangs by the thigh of a man”? A key, of course.) It allows us, in our squeamishness, to talk about sex at one remove, to approach the flame without singeing our extremities. (The Exeter Book, circa AD990, includes several phallic-oriented riddles. The double entendre is a robust cultural fixture, having endured since at least the 10th century. ‘Have your rump tenderized’ … butcher Pete Lymer, who has been told to tone down his signs. ![]()
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