Sweary not sweary: Joe Pesci in Home Alone

With Joe Pesci back in the spotlight thanks to The Irishman, and Christmas just around the corner, I’ve been remembering one of his finest performances – as hapless burglar Harry Lyme in Home Alone. It’s easy to forget how against-type this role was for Pesci, best known for playing menacing, foul-mouthed criminals in gangster films like Casino:

(Don’t miss the TV version, with its fancy hecking swear-avoidance.)

When Pesci was sent the script for Home Alone, he ‘saw he could do something with it’, according to executive producer Mark Levinson. But the filmmakers knew that Harry Lyme would be a challenge for Pesci. In a behind-the-scenes featurette on the DVD, director of photography Julio Macat says:

A fuck shit stack of sweary songs

My last collection of sweary songs began with some vintage a cappella filth about cocksuckers. For balance, I’ll start this one with The Fourskins’ winning ditty ‘Her Vagina’ (most audio that follows is VNSFW):

Want ruder? Harry Roy and His Orchestra sang about ‘My Girl’s Pussy’ almost a century ago. Warning: this one has serious earworm potential:

(Comic artist R. Crumb and his Cheap Suit Serenaders introduced me to the song.)

A lyric for our times: ‘Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole’ by Martha Wainwright:

A paradoxical-ass word

Ass shows up a lot on Strong Language. We’ve looked at kick ass and my ass, lick-my-ass and assclowns and asshats, among other-ass things – or other ass-things, if you prefer the xkcd hyphenation. (See Language Log for a lit-ass –ass lit review.)

As a suffix, –ass is used to form ‘generally negative (but increasingly positive too) adjectives and occasionally nouns’, notes Green’s Dictionary of Slang. This Janus nature recurs in slang, as in the contradictory shit vs. the shit. And you can’t spell Janus without anus.

A search for ass on GDoS currently yields 137 results, and the main entry for ass (n.) has 184 subentries, with compounds like ass-bucket (‘unpopular or unimportant person’) and expressions like give up the ass (‘accede to seduction’) and up to one’s ass in alligators (‘in very serious troubles’).

Ass, in short, gets around. It’s a seriously productive-ass piece of vocabulary.

Mark Wahlberg knows his shit

Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell are on a press junket, promoting their new film Daddy’s Home 2. (Any comments about the quality of this franchise or the need for a sequel will be summarily ignored.) This week, one stop on that tour was with the Israeli website ynet (the online arm of the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth). During the interview, Ferrell was asked about Wahlberg’s “profound knowledge of Hebrew”, which Wahlberg was then happy to demonstrate. And, like any good language learner, his knowledge apparently includes a wealth of profanity, which I’ll lay out below.

A sweary seasonal suggestion

British comedy singing group Fascinating Aïda have some wise words of advice for you this Christmas:

Lyrics below the fold: