Blue, Blue, My Mind Is Blue

Do I have a...oh, do I even dare say it out loud...a DIRTY MIND?

​I'm afraid the answer to that is yes.  But is that a bad thing?  There's a little needle-point sampler on the wall of my office that one of my husband's high school girlfriends made for him.  It says: "A Dirty Mind is a Joy Forever."  I have to say, I agree with that.  But don't we all have dirty minds, really?  I mean most of us.  Sex is what makes the world turn.  It's what creates the human race.  It's our driving force, so to speak.  No wonder we're so obsessed with it.  And people who claim they aren't, tend to think that sex is dirty; so doesn't that mean they have a dirty mind too?
So, yes, I guess I do have a dirty mind.  And I'm no Spring chicken anymore.  Does that make me a "Dirty Old Man"?  No, I think there's a difference.  Dirty Old Men want to impose their dirty old mind (the dirty bastards!) on people, often physically.  Like public weenie-wagging.  Flashers.  Subway gropers. The Roger Aisles' of the world. I mean, I would never impose my lewdness on anyone who didn't ask first.  And if my writing is a little too blue for you, then you certainly have the choice not to read it.

But comparatively speaking, I don't think even the bluest of my blue work is anything but light blue.  I mean, blue comedy goes back to Ancient Greece.  The Marquis DeSade was penning his pitch blue comedy two hundred and thirty years ago (so there's nothing new under the sun). Is DeSade comedy?  I think anything that extreme is meant to be comical.  I mean, it's not really my cup of tea...
I mean, sex is funny.  To me, anyways.  Always has been.  I mean, yes, I appreciate erotica.  I can go down a porno rabbit-hole as deep as the next guy.  But when I come out of it, I can't help but think how silly going down there was. 

I recall one time when I was a child, I drew a crude picture of a woman's breasts and wrote the word "sexy" on it.  I showed it to one of my cousins who laughed and then immediately ratted me out to the adults.  Of course, my mother had to scold me.  Perhaps I realized right then the power that words and images had; especially in the context of sex.  And the possibilities of sex to amuse.  When I was in junior high school (eighth grade, I think it was) and my drawing skills had reached a certain point beyond crude, to perhaps primitive, my best friend asked me to draw a man and woman having intercourse.  I rendered the drawing fairly quickly.  I can see now that I was influenced by Japanese erotic art known as "Shunga."  It's too graphic to put here; but I can say that the gents in the artwork usually have members that would make a male moose envious.  The fellow in my drawing had a Shunga-like member.  And the lady had breasts that would make Chesty Morgan blush.  But the thing that I spent the most time rendering was the pair of Nike Cortez running shoes the man was wearing.  Why was he wearing them?  I'm not sure.  I guess it pushed the drawing into some kind of absurdity that made it funny, to me.  The sneakers somehow kept if from the realm of simply being an extremely pornographic drawing to being a funny pornographic drawing.  When my pal told me he'd taken it to school and showed it around, I turned white.  When he said the vice-principal confiscated it, I nearly pooped my pants.  "Just kidding!" he laughed.  Kids, right?

Illustration by Michael Craddock

​

I'm sure you've heard of The Ashton-Drake Galleries.  They specialize in dolls.  Commemorative celebrity dolls and cloying, sugary baby dolls.  Baby dolls for grown-ups(?):

I'm sure you've seen the ads in magazines like TV Guide and Reader's Digest.  Here's a typical one from the early 90's: 

These dolls were not made for or meant to be played with by children.  They were for grown persons to collect and then, I suppose, display them.  I mean, I find it weird; but who I am to say anything?  I still play with dolls.  They make great actors.  They do exactly what you want and don't talk back.  So, there was this one Ashton-Drake ad I came across.  It was for a doll.  That's all I'll say.  One day I was bored at my bartending job and I was flipping through a magazine.  I came across an Ashton-Drake doll ad called "Clean As a Whistle."  I proceeded to vandalize the ad with pen and pencil eraser.  When we were quite young, my brothers and sister and I discovered you could use a pencil eraser on images printed on glossy magazine paper.  LIke, you could white out the eyes and then fill in your own eyes on say, Shelley Hack for Revlon or whatever.  Try it.  It's fun.  Needless to say, you can alter an image to your own personal satisfaction.  Which is what I did with "Clean As a Whistle."  Except, when I was done, "Clean as a Whistle" was no longer clean. It was pretty dirty.  I will spare you the details; but it was pretty obscene.  But it was funny.  The dichotomy between the original stomach churning cutesiness and the now entirely inappropriate obscenity at just the right balance was, I thought, a laugh riot.  One of my friends thought so too, after I mailed it to him (he still has it to this day).  In fact, one day he told me that he had showed it to his 70something mom.  No, "just kidding!" this time.  "You didn't..." I gasped into the phone.  "I did."  "What did she say?" I asked.  Now his mother was going to think I was some kind of pervert.  "She was highly amused," he said.  I breathed a sigh of relief.  Thinking on this, I've come to realize that perhaps women may actually have more of an appreciation of the bluer comedy styles.  Certainly, women can get away with supplying it more than men.  For example, this funny lady:

Of course, she's best remembered as "Aunt Esther" on Sanford and Son; but have you ever seen her stand-up work?  It's pretty damn raunchy.  And she was doing it well into her golden years.  And yet, she was never branded a "Dirty Old Lady."  Even most actual dirty old ladies rarely get branded as "Dirty Old Ladies," whereas even relatively young, older men get the "Dirty" branding if they so much as wistfully smile at the cover of Sports Illustrated's swim-suit issue or tune in the Victoria's Secret undies parade.

Rusty Warren was not so much raunchy as she was naughty.  She's perhaps best remembered for her night-club hit: "Knockers Up!" which is exactly what you think it's about. 

This was during the early to mid-60's when things were just starting to "swing."  But people have been "swinging" since time immemorial.  And I bet when Rusty told the ladies in the room to get their "Knockers Up!" she didn't have to do much to get them to do just that.  I picture bee-hived and bouffanted babes in slinky sheaths over bullet bras, proudly parading their knockers in a distaff conga line.  And maybe even a mid-century nip-slip or two.

Now, I asked earlier if in middle-age and dirty minded did I qualify as a "Dirty Old Man." Sarah Jessica Parker and I are the same age; and she's still getting her Sex and the City on.  So does she qualify as a "Dirty Old Lady"?  All Carrie Bradshaw did with her life was screw guys and then write about it.  Does Carrie Bradshaw qualify?  You know, for all her supposed "liberation," it seemed that all Carrie really wanted was to be married and buy things.  She was reverse-sexist.  She treated guys like Kleenex.  Actually, she was kind of a reprehensible character.  Get over yourself Carrie.  I'll take Patty Greene over you any day:

Older "dirty" women have another advantage over older "dirty" men.  They get support.  They have a cute name: "Cougars."  I mean Carrie's best friend was the poster lady for "cougars."  She even did a commercial where she wanted to get gang-banged by an entire football team.  I mean, this is either cute, or filthy; but Kim got away with it.  Maybe the only actress at that time who could've.

I mean, let's reverse the scenario.  Let's have say, the leading male sex symbol of 2001; how about People Magazine's Sexiest Man Alive 2001, Pierce Brosnan?  Same exact scenario, except it's the "Bears" cheerleader's locker room.  Pierce is pawing through the ladies lockers, slurping all over their soda cans.  The ladies return and Pierce utters the same dialogue from a shower stall.  Even though it's Pierce Brosnan, I still don't think it would play.  It would come across as skeezy and wrong.  But, oh, what I'd give to see that commercial!

So, it seems there's a double standard for "Dirty Old" people.  Advantage, ladies.  But it's gotta be a lady with a certain je nais cest quoi.  A certain confidence, which Kim had by the bucketful.  I mean, picture that Pepsi commercial with say, Cynthia Nixon or Kristin Davis.  Would've been an entirely different experience, right?

But deep down, maybe I'm not that "blue."  Because, I think you'd have to have a truly "dirty" mind if you attempted to tell the "Aristocrats" joke.  As I'm sure you know, "The Aristocrats" joke is considered to be the filthiest joke ever told.  But the thing with that joke is that the blue material should be extemporaneously supplied by the person telling it.  There's even a documentary called "The Aristocrats" that's a deep-dive into the joke.  I haven't seen it.  I've never heard anyone tell their version of the joke.  And I don't want to.  The point of the joke is to make the blue part as filthy, disgusting and dirty--sick, really--as you possibly can.  I have an impressionable mind.  I don't want that stuff having a permanent home in my brain.  That's also my quandary with horror movies.  I love them but if the imagery is too much, I will regret having seen them.

Truly Tasteless Jokes was a wildly popular book in the early 80's that went on to spawn a whole series.  I think one was more than enough.  A friend of mine had the book and I recall not only being shocked by some of them but physically sickened.  But I guess that's what a "sick joke" is meant to do.  I mean, when your book has a chapter devoted to "dead baby jokes" you're committed.  I guess the "sick joke" is the nasty cousin to the "dirty joke."  Which makes me ask why? Why sick jokes?  I mean, I get why there are dirty jokes; but why sick ones?  I guess it's a way to process, through humor, unspeakable things.  The unspeakable atrocities that humans are capable of.  And we're capable of some bad shit.  Maybe sick jokes are a way to deal with the deepest, darkest most frightening aspects of ourselves.  I hope that's what it is.  Otherwise, we're really in trouble.
But, I don't want to end this on a bummer note.  So, here's a picture of La Wanda page from early in her career:

And here's a joke she might've told.  Caution: it's blue.

Loueffie and her friend Morene were in the break room, sitting and having a cup of coffee.  Loueffie, deep in thought finally turned to Morene and asked: "Morene, have you ever been picked up by the fuzz?"  Morene put her cup down and said, "Yes I have, Loueffie.  And it hurt like hell!"