Monday 3 June 2019

Comedy Archeology - Full Of Sweary Goodness

There’s a fine art to being sweary yet childish, puerile yet funny, sophisticated but very silly and an originally anarchic British comic which is now very much part of the comedy establishment has managed to walk that fine line for four decades now…

Viz
It started in 1979 but, being of an age that I was really going to appreciate actual children’s comics, I didn't get into it at that point. It was as I headed into my teenage years that I discovered it and it became a firm favourite for many years. It’s very much borne out of a love of British comics (as well as the absurdity of British tabloids and a love of British D-list celebrities from the 60s to the 80s) twinned with that perennial schoolboy favourite of being inventively sweary.

Many of the strips became familiar names - Roger Melly The Man Off The Telly, Sid The Sexist, The Fat Slags, Billy The Fish, Buster Gonad And His Unfeasibly Large Testicles - and animated / live action versions were to beckon (to varying degrees of success as often happens when adapting one medium to another). The annual hardback collection of the best of Viz issues became a staple of many a Christmas stocking.

As with anything successful, at the height of its fame, Viz spawned a number of imitators with similar sounding titles such as Smut or Zit! The main problem with these attempts to cash in on the Viz phenomenon was that they just weren’t particularly funny. Viz wasn’t just a rude, sweary comic; it was genuinely funny. It also had several strips that were just surreal - I defy you not to laugh at The Vibrating Bum-Faced Goats just as a concept if nothing else.





As can happen with a lot of long-running things, I haven’t kept up with Viz in recent years. That doesn't lessen the impact it had on me - I still appreciate a good silly joke or enthusiastically funny sweariness. Who doesn’t?*

So let’s backtrack a bit. A little while back I talked about going down another track. Let’s reverse our way back a bit and follow that one next…


* Boring people, that’s who. “Oh but swearing is a sign of a poor vocabulary.” Oh tit off, you absolute pile of cock. (See? It’s fun.)





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