The punk poet performer Thick Richard has created a show around his favourite topic: swearing. “Swear School” is a highly educational and completely foul-mouthed lecture drenched in wit and cynicism. This evening’s performance was at the Kings Arms, as part of the Greater Manchester Fringe Festival.
The stage contained a teacher’s desk on one side, and a ventriloquist’s dummy dressed as a schoolboy at another desk on the other side. Our ears were assaulted with a loud montage of recordings from music lyrics and television programmes that featured swearing. Then the theme from “Grange Hill” played; and Thick Richard entered, dressed as a teacher in full dark three-piece suit and mortar board hat, and we were now his class.
The structure of the show was Thick Richard going through the alphabet and getting us to chant the swear words for each letter, which helpfully appeared as projections of chalkboard writing on the back wall. If audience members knew the meanings of particularly obscure terms, they were given a piece of paper containing their own personalised insult as a reward. Two members of the audience were very good at this, and collected a lot of insults, to their obvious delight.
The dummy, referred to as “Brat”, had his mouth scrubbed out with soap and water frequently, and operated as the foil to Thick Richard. From A-M, it was a very interesting etymological lecture that Thick Richard had plainly put a lot of thought and research into, with references ranging from Chaucer to (unflatteringly) David Cameron, and it was coming across as a sort of bad-languaged version of a Stephen Fry programme.
Once Thick Richard reached the N-word, the tone of the show completely changed. The swear words were no longer just focused on sex and bodily functions: race and disability and sexuality were brought into the conversation too. (And a useful demonstration was given on how to swear in British Sign Language.) Now Thick Richard was going into the ugly side of swearing, and he was dancing about either side of a very loaded topic, while making it clear that racist, disablist and homophobic swearing is socially unacceptable.
This led to “O for offensiveness” and “P for political correctness”. Like many comedians, Thick Richard has strong views on “snowflakes” who want all uncomfortable discussions banned from public spaces, and consequently the comedy that derives from them. “XXX for censorship” sent him off into a place of genuine anger about fake news, and the untruths that powerful people tell, which he considers to be far worse than using swear words in public. He used a great many swear words while discussing this point, and as he was screaming them with real fury at us, and the Kings Arms is only a small space, this was quite an aggressive and confrontational part of the performance – perhaps more so than Thick Richard intended.
“U is for eUphemism” brought us back to wit and wordplay, and I now know the difference between a “Dracula’s teabag” and “the dead otter.” Overall, my vocabulary of swearing tripled this evening, which the bad car drivers of Greater Manchester will shortly be benefiting from, and this was a performance worth seeing.
Reviewer - Thalia Terpsichore
on - 5/7/19
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