The past is a foreign country I: Revenge of the Nerds
(The movie, not, like the concept of revenge.)
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the past few years it is that human beings have no long-term memory. We are unable to conceive of what the world was like even in the recent past. In 2006, when Chip Taylor wanted to characterize the two political parties, it was the Democrats he decided to call “conspiracy flingers” (hear it here). This was clearly not an act of partisanship—his description of Republicans is unprintable in a family substack—but I at least have to make a real effort to remember 2006 in sufficient detail to explain his choice of who’s flinging conspiracies.
What changes fastest for us right now, now that cars don’t get updated every year and clothing fashion creeps along glacially, is what we consider offensive. The lightning pace of offense has its advantages, because it permits us to pull up celebrities’ tweets from only a few years ago and get outraged by what at the time had appeared anodyne. But I wanted to talk about one of the biggest shifts in the category of offense in I hope an unexpected and unusual way by talking about the 1984 film “classic” Revenge of the Nerds.
1984 is almost forty years ago, and naturally a great many texts that old are in some sense cringy, which is why we have listicles titled “they could never make that now!” RotN, it goes without saying, they could never make now. I’m not here to dunk on a movie for being “a product of its time,” or to fret over all the racist, sexist, and homophobic jokes. The heroes of the piece secretly install cameras in a sorority shower room and subsequently sell nude photos of the sorority sisters—some people might call that problematic. Although a lot of movies get called rapey, RotN belongs to that select group of films in which the protagonist is celebrated for the literal crime of rape—he disguises himself as someone else and dupes a woman into having sex with him (she’s totally into it when she finds out later, don’t worry). But none of this is what concerns us.
The plot of Revenge of the Nerds gets kicked off when the jocks throw a wild party in their frat house, at which one jock (I think it was Ogre) spits alcohol through a flame, creating spectacular pyrotechnic fireballs, and accidentally burns down the house. So far so good. Except…
…this incident is clearly inspired by an older urban legend, in which partiers burn their house down by lighting off farts. I’ve been desperately flipping through my Jan Harold Brunvand collections in search of a “real” record, but real records are exactly what you often don’t get with an urban legend, and I can only testify that I heard it many times in my wayward youth. I’m old enough that I almost certainly heard it before 1984. These stories get around, and I have to believe that the screenwriters of RotN knew the legend, too. They borrowed it for their movie.
But at some point they changed the igniting incident from flatulence to spitting. They cleaned it up. They made it respectable.
I have no access, I should stress, to any early drafts of the RotN screenplay. I have no way of checking this theory. But it would seem to beggar probability that someone could write a “wild partiers burn down the house by lighting flammable x” scene without being aware of a prior value for x. Which means that either the screenwriters, second-guessing their own toilet humor, or the studios, from a sense of propriety, decided that a juvenilely raunchy R-rated movie that features full-frontal nudity, heroic rape, and revenge porn avant la lettre, should be fart-free.
Ten years after RotN, Disney would feature a flatulent warthog in The Lion King. By the early twenty-first century, flatulence was just a sign that a movie was intended for children. When Scooby and Shaggy have a competitive belch-off in the 2002 Scooby-Doo live action (for example), they begin farting in the middle of it just…just because. It’s a kids’ property, right?
“I’m tempted to say [writes humor historian Christopher Miller] that, for the first two thirds of the twentieth century, flatulence—not sex, not race—was the supreme taboo in American culture.” He notes that “even Tijuana bibles that blithely show young Nancy [censored] Sluggo, or Little Orphan Annie [censored] her dog Sandy, rarely challenged the taboo against farting.” And then all of a sudden they’re selling Walter the Farting Dog to children
I’m trying to be value-neutral here. I’m not picking on kids’ books or old movies. Honestly, Revenge of the Nerds is funnier than most of the dire post-Porky’s movies that were the fashion of the time. Curtis Armstrong (the man who plays Booger in RotN) tries, in his 2017 autobiography, to paint RotN as a goofy, harmless, benign celebration of the underdog (I don’t have his book in front of me), which is at least a half-truth. The movie is incredibly and intentionally offensive, and has only gotten more so as time drags on. But the one joke too offensive for the offenders, too raunchy for the raunch-fest, now looks like a child’s toy. Who could have seen that coming?
Samuel Johnson, who on principle (and explicitly!) opposed censoring Shakespeare, produced in 1765 an edition of the plays in which he changed Hamlet’s “to grunt and sweat under a weary life” to “to groan and sweat…”. Grunt to groan. In a footnote he acknowledged that grunt is “undoubtedly the true reading, but [it] can scarcely be borne by modern ears.” Of all the exceptionable lines in Hamlet (“faith, her privates we”; “country matters”; etc.), the idea that grunt is the hill to compromise your principles on…who could have seen that coming? A lot of water under the bridge between 1765 and now.
Miller’s “first two thirds of the twentieth century” is a loose definition—Blazing Saddles, with the scene you know I am referring to, is in 1974—but somehow a decade after Blazing Saddles, RotN could not bring itself to light a fart on fire. And then ten years later: Lion King; and after that, le deluge. A lot of water deluging under the bridge between 1984 and now. Who could have seen that coming?
[Miller: American Cornball (Harper, 2013) pp. 177 & 175; Johnson: quoted in Noel Perrin, Dr. Bowdler’s Legacy (Anchor, 1971) p65n; I should perhaps admit that I have not seen RotN since I was a teenager.]