Behold the power of colorful language.
The Walking Dead can graphically depict a pack of zombies gang-disemboweling a man while he still draws breath, but the series cannot drop an f-bomb.
Many people were more offended by Rashida Tlaib saying of President Trump, “Impeach the motherf***er,” than by the shady alleged extortion scheme that precipitated her statement.
And an ill-timed spot of on-air profanity can turn a newscaster, briefly, into news.
However, one unspoken aspect of these unspeakable words is their versatility—something that is celebrated joyously in the new Netflix series, The History of Swear Words.
“With swear words, we can cut, soothe, delight, frighten, insult, and seduce,” says unlikely host Nicolas Cage in the opening episode. The delightful miniseries then proceeds with a similarly versatile approach to plumbing the background, usage, and hidden layers of six forbidden words.
At this late point in his career, the weirdest thing Nicolas Cage could appear in is not, say, last year’s Lovecraftian mutant alien epic, Color Out of Space, but rather a fun little nonfiction romp on Netflix. Despite the fact that Cage is screaming at the top of his lungs literally within the first two minutes of the show, it is jarring to see him cosplay as a normal person. He dons a dark suit, manicured beard, and a semi-believable hairpiece instead of the Willy Wonka-meets-Tiger King streetwear he often appears in when not starring in 17 bonkers movies per year.
But while Netflix is selling Swear Words as a Nicolas Cage vehicle, the host is merely one ingredient in an agreeable gumbo.
Thanks to the show’s zippy pacing, the history part never gets too bogged down in biography. Each episode is devoted to a different curse word—f***, p****, damn, etc—and spends a little time in the century from whence it came, either providing an origin or debunking apocryphal rumors when one is not entirely clear. Most of the “history” of this History lesson, though, is more recent cultural context, like how the congressional hearings that brought us parental advisory stickers in the 1990s carried a heavy undercurrent of racism, and how usage of the word “bitch” spiked in the 20th century with each feminist movement.
Although it offers viewers a genuinely surprising factoid or two in each episode, this show is out to entertain more than teach.
Only in the era of streaming wars do shows of that caliber feature decent production values and Nicolas Cage.
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