Crudities

For some reason I thought back to Knocked Up recently. It seems to me that those slacker dudes sitting around the living room making sperm jokes marks a new level of crassness in movies, though I was less shocked when I saw on The Soup's review of reality shows on E that on some show they had real families competing to suck the cream out of cannolis and spit them into bowls.

Naturally, my mind flashed back to Bakhtin's 1965 book on Rabelais where he extolled the as liberating political forces of Carnival and "the lower bodily strata" and satire in the Renaissance, and to Makaveyev's shitting contest in the 1974 classic Sweet Movie. But I don't think that fart and cum jokes are as liberating when they're part of everyday, everyminute life. I think they work their magic as exceptions.

Is it just me getting old, or are there new levels of lowness? Compare Animal House, a standard-bearer for its day, now looks chaste. Is crassness cyclical? (seemed like all the college students were into ballroom dance and frickin volleyball in the 90s.)

Couldn't find the shitting contest. Here's another fine scene from Sweet Movie