Swearing is Big and Clever

Taking pride of place on my bookcase is my collection of early Viz annuals. Flicking through them over the last few nights, I'm struck again by just how hilarious they are.

It's worth saying at this point that I can have a very crude sense of humour. I've always been of the mind that you can't beat a good dick joke, so a magazine with a recurring strip entitled 'Buster Gonad and his Unfeasibly Large Testicles' was always going to pique my interest.

However, where Viz succeeded from being just a load of comics with swearing and knob gags was it's tone. Strips like 'Sid the Sexist', 'Biffa Bacon' and 'The Fat Slags' worked because they were spot-on. Growing up in Northern England, I knew people like those characters in the real world.

Sid was a particular favourite. Creator Simon Donald got the mouth Geordie wanker down to a tee: Sid may fancy himself as a "Tyneside's Silver Tongued Cavalier' and boast to his mates of his sexual exploits, but the truth is that he's a 30something virgin who lives at home with his mother. Similarly, Chris Donald's "Roger Mellie - The Man on the Telly" seems ahead of it's time, showing a caricature of media personality as a coke-sniffing, boorish womaniser that's become more common in these celebrity obsessed times.

Add in that were the bang-on parodies of tabloid shock stories, such as a car-park attendant who claims to have bedded a series of Hollywood actresses. Whichever member of the Viz team wrote this has my respect, as they got the style perfect while still managing to extract enough farce to get the laughs.

I first got into Viz in my student days, perhaps somewhat predictably. A friend from Darlington had bought a copy which came with a collection of the best of the letters page. That was enough to keep me creased up for days, and I became a huge fan.

Between 2000 and 2008 or so, I bought every new edition of Viz before I give up on it. A lot of the strips just weren't that funny ('Woman Man' being one culprit) and highlights such as 'Drunken Bakers' didn't justify handing over my cash. Perhaps it was losing the Donald brothers, both of whom left the magazine in the early part of the century.

But I still keep an eye out in the charity shops for any annuals and collections from the 80s and 90s. Like every good bore, I've let phrases from Viz enter my own lexicon: a slightly rude sounding comment will bring a "fnarr" from me every time, thanks to numerous reads of the adventures of "Finbarr Saunders and his Double Entendres".

I keep meaning to track down Chris Donald's "Rude Kids" book sometime, but for now, I'll make do with guffawing over "Mickey's Magic Monkey Spunk Moped" and "Bertie Blunt - His Parrot's a Cunt".