Maxon and I outside of the Trocadero -- a fan from the audience took the photo
For the third night of Chanukah, I took Maxon to see one of his favorite comedians, John Mulaney. I would say that Mulaney is rated PG-13 for mild language and mature situations. But the comedian who opened for him, Seaton Smith, was definitely rated R.
Now, just like I don't expect to see Sin City: A Dame to Kill For and Dracula Untold movie trailers before Guardians of the Galaxy (I'd like to have a word with you, Walt Disney Studios), I don't expect the opener for a PG-13 comedian to tell jokes about tuchus schtupping.
But he did.
Here's why I'm not too worried:
Now, the cursing doesn't bother me. Most people who know me would say that I have a lax policy on cursing. I've gotten a lot more careless with my own swearing as the boys have gotten older.
Part of this has to do with comedy, which I use as a reward. We have a five-point system in the mornings, where our boys earn a point for getting up without being told, brushing teeth, making the bed, making breakfast and getting out the door on time with backpack/homework/lunch/extremely overdue library books. Both boys need to earn five points to get comedy in the car. All of the comedians we like curse. I tried to get them into the clean comedy channel on Sirius XMU. They thought it was boring. They weren't wrong.
One morning, I put on the Comedy Central channel and they heard the "Delta Airlines" bit by John Mulaney and cracked up, begging to hear more. I screened his standup albums and downloaded them. Since then, I've found some other comedians like Mulaney who the kids can handle. There are even two Louis CK bits that I approved. They get to feel like they're doing something very grown up, and we all get to enjoy the drive to school a lot more. Five-point mornings are worth it.
I wish our culture just accepted curses as being as innocuous as words like "desk" or "aphid." Because I think curse words are fantastic. They crunch in your mouth like kettle-cooked chips and slam the door on your sentences.
I will never forget the first time I heard George Carlin's Seven Words You Can't Say on TV when I was in 4th grade, which my friend Jenny G. and I listened to in her older brother's bedroom over and over again. My dad used to let my sister, Dana, and I stay up and watch Saturday Night Live. Dana and I watched Eddie Murphy and Robin Williams specials on HBO obsessively. My Nana played A Chorus Line over and over for us, which I recently listened to for the first time since I was 11 and had many "so that's what that song was about" realizations. My dad can curse like a gangsta rapper, especially when arguing legal matters over the telephone.
Despite his pirate mouth, my father was raised by some hard-line old school Eastern European Jews, which meant that I got my mouth washed out with soap when he heard me curse, or when when my Grandma Belle found our Mad Libs with all the naughty nouns, verbs and adjectives and turned it in to my dad. Like I said. They were some hard-line old school Eastern European Jews.
Maybe I am so lax because of the many times my dad gave me a soap sandwich. I don’t want my boys to see curses as forbidden fruits. So I tell them that curses are grownup words and not for kids to say. If I learn that they used swear words at school or around their friends, I take the comedy privileges away, and that seems to be enough of a punishment. Ezra slips more than Maxon. But of all the horrible things my kids can do, dropping an s-bomb by the cubbies when Ezra spills all the food out of his lunchbox is not enough to get me worried about what kind of children I am raising.
When it comes to enjoying comedy, I have a feeling that the boys are much like me when I was 10, blithely dancing and singing along to Chorus Line songs about homosexuality and wet dreams, not having the faintest idea what they meant. The bits that were over my head never really sank in.
When I asked Maxon what he remembered about Seaton Smith's act, he told me, "the rat joke," which was the safest joke Smith told. And Maxon's favorite John Mulaney bit was about writing a happy birthday sign. But what made it all worth it was when Mulaney saw Maxon sitting next to me in the third row. A little shocked to see a 10-year-old in the audience, he stopped to talk to Maxon for a few minutes, asking him questions and peppering jokes in between the answers.
When Mulaney asked Maxon what he wanted to be when he grew up, Maxon said, "I want to do what you do. You know, comedy."
"Thanks for talking to me, Maxon," Mulaney said as he went back to his act. "I'd talk to some more people, but no one is as cool as Maxon."
When we left the show, other audience members gave Maxon knowing nods and thumbs up, pointing him out and recognizing him. The kid felt like a celebrity.
"That was the best night of my life," Maxon said in the taxi, putting his head in my lap.
As we rode home and he giggled to himself, I knew he wasn't thinking about curse words or tuchus sex.