>
>Ralph, would never say
>anything stronger than "drat." He cited Trotsky as the inspiration.
>
>Doug
I think W.C.Fields used to say drat. I love the way Fields would get around censors.
http://louisville.edu/~kprayb01/WChumor.html#A6
Fields was a profane man; a very colorful cusser off screen (and on screen, when he could get away with it). It went along with his heavy drinking, disdain for religion and other "unwholesome" traits. Goddamn, f*ck, son of a bitch, and all the rest were just as likely to turn up in Fields' conversation as some of the flightier, classier words in his vast vocabulary. Before the onset of Hollywood's strict 1934 Production Code, Fields even managed to get the line--"Ah, the hell with her!"--as well as a risque' tooth-pulling scene into his short, The Dentist. Yet, the line, "You can take this golf course and stick it!" was cut from the sound track at the word 'stick.' "Fields commits more violations of the Hays Code than all the other stars combined," wrote Alva Johnston in The Saturday Evening Post in 1938. Fields' battles with the censors are the stuff of lore, and he sometimes had to be very obscure when putting sexual double entendres into his scripts. One of the most obscure, and one which seems to have eluded all the critics, is the fact that Fields manages to use the words 'dick' and 'pussy' prominently throughout The Bank Dick. Both words were on the censors' no-no list, as memos from the era prove, yet Fields' cagey finagling allowed him to use them. Thus, Fields manages to set up a scenario whereby his "hero," Egbert Souse'--the bank "dick" (slang for detective)--derives his most pleasure while inside the "Black Pussy" (a tavern). That connection was lost on everybody, but the censors went ballistic at the name "Black Pussy Cafe," until Fields told them that there really was such a place. To placate them he added the word 'Cat' to the script, and the "Black Pussy Cat Cafe" seemed to appease the righteous ones. Then, in utter defiance, Fields called it "The Black Pussy" or the "Black Pussy Cafe" throughout the film. In an earlier film International House (1933), Fields sets up a gag that can't be anything but salacious; it makes no sense otherwise. In the scene, Fields' female companion says something is under her and she's "sitting on something," to which Fields responds, "Ah, a pussy." He then proceeds to lift a cat from the seat. In My Little Chickadee, a film that had the censors even more on their toes than usual because of the presence of Mae West, Fields peppers the script with "wedding night" jokes--some so obscure ("I have some very definite pear-shaped ideas I'd like to share with thee") they sound desperate and pitiful. The exclamation, "Godfrey Daniel!" was one used by Fields in all of his films as the closest allowable approximation to "goddamn!" In The Old Fashioned Way a character says, "Ah fudge!" to which Fields reacts, "Don't use that kind of language in front of my daughter." In The Bank Dick there's a black-out visual gag of Fields getting a swinging gate in the groin that happens so fast nary a commentator has mentioned it. In The Dentist, a female patient bends over to tell Fields a little dog bit her on the ankle, to which he responds: "You're rather fortunate it wasn't a Newfoundland dog that bit you" (meaning, of course, it would have bit her on the ass). In The Fatal Glass of Beer, instead of saying "am-scray" (pig latin for "scram") to some Indians, he says "oo-scray"--which translates into "screw" (as in "screw off!") Despite all this, Fields, again the man of paradoxes, was said by both Robert Lewis Taylor and Carlotta Monti to be offended when others told risque' jokes and stories.