<<< As a young man I’d been excused from the politesse of a middle-class upbringing, and found myself free to figure it out or starve. I found my day-to-day and hand-to-mouth employment among folk whose speech inspirited the hell out of me. I note: fellow cab drivers, our customers, in their infinite variety, the hustlers and thieves I met in the North Side poolrooms and poker games.
They inspired me to write, and I did.
Two of my earliest plays—American Buffalo (1975) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1983)—are written in the profane language of the Chicago streets.
Critics accused me of riding buses with a tape recorder and transcribing the speech I heard. I took it as the compliment it actually was. For I was not, of course, transcribing the speech of others, but imagining myself into their situations and, like them, talking my way out of them.
Profane is Latin for “outside the temple,” meaning something unholy. And the Church traditionally appropriated to itself the power to curse and excommunicate the heretic. “May you be cursed in your Sitting and your Standing, in your sleeping and waking,” and so on.
The profanity of the streets was not used to curse, but to accentuate or embellish. “Fuck you,” in those days, was the challenge to fight. (It survives in today’s more effete “fuck you, get a lawyer.”) The F-word, of the actual folk, then and now, is a rhetorical tool.
“Get off my fucking porch” not only alerts the listener for the appearance of the direct object (which is, after all, not only the conclusion but the point of the sentence), it underlines and accentuates the importance which that object holds for the speaker. “Get your ass off my motherfucking porch” is powerful in a way that “get off my porch” is not, unless the speaker is, additionally, holding the (nonlinguistic but influential) Remington 870. The phrase is also noteworthy as written in iambic pentameter.
When one has nothing left in the golf bag save “fuck you” and, having been uttered, that’s no longer available, what is left save “and I really mean it”?
The speech of the American middle class is largely the attempt to impress, obfuscate, or placate. That of the streets is, in my experience, to express.
For example:
Middle class: “What a nice dress.”
Street: “Hey, baby, any more at home like you?” (Iambic pentameter.)
The second line, as Shakespeare amply demonstrated, is a natural rhythm of English speech. “Oh for a muse of fire that would ascend” is, to the Anglophone, rhythmically as natural as “I am not going to tell you one more time.” Iambic pentameter, five feet to the line.
I was filming Heist with Gene Hackman; my wife, Rebecca Pidgeon; and Danny DeVito. Danny’s line to Gene, his rival, is, “Are you fucking with me, are you fucking with me, or are you done fucking with me?”
This occurred in an early scene—one of my first with Danny. I was concerned that he would (incorrectly) accentuate the word done at the end of the phrase, which would have branded him, sadly, with a merely academic understanding of actual American idiom. But I need not have worried, as he accentuated the final fucking and all was well.
Per contra, Becca was raised in Edinburgh, and educated at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In the early days of our association she flatteringly strove to adopt my Chicagoan vocabulary. Our great friend, Shel Silverstein, corrected her: “Becca, when you say motherfucker, it’s like someone is trying to fuck your mother.” Things change, and my early plays have become part of the canon. Their profanity is not only no longer exceptionable, it’s no longer found worthy of note.
Stephen Colbert was canceled not because he was no longer funny, but because his audience noted it and so his show lost a lot of money.
Today’s late-night television gagsters and their political counterparts dredge for laughs or votes telling our president to “fuck off” or “piss off.” This, though no longer the thrown gauntlet prefatory to violence, still signals the end of rational discourse. When one has nothing left in the golf bag save “fuck you” and, having been uttered, that’s no longer available, what is left save “and I really mean it”?
Which is where we find ourselves today. Stephen Colbert was canceled not because he was no longer funny, but because his audience noted it and so his show lost a lot of money. His suggestion that our president “go fuck himself” is like the jeering of the depleted boxer before his opponent steps in and sends him to the canvas.
President Donald Trump isn’t responsible for the demise of his various detractors. They are. Adam Schiff told the president to “piss off.” Had he possessed either power or a plan, the phrase might have been a warning—as it is on the streets. In fact, it was merely the unfortunate mewing of the reduced.
President Trump and his cabinet, on the other hand, exhibit that quality the stoics taught us that men most revere: reserve. Teddy Roosevelt said, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Zohran Mamdani said of Trump, “I am his worst nightmare.” Who do we like in a fair fight?
I used to say that the First Amendment protected all speech, with two exceptions: One could not say Wayne Newton’s head was too small, nor that workout guru Richard Simmons was fat. In reality, according to the Constitution, the government may make no law restricting free speech. All speech is pretty much protected, save that which advocates the violent overthrow of the federal government. The First Amendment protects the unfortunate and confected profanity of the left, as the Fifth Amendment protects their silence.
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from "When We Gave a Fuck" by David Mamet, THE FREE PRESS, August 11, 2025.
https://www.thefp.com/p/david-mamet-back-when-we-gave-a-fuck-culture-writing-film?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email