Dirty jokes told creatively, laced with clever puns and twists of language, separate modern sophisticates from crude, foul-mouthed dullards, the humourous from the humourless and the adults from the children.
That's the reason kids of a certain age suddenly, to the alarm of their parents, flock to Family Guy but it also explains the enduring attraction of young audiences to saucy, comedic musicals like Chicago, The Evil Dead and Grease. Potty and fart jokes are for the little ones. As a kid, you know you're not in Kansas anymore when you're picking up on sexual innuendo.
The English language master in this field was one William Shakespeare, of course.
Those eternal tales of good and evil, love and deceit, sacrifice and greed, were mired in large doses of violence but also in ample applications of saucy fun.
A group of local young people are doing Bard In The Yard again this summer, condensing two Shakespeare comedic classics - The Taming Of The Shrew and As You Like It - into one-hour episodes. Put another way, they're taking HBO content and reproducing it for a younger, kinder, gentler audience.
The Taming Of The Shrew is the classic Shakespearean romantic comedy, the stage equivalent of When Harry Met Sally and Pretty Woman. The high school romantic comedy movie 10 Things I Hate About You makes no effort to hide the fact that it's really just a modern update of The Taming Of The Shrew. Like all three of those films, the romance is sweet and the comedy flirts with sexy and then plunges into sex with gleeful abandon.
One of Shakespeare's most famous sexual innuendo scenes is found early in the second act of The Taming Of The Shrew, with Katherine trying to set boundaries and Petruchio taking everything she's saying and turning it into a spicy joke at her expense.
Petruchio: Come, come, you wasp, i'faith you are too angry.
Katherine: If I be waspish, best beware my sting.
Petruchio: My remedy is then to pluck it out.
Katherine: Ay, if the fool could find where it lies.
Petruchio: Who knows not where a wasp does wear his sting? In his tail.
Katherine: In his tongue.
Petruchio: Whose tongue?
Katherine: Yours, if you talk of tales, and so farewell.
Petruchio: What, with my tongue in your tail?
Notice it's Katherine, not Petruchio, who first turns their banter towards sex, with her insult that Petruchio isn't man enough to find where her wasp stinger lies. With the door left ajar by Katherine, Petruchio proceeds to kick it down with a zinger as shocking, funny and crass as when it was first uttered on stage in 1592.
Naturally, that line and others like it will be gone when the teens and tweens stage The Taming Of The Shrew for local audiences Thursday and Friday. When they get to the play in senior high school, however, and read the unabridged and uncensored version, they will laugh their heads off and then tell all their friends.
The teachers will roll their eyes because it will be the 1,000th time they've heard teenagers discover the dirty lines in Shakespeare (they're everywhere, from Romeo and Juliet to Hamlet and Macbeth). The teachers will then try to steer the conversation back to Shakespeare's themes around romantic love and fidelity.
Safe to say, this brief exchange in As You Like It also won't be uttered by the young people taking part in Bard In The Yard:
Audrey: I am not a slut, though I thank the gods I am foul.
Touchstone: Well, praised be the gods for thy foulness! Sluttishness may come hereafter.
Seth MacFarlane couldn't have written it any better more than 400 years later.
Go support the kids and applaud their talent interpreting the great master. Bard In The Yard takes the stage Thursday at 7 p.m. and Friday at 2 and 7 p.m. at Theatre North West. Admission is by donation at the door with a suggested amount of $10.
While watching some of Prince George's best young actors perform for laughs, keep in mind that Shakespeare's comedy, like his dramatic fare, respected no boundaries of taste in his efforts to unmask core human truths for all to see and enjoy.
