The pithy British sitcom follows four male, ‘nerdy’ adolescents –well sixth formers- in their desperate attempts to survive high school and to successfully ‘find the clunge’, as Jay -the least charismatic of all of them- bluntly puts it.
I love that the British public can tolerate the amount of verbal profanity in The Inbetweeners. I never would have imagined that we would be able to find such obscene language so hilarious –even in with our collective abhorrence for political correctness, as professionals, we rarely cross the line and routinely maintain a traditionally British, prim and proper front.
But underneath it all, after a long day at work, we really are not as proper as I thought; clearly, the proof is in the pudding and this pudding bears a significant resemblance to true life, or rather real teenage boys.
Not that I have spent much time amongst sexually frustrated teens in a few years, but I can still recall –with clarity- the strange sexual innuendos that I heard used when I was in upper school.
But, here is a frightening fact, it goes beyond that; it turns out adult males are just as vulgar –perhaps that is the real reason that we all love the show? Am I nearly getting it now?
In a recent episode, the ‘thick’ one, Neil, is asked to assist the models at the school’s charity fashion show, and is pissed off that they ‘...put a curtain up so we can't see the clunge, it's totally sexist!’ To which, Jay replies ‘They tried this when we did the school play, we just cut a hole in the curtain and stuck our knobs through it, it was well horny, we was getting noshed off in between scenes.’
The next morning, at my local leisure centre, I overhear very similar banter amplified across the air vent that connects the male changing room to the female changing area; very loud male grunting, perverse language, incessant chortling – somehow not as charming or as funny as the Inbetweeners’ boys.
But, perhaps it sheds some light on how and why gross reality can be refracted through award-winning comedy, to become hilarious entertainment – it makes a refreshing change to regular dirty-old-man-talk.
