ABSTRACT
The end of the Chatterley ban in 1960; Kenneth Tynan's use of the word fuck on the TV in 1965; the Sex Pistols saying shit, dirty fucker and fucking rotter to a horrified Bill Grundy on Thames Today in 1976; the Oxford English Dictionary's decision to admit swear-words in the mid-1970s — these are the familiar landmarks in the recent history of British public swearing. But the journey of Viz from obscure fanzine to mass-market ‘arse-joke sales phenomenon’ (in the words of one of its begetters) is surely as important as any of them. ‘In England the gap between what can be said and what can be printed is rather exceptionally wide,’ wrote George Orwell in 1941 (161). Viz emphatically filled that gap with endless references to farting, testicles, tits, bottoms, turds, piles, etc. The tabloids briefly manufactured a little outrage at the success of what they dubbed the ‘four-letter comic’. But since then, Viz has continued to occupy a permanent and fairly uncontroversial position on shelves of the nation's newsagents.
