"You say, 'We'll do a level on Lust! That'll be easy!' But then you really struggle to push the boundaries. Then you get kind of silly about it. You know, 'Let's just hang a huge penis out there and call it a day.'"
— The developers of Dante's Inferno, going back to the penis well.
Writing periodically updated media is challenging. If you're writing a novel or a movie script, you have time to gather and lay out all of your ideas, parse out all of the bad ones, and distribute them equally over your work to keep it interesting. If you're writing a new comic strip or TV series, you have to be fresh and funny every week, or even every day. No writer, no matter how amazing, can bat a thousand. Sooner or later writer's block sets in, or you just get too busy to totally devote yourself to the work. What to do?
Sometimes, you may find yourself forced to get out your long-handled ladle and scrape out a Bottom of the Barrel Joke.
Pulling out a Bottom of the Barrel Joke is resorting to Vulgar Humor when you normally wouldn't. If you can't think of anything clever or insightful for your characters to say, sometimes you need to have them say something shocking or raunchy instead. Hey, at least it's better than just not submitting something this week, right?
Most writers feel at least a twinge of shame when they do this; it's the artistic equivalent of taking the easy way out. Having one of your characters fart loudly in an elevator might get you some cheap laughs, but it takes no effort, it isn't clever, and it gets very old after awhile. Even still, the best works are occasionally forced to go there, and used sparingly, the results can still be entertaining from time to time.
Examples:
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Film
- Invoked disapprovingly by Roger Ebert in his caustic review of Freddy Got Fingered, which is filled with such jokes:
"This movie doesn't scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn't below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels."
Live-Action TV
- When Stephen Colbert does it, he reminds the viewers that he won a Peabody.
- QI often puts the punchlines to these as forfeits, such as "Piers Morgan" for the question "Name a poisonous snake", "Janet Street-Porter" for "What has large teeth and only one facial expression?", and "Have you been talking with my husband?" to Stephen Fry's request "Tell me about the Great Disappointment."
- Subverted on one occasion where the question is "Can you tell me the biggest joke ever to come out of Alaska?" and one of the panelists responds with "Sarah Palin." This was not a forfeit, since it was "so obvious".
- Subverted again when the question is "What has 20 legs, 5 heads, and can't reach its own nuts?" One of the panelists calls out "Westlife", but is not forfeited. Double subverted when another panelist takes a guess at what the forfeit is and gets it: "One Direction".
- Conan O'Brien's monologues use this kind of humor in spades, every single episode. In fact, most of the actual humor in the monologues comes not from the jokes, but from Conan's funny apologies for the jokes.
- Have You Been Paying Attention?: When Tom introduced the desperate sounding 'Nobel or Netflix' round, Anne Edmonds asked:
So what does the bottom of the barrel actually look like?
Music
- Eminem:
- A feature of Eminem's period of pill-addled writer's block was the increasing use of unfunny, over-the-top grossout and Fan Disservice material in place of what had once been witty and poetic Lightmare Fuel. A few good examples are the gerbil-stuffing doggerel of "FACK", the Shady verse on 50 Cent's "Peep Show" which is about him kidnapping strippers and then shitting on them, and forcing a woman to huff his farts and become dependent on colostomy bags in "Ballin' Uncontrollably". Unusually, he got out of the writer's block by pushing it so gross that it started to verge into horror, which eventually became Eminem's artistic direction, releasing the Horrorcore Slasher Movie Concept Album Relapse after healing from his drug problems.
- There's a few examples of this in Eminem's earlier discography, too, with an obvious example being the hook for "Under The Influence" - "You can suck my dick if you don't like, my shit, 'cause I was high when I wrote this, so suck, my dick!". (This was on the same album as "Stan".)
Newspaper Comics
- The Far Side: A few comics basically amount to an apology from Gary Larson for being unable to come up with anything better.
- For example, one comic shows some wasp police investigating a hole in a nest: "It looks like these rocks were thrown from inside the hive." On the other end of the nest, there's a boy hiding. The caption reads: "Artist: Gary Larson. Medium: Ink on bristol. Title: It Was Late and I Was Tired."
- Another one shows ducks standing around, when one yells "Chicken!" and they all duck as a chicken whizzes by. The caption says: "'And so,' the interviewer asked, 'do you ever have trouble coming up with ideas?' 'Well, sometimes,' the cartoonist replied."
- Bill Watterson, in the Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book, discusses how he would sometimes "go for broke on the illustration" when time could not allow for good writing (the example provided was of Calvin popping an especially huge bubblegum bubble, winding up with bubblegum all over his face, and then saying "I think I blew my head inside out!").
- He even made a comic about going to the bottom of the barrel. Calvin's mom finds garbage under his bed that he threw down there to "keep the monsters quiet". In the aforementioned collection, this was a comment on the comics he drew just to fill his quota even when he had no inspiration.
Radio
- Get This: Towards the end of the show's tenure, Fridays were taglined "all jokes must go!", insisting that all the really bad jokes should be saved for Friday, after the week was over and they had run out of all other material.
- I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again once had a sketch where a very serious critic for one of the intellectual heavy Sunday papers delivered a review of the show that was couched in highbrow intellectual language, in a style akin to an Oxbridge don discussing literature, comparing the humour to that of great mediaeval comedies such as Rabelais, Chaucer and Boccaccio, freely quoting from these great literary works and using technical and academic literary terms for the modes of humour employed by the show. "Rabelaisian persiflage" note wasn't the half of it. The highbrow critic paused for a beat at the end and added "And I especially liked the knickers jokes".
Stand-Up Comedy
- This can be a tactic of stand-up comedians who are floundering on stage and find themselves desperate to re-win the audience. Sometimes it works, like when Gilbert Gottfried saved himself from a 9/11 joke by randomly telling The Aristocrats. Other times it doesn't, like when Michael Richards infamously used the word "nigger" at a group of black hecklers. He was reportedly trying to Cross The Line Twice, but only crossed it once and failed to get back over.
- This is likely one of the reasons stand-up comedians face difficulties if transitioning to Live Action TV series. Rather than standard routines with the occasional special performance, they must develop an entire script. Unlike other comedy shows that have some form of story to hold them together, stand-up comedians on TV have to rely on their comedy to carry the show. It's not uncommon to see increasing numbers of these jokes as a season progresses and the comedian's ideas dry up.
- Dave Chappelle perhaps faced the worst of this with his show. He fought to maintain the quality of his comedy while executives tried to push for lower-brow comedy. As his audiences began to show they preferred what he saw as a Bottom of the Barrel Joke, Chappelle quit.
- Frequently lampshaded by Bill Hicks, who even referred to his act as "Chomsky with dick jokes."
Bill: Folks, here’s the deal. I editorialize for forty-five minutes, the last fifteen minutes we all pull our chutes and float down to Dick Joke Island together.
Web Comics
- Jerry Holkins, the writer of Penny Arcade, refers to this as "Going back to the penis well," largely because, when he can't think of something insightful to say about video game culture, his colleague will talk him into making a dick joke.
- Dominic Deegan has used this a few times in interesting ways, often twisting it to dramatic effect instead of comedic.
- Arthur, King of Time and Space sometimes does jokes about modern-arc Arthur, updating his own webcomic, saying how much he hates having to do "can't think of a joke" jokes.
- Subverted in a Sluggy Freelance filler story (which are of course pretty bottom-of-the-barrel as it is, but in a broader sense), when the protagonists suspect someone of being an android. They take him away and the next strip starts with them standing with a knife in front of a table with a gory mess on it, saying they found no inorganic parts in the guy. Torg even goes "What's this? An intestine?" and eats it. Then the guy they suspected is shown looking from behind an x-ray screen and asking what they're doing with his spaghetti and meatballs.
- Jeph Jacques
stoops to Toilet Humour. There's also this from The Rant:
"If I have my way, there will be two easy jokes I will never do in QC; One being the "Wacky Misunderstanding" referenced in this strip and endlessly overdone by television comedies, the other being the "Oh hey it sounds like Marten and Dora are getting it on in the bedroom but when Pintsize opens the door it turns out Marten's just helping Dora into a corset or something.""
- Although he does have what he calls Butts Syndrome; that is, that he thinks that the word Butts is enough to carry a punchline.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is a delightfully odd potpourri of high-level insight on mathematics, science, economic and political theory, and philosophy... mixed with the occasional observation that genitals look funny.
Web Original
- Invoked in the Honest Trailers episode on The Emoji Movie. The narrator worried a couple of times that his harsh criticism of the movie was getting "too honest"note , so he decided to throw in a couple of "Poop joke(s)" (i.e. jokes made by the Poop emoji) to try to lighten the episode up.
Web Videos
- Tankmen is infamous for casually putting cock jokes into its dialogue whenever a good opportunity is found.
Western Animation
- On one episode of Chilly Beach, characters watch a terrible reality show, prompting April to comment that the network is really scraping the bottom of the barrel. Then Jacques changes the channel to a show that is actually called Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel.
It is always mong.
