That’s my best advice. Forget nuance, cleverness, subtlety and wit. Make your title blunt. Make it a big, crude, obvious hammer."
Some things are just hard to talk about in casual conversation. It may be because they contain an obscenity, a sexual reference, one of the Inherently Funny Words, be a Long Title, or a Who's on First? situation (e.g., a name like That Movie or Something) but whatever the case is, saying the title usually results in an awkward pause and clearing of the throat after saying it.
These days, more and more things are doing this entirely on purpose, often to draw attention to a controversial subject and push people's comfort boundaries. It's also done frequently enough just to try and be funny, especially if it's of the Black Comedy variety. Often leads to variable Politeness Judo when talked about publicly.
Note that this is for titles that would be awkward to mention in polite company. For titles that are actually awkward to say, see Long Title, Word Salad Title, Word Purée Title, and Oddly Named Sequel 2: Electric Boogaloo.
Differs from Have a Gay Old Time in that this is when the awkwardness is entirely intentional. Compare Double Entendre, except this trope is not at all subtle. Usually used as part of filth, with or without Parallel Porn Titles. When Executive Meddling prevents the awkward title from being used, it becomes a Censored Title. The horror equivalent is Gory Deadly Overkill Title of Fatal Death.
Page contains expletives, so therefore definitely isn't work-safe. Don't say we didn't warn you.
Examples:
- 7UP ran a brief campaign featuring Orlando Jones. The tagline? "Make 7 UP Yours". He wore a t-shirt in the first commercial (which you could buy) with "Make 7" written on the front and the rest on the back.
- The Swedish vacuum cleaner company Electrolux once sold its products in the UK with the slogan "Nothing Sucks like an Electrolux." This was completely intentional, and succeeded in getting the attention it was intended to, for years.
- In 1978, Loriot, a German comedian whose sketch show rivals Monty Python's Flying Circus in popularity in Germany, had a sketch in which a salesman visits a housewife to sell her a new "Heinzelmann" vacuum cleaner. Several times he quotes the product's slogan, "The Heinzelmann sucks and blows while Mom can only suck." Since Loriot's entire work was based on awkwardness, the innuendo was surely intentional.
- Another Swedish example: An ad which was supposed to feature a new brand of cookies and a couple of older ladies, turned into this when one of the ladies said "we like all six" (referring to the six different tastes). The Swedish translation for "we like all six" can also mean "we all like sex." That line became the slogan.
In General:
- A good number of Hentai fall under this. A certain amount of this is probably the distributors trying to make sure that kids don't pick it up accidentally.
- Bondage Queen Kate
- Boobalicious. Note that this is its title in the English market—its original name was (in Gratuitous English) Milk Junkies. Not that much better, really.
- Virgin Auction
- Sex Warrior Pudding.
- Nipple Magician. Because the writer thought it sounded cool and the American guys who publish it in their comics anthologies like to laugh their asses off while simultaneously getting off at the mere thought.
- The Hills Have Size
- Foxy Nudes
- The Rapeman
- Rape! Rape! Rape!
- Tits! Tits! Tits!
- My Nipples are Dicks
- The Maiden R*pe Assault: Violent Semen Inferno (yes, they actually censored its title)
By Work:
- Ah... and Mm... Are All She Says: Toda's grunts are written as Aa and Uu in the Japanese title. These are also standard onomatopoeia for orgasmic moans, so the title, in isolation, sounds like it's about a person who moans all the time, something that works better in a hentai series. In fact, in Chapter 19, Rukai Yuuji, an eromanga artist who befriended Toda earlier that chapter, has to scrap plans for a series about a heroine who only says "Ah...", finding it hitting too close to home.
- Bastard!! (1988)
- Dick Fight Island has a Completely Different Title in English. In Japanese it's the much tamer The Eight Warriors, though the English title tells you what you're in for much better.
- Invoked in the manga EG Maker when a game maker markets a game called "It can't be helped that I want to have sex with my little sister."
- Gintama. It's a near-homophone for kintama, a Japanese word meaning "testicles" (literally "golden balls"... get it?). Try asking "hey, did you see this week's Gintama?" in the language and get ready to get looked at funny.
- Goddamn!!
, an early '90s racing anime.
- I Want You to Make a Disgusted Face and Show Me Your Underwear (Iya na Kao sare nagara Opantsu Misete Moraitai), a highly Not Safe for Work Light Novel and anime which is pretty much Exactly What It Says on the Tin, crosses this with Long Title.
- The Anti-Goku Uniform Resistance in Kill la Kill is named "Nudist Beach". Even the protagonist can't believe that's their actual name.
- Kiss My Ass, a manga about a high school boy with hemorrhoids.
- My Balls. The balls in question contain Sealed Evil in a Can, and the man whose balls they are has to resist the temptation to masturbate or risk The End of the World as We Know It.
- Takuma Yokota's works:
- Molester Man, though it's a Non-Indicative Title.
- Onani Master Kurosawa. 'Onani' is the Japanese word for masturbation that came from "onanism".
- Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt. The OST's songs have some pretty interesting names as well, including such gems as "Beverly Hills Cock", "Dancefloor Orgy", and "Technodildo".
- The penultimate episode of Persona 4: The Animation is titled "The World is Full of Shit". The speaker is Adachi, the true killer, who the protagonists confront in the episode in question.
- The title of The Pet Girl of Sakurasou, i.e. The Pet Girl of Sakura Hall, describes a girl as a "pet." This is probably meant to sound misogynistic, because the show aggressively deconstructs the idea that an adorable ditz would make an ideal girlfriend.
- Stroke Material - My Fucking Lover is actually a Shoujo comic with little to no fanservice in it!
- 'Tis Time for "Torture," Princess sounds like the title of a BDSM comic. It's actually a gag manga where a Pretty Princess Powerhouse is "tortured" by being bribed with things she is denied by her strict training regimen, like delicious food or video games.
- In Yotsuba&!, the adoptive father of the title girl, in order to amuse her and himself, likes putting on his head his fresh-washed underpants and dancing strangely, while calling himself a Super Hero named "Pantsman".note
- The Big Finish Doctor Who story "Dr. Who and the Pirates" is very deliberately titled to annoy a certain kind of nerd (the character's name is not "Dr. Who"!). This is partially a Mythology Gag, as the Character Misnomer And The Noun Phrase naming format was used in the show a couple of times by accident, but mostly serves as an indication that the story is meant to be taken in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way.
- Bitch Planet. It's actually a feminist critique of exploitation films.
- The Goon parodied this with an imaginary Missing Episode called Satan's Sodomy Baby, which they weren't able to publish because of the Moral Guardians. The author said that the only way the publishers would relent would be a demonstration of reader interest, and he encouraged fans to go into their local comic book stores and demand Satan's Sodomy Baby.
- Kick-Ass, also the name of the main character's hero identity.
- The Preacher sidestory focusing on the backstory of The Grotesque, Arseface, is named The Story Of You-Know-Who to avoid this. Which just seems odd in light of how the cover is a close-up of his face.
- Sex Criminals has nothing to do with rapists. It's about a couple who can stop time when they have sex, and use that power to rob a bank.
- Stan Lee once had an argument with his publisher about why his comics were doing well. Martin Goodman, the publisher in question, argued that it was all due to the strength and simplicity of the titles. So Stan challenged him by saying he would make a comic with the worst title he could imagine. The result was Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos.
- The Sin City story "That Yellow Bastard" has been covered up by comic vendors in some parts for this reason, though by today's standards "bastard" actually isn't that bad.
- A non-vulgar version is the decidedly hard to say HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. It might still be the least weird thing about the fic.
- South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut had the working title "South Park: All Hell Breaks Loose", but the title was rejected by the MPAA for containing the word "Hell". When Trey Parker heard this, in exasperation he sarcastically suggested "Bigger, Longer and Uncut", and to his surprise, the MPAA missed the obvious innuendo entirely and the name was accepted. The soundtrack also has the songs "Uncle Fucka" and "Kyle's Mom's a Bitch".
- The original title for 50 First Dates was going to be Who the Hell are You?.
- The French movie Baise Moi. "Baise" started off meaning "kiss" in french, but it has changed over time, and now... well, Fuck Me is the closest English title. Some localizations translated it as Rape Me.
- Big Tits Zombie
- The Birth of a Nation, a 2016 movie about Nat Turner's slave rebellion. It was most certainly named to invoke the ground-breaking but infamously racist film of the same name, and may have been named as such to reclaim the title a la N-Word Privileges.
- Clerks has Randal ordering porn for his video store over the phone. They start off innocuous-sounding, then get explicit, then kinky, then disgusting. And this is while a mother is there with her child.note
- Colonel Kill Motherfuckers, a low-end horror comedy.. Amazingly enough, that's the nickname of the villain In-Universe.
- Dame tu cuerpo, (or in English, "Give Me Your Body"), a Spanish-language body swapping film.
- Dick - a film from 1999 starring Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams, about two teen girls help bring down President Richard Nixon and get the nickname Deep Throat.
- Fuck, a documentary about the word. The marketing campaign called it "The film that dares not speak its name."
- The Swedish film Fucking Åmål (pronounced more or less O-moal), retitled Show Me Love in the English version. Then again, Åmål is the small, dull town in which the characters live, and the original title is what one of them usually calls the place. Also, since from a Swede's perspective "fuck" is a Foreign Cuss Word, the word is a bit tamer (though profanity as a whole is also not as big an issue in Sweden).
- Gayniggers From Outer Space
, a Danish Blaxploitation Parody Short Film. Just the title Crosses the Line Twice.
- The indie film Good Dick. Though some of the film focuses around porn and sex, it is really a romantic drama about a video store employee and a reclusive girl who rents porn from him.
- Hands on a Hard Body. It's a documentary about a contest of endurance and the hard body of the title is a truck (the hands being which contestant can keep their hands on the truck the longest with the winner getting the truck).
- The Monkees' movie Head was titled as such to signify it was a true "mind trip", even though the Monkees' young fans very likely hadn't yet tried drugs (one common reason as to why the film flopped). It was also so that when Bob Rafelson and Jack Nicholson produced their next film, Easy Rider, it could be promoted as being "from the guys who gave you Head".
- In & Out refers to a closeted gay man being in and out of the closet, but it has additional sexual connotations as well.
- Inglourious Basterds. As noted above, "bastard" is not quite as horrible a word in US culture anymore (to the point TV commercials were allowed to say the word uncensored), but is still considered "bad". It's also worth noting that both words are misspelled.
- The James Bond film Octopussy, and the documentary about it called Inside Octopussy. Notable for being one of the few Bond films where the title theme doesn't share the movie's title, for obvious reasons.
- Jaws 2 worked to avoid this, in France; the original film was titled Les Dents De La Mernote . Adding Deux to Mer leaves you with something that sounds offensive in Frenchnote - so a new title was sought. The director of Jaws 2, who is French, points this out in a special feature on the DVD release.
- Jennifer's Body. "I want to see Jennifer's Body", "Did you see Jennifer's Body?", etc.
- Kick-Ass is a double example of this trope: it has the word "ass" in it, thus causing marketing and open discussion problems.
- The Legend of Nigger Charley is a 1972 Blaxploitation Western starring NFL-linebacker-turned-actor Fred Williamson. Notably, the film had a sequel in The Soul of Nigger Charley made the following year, and a Spiritual Sequel in 1974's Boss Nigger. Seanbaby once described Williamson as "a big-enough badass to star in three films with the N-word in the title".
- There are actually two movies with the title Live Nude Girls. The first, in 1995, was a comedy about four female friends who'd drifted apart reuniting for a bachelorette sleepover, and is only rated R because much of their dialogue consists of frank conversations about their sex lives. The second, from 2014, is about a man inheriting a run-down strip club, and is much closer to the sort of film you're thinking of when you read that title.
- Used in Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, where Tom suggests opening a company named "Arse Tickler's Faggot Fan Club", and returning people's cheques - a lot of people would be too embarrassed to cash them. This might actually be a real scam.
- Loro ("Them") is an Italian film about Silvio Berlusconi that was divided in two parts, "Loro 1" and "Loro 2". However, in Italian "Loro 2" sounds like "These two (guys/people)", so for a while critics and journalists were divided on what the title could refer to: Berlusconi and his wife? Berlusconi and his right-hand man? Berlusconi and the guy who is desperately trying to meet him in the first part? All answers could be valid and there was no real reason as to why the film was divided in two parts, as if the choice was made just for the sake of the pun.
- The sequel to Meet the Parents was entitled Meet the Fockers. This nearly got nixed by the MPAA, but the producers defended it by offering letters of support from several people actually named Focker stating that it was an entirely legitimate surname, of course. Then there was the next sequel, Little Fockers...
- One-Eyed Monster, a movie about an alien possessing Ron Jeremy's penis and using it to kill people. It was supposed to be given the even more awkward title Ron Jeremy's Dick, but the director decided that if Zack and Miri Make a Porno couldn't get the full name on the marquee, there was no way he could get that one through.
- John Waters' Pecker.
"I'm not that innocent not to know there's a double entendre, but it's a joke: The boy's nickname, because he picked at his food as a child. Originally, the MPAA turned down the title, and we went to court about it. My lawyers had a list of titles to show them like Shaft, Free Willy, In & Out, and I gave a little speech saying, 'It might be vulgar, but it's not an obscene word' and 'This is a movie about someone who wants his good name back. And in this case the good name is Pecker!'"
- Pure Shit, an Australian film directed by Bert Deling. When it premiered at Melbourne’s Playbox in May 1976, the Vice Squad raided the theatre. It was initially banned, then given an R certificate (over 18 only), and the title was changed from Pure Shit to Pure S.
- Towelhead is a movie about a 13-year-old Lebanese-American girl in the early '90s. Its title is an ethnic slur against Arabs.
- Violent Shit and its sequels.
- Weiner, a documentary about politician Anthony Weiner's 2013 campaign for Mayor of New York City and how it was complicated by his sexting scandals. Considering the New York Post published suggestive puns on the subject's name for headlines every chance it got (e.g., "Weiner Exposed," "Weiner's Long, Hard Road Back"), and said headlines were featured in the film, the directors had to have known they picked a potentially awkward title.
- What the #$*! Do We Know!?. This is the actual uncensored title. Generally said as "What the Bleep Do We Know!?"
- The documentary Who The #$&% Is Jackson Pollock? uses symbols as its title on the case and even in the opening title. However, truck driver Teri Horton says the uncensored title as she relays the story of how she bought what some believe is an authentic Pollock painting at a thrift store in regard to her theretofore lack of familiarity with the famous painter.
- The German movie Der Wixxer. The word is usually spelled Wichser, and means "wanker."
- The Vin Diesel action film xXx, or Triple X. Rumor has it, part of the reason for the title was to try and prevent Internet filesharing for the movie — after all, if you do a search for "xXx movie", you're going to get a lot of results that don't have anything to do with Vin Diesel.
- Young People Fucking. This actually was the subject of some political drama in Canada, when it was held up as an example of the sort of film that the Conservative government would be able to censor under new legislation allowing film productions to be denied their usual tax credits if they violated "public policy". It transpired that nobody who was advocating this had actually seen the film, which is somewhat tamer than the name suggests. A screening of the film was organized in Ottawa for MPs.
- Y tu mamá también, a Mexican film whose title tranlates to And Your Mom Too. It was released in the U.S. under the Spanish title.
- Zack and Miri Make a Porno was rumored to have been greenlit just for its audacious title. Unsurprisingly, it was impossible to market as a result.
In General:
- This is fairly common in Bizarro Fiction, where you might encounter titles like The Greatest Fucking Moment In Sports (it's about a bike race) or Rampaging Fuckers of Everything on the Crazy Shitting Planet of the Vomit Atmosphere
.
By Author:
- Stephen Colbert's books I Am America (And So Can You!) and America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren't abuse bad grammar for laughs.
- First Nations author Tomson Highway's novel Kiss of the Fur Queen, which has a multi-layered title (albeit one that only makes sense in context) — it's a book with Flamboyant Gays, Tricksters, and sinister Gallows Humour. Highway's plays are similar, with titles like Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing.
- Stirling Johnson has written books entitled English as a Second Fucking Language and Watch Your Fucking Language. They are, appropriately, about the use of profanity.
- Cartlon Mellick III, prolific author of Bizarro Fiction, whose works include Ape Shit, The Baby Jesus Butt Plug, The Menstruating Mall, Razor Wire Pubic Hair, and The Faggiest Vampire. That's not even half of them.
- Several novels written by Irvine Welsh, including The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs, The Acid House, Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance, and of course, Porno.
By Work:
- An Affair With My Mother, a memoir by Caitriona Palmer. The "affair" part of the title is metaphorical; she was raised by adoptive parents and located her birth mother in her twenties — they became close, but for reasons detailed over the course of the book, her mother wanted to keep their relationship secret.
- Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, actually featured in the San Francisco Chronicle's book review — the paper censored "bullshit" in its listing, but not in its picture of the cover, making the endeavor somewhat pointless. The book itself is more artsy than the name would suggest.
- The Artificial Nigger, a short story collection by Flannery O’Connor.
- The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stories
.
- The Big Penis Book
, a follow up to the The Big Book of Breasts. Both feature partially transparent dust jackets that when removed reveal the principal subject matter. They are also coffee table sized and rather artsy, with lots of interviews and naked pictures.
- "The Big Space Fuck", a short story by Kurt Vonnegut. It's featured in Harlan Ellison's anthology Again, Dangerous Visions and Vonnegut's autobiographical hodgepodge Palm Sunday. It reads much like a Kilgore Trout story.
- Bimbos of the Death Sun by Sharyn McCrumb, a novel set in the science fiction fandom. The trope applies both in and out of universe; the book's protagonist is a sci-fi author who wrote a novel that's actually quite good and not disrespectful to women at all, but which got saddled with that title (and a matching cover) by a third-rate publisher, forcing the author to disown his work and live in fear of the feminists on campus.
- Blowing My Way to the Top by Jen Atkin. The innuendo is intentional, but it's an autobiographical self-help book by a hair stylist. The cover at least makes the pun clear by depicting the author blow-drying her hair.
- The Book of Feckin' Irish Slang That's Great Craic for Cute Hoors and Boosers and others in the same series.
- Used In-Universe in Boring Girls, in which the narrator names her metal band "Colostomy Hag".
- Charlie and Lola books have grammatically awkward titles such as I Will Never Not Ever Eat A Tomato, Snow Is My Favourite and My Best, and The Most Wonderfullest Picnic in the Whole Wide World. They're meant to sound like they're being said out loud by Lola, a 5-year-old child.
- Como se Dar Bem na Vida, Mesmo Sendo um Bosta, translatable as "How to Succeed in Life Even If You're a Complete Turd", a parody self-help book by Brazilian comedy group Casseta e Planeta.
- Common in the Confessions of Georgia Nicolson series, with titles like Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging, Knocked Out by My Nunga-Nungas, Dancing in My Nuddy-Pants, and And Then It Came Off in My Hand. The more squeamish American publishers re-titled that last one Away Laughing on a Fast Camel, and the film adaptation of Angus is titled Angus, Thongs, and Perfect Snogging.
- Cunt, Inga Muscio's well-known feminist book about Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
- The Cunt Coloring Book
, whose cover page is no better
even though it's not immediately obvious what you're looking at.
- Die Nigger Die!, the 1969 autobiography of Black radical activist H. Rap Brown.
- Eeeee, eee, eeee, Tao Lin's first novel.
- The Ethical Slut, Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy's classic guide to polyamorous relationships — so seminal it even named a trope.
- Everyone Poops, a children's book about Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Also in the series are the only marginally less awkward The Gas We Pass and The Holes in Your Nose.
- Faggots, Larry Kramer's 1978 novel criticizing the contemporary gay culture.
- Feuchtgebiete by Charlotte Roche. The title roughly translates to "wetlands" but can also be parsed as "regions", which lends itself well to the dirty mind. The book's pervasive PR in Germany also led everyone to know it as "that sex book", making the euphemism that much more obvious.
- Gluten is My Bitch by April Peveteux.
- Go the Fuck to Sleep, a nice bedtime story not intended for young children, but their frustrated parents. The title is technically censored on the cover by centering the white "uc" letters over an equally-white moon. The kid-safe version is titled Seriously, Just Go to Sleep. It did well enough to get sequels, You Have To Fucking Eat; Fuck, Now There Are Two of You; Stay the Fuck Home, a self-parody released during the COVID-19 Pandemic.
- How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale, Jenna Jameson's rather lengthy autobiography.
- How to Shit in the Woods, an otherwise quite serious book about proper sanitation while camping or hiking.
- I Am Not a Serial Killer. Quite awkward if you missed the "not", only slightly less awkward if you did catch it because it looks like a Suspiciously Specific Denial.
- I Heart My Little A-HolesSubtitle is a parenting book that caused a minor controversy over its title. The author responded that any parents who hadn't had that thought at least once were kidding themselves.
- I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy, an awkward yet apt title for a memoir about her experiences as a child actor with an abusive mother.
- Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? by Alan McArthur and Steve Lowe, a modern social commentary story.
- It is very hard to talk about without running into a Who's on First? situation: "Have you read It yet?" "Have I read what yet?"
- The Mammoth Book of... series collects short stories, and each is a big honkin' paperback with the title in huge font. It's not unreasonable to assume this trope was intended for the ones of "Gay Erotica" and "Lesbian Erotica".
- A Man's Horn. Yes, the Double Entendre is intentional.
- The Muller-Fokker Effect by John Sladek. It's technically clean, but you have to be very careful how you pronounce it. Probably intentional; according to Sladek, "Young persons have no business reading such a book, which contains sex, violence and anagrams. I think I can speak for the moral majority here when I assure you that we are doing our best to prevent such problems by closing all libraries."
- Murderess, which owes its title to something not quite as violent as one might think; its protagonist simply wonders if she inherited her clan's notorious murderous inclinations, and the book delves into themes of Nature Versus Nurture and In the Blood.
- My French Whore, the first novel by Gene Wilder.
- My Shit Life So Far, the autobiography of Frankie Boyle. Many stores displayed it with a "Censored" sticker covering the offending word, but it's surprising just how many didn't. This should be expected from a comedian who almost named one of his tours "Deal with This, Retards".
- Naked Pictures of Famous People, a tie-in book to The Daily Show. Particularly awkward if it's displayed prominently on your shelf.
- A Natural History of Rape, a book about the possible evolutionary origins of non-consensual sex.
- Negri, froci, giudei & Co.
, translatable as "Niggers, Faggots, Kikes, and Co.", by Italian journalist Gian Antonio Stella. It's about racism and intolerance in every country and historical age.
- Nigger, a book by Black comedian Dick Gregory detailing his life in the Civil Rights Movement. In his dedication page, he explains, "Every time you hear the word 'nigger', remember that they are advertising my book."
- Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, a more academic study by Black author Randall Kennedy. TV commentators struggled to talk about it without actually saying the title.
- Nude Men by Amanda Filipacci.
- On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt, which The Other Wiki describes as "a philosophical essay that presents a theory of bullshit that defines the concept and analyses the applications of bullshit in the contexts of communication."
- The Poisoner's Handbook, an excellent look at the foundation of forensic science in New York City.
- Popular Music From Vittula by Swedish author Mikael Niemi. "Vittula" is a Finnish word translatable as "Cuntville".
- Used In-Universe in The Princess Diaries, where Mia's best friend Lilly starts a magazine for student literature called Fat Louie's Pink Butthole, after Mia's cat. And the first issue's cover featured Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Executive Meddling by the principal forces her to change the title to The 'Zine. This only happened in the book, not in the film adaptation.
- Serious Survival: How to Poo in the Arctic and Other Essential Tips
. True to its name, it does have a section on how to safely poo while exploring in the Arctic wilderness.
- Sex God by Rob Bell
, an excellent Christian perspective on love and sexuality. Extra awkwardness for stocking it or asking about it in a Christian bookstore.
- Sheepshagger by Niall Griffiths.
- Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition
. It's only partly about sodomy. Apparently, Johnny Depp read it in preparation for his role as Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean — and it shows.
- Steal This Book by American counterculture icon Abbie Hoffman. Bookstores famously resisted stocking it; many were concerned that Hoffman's positive reputation among hippies would lead them to take the title seriously, but many others were worried about the content, which was essentially an instruction manual on civil disobedience — including sections on how to shoplift. True to its mission statement, the book is freely available online.
- This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It, the sequel to John Dies at the End. It's not lewd, but no less awkward, especially given that it's pretty much impossible to read the title unless you're looking at the front cover — at which point you're likely already touching it.
- The Vagina Ass of Lucifer Niggerbastard, the most famous of Shawn Wunjo's oeuvre of intentionally profane books.
- Who Writes This Crap? by Luke Wright and Joe Stickley, a satirical look at the bad writing present in daily life. (Unrelated to our trope of the same name.)
- A couple from the Xanth novels by Piers Anthony:
- The Color of Her Panties. The context is that the panties don't actually exist — the "her" in this case is a mermaid; she doesn't wear clothes, nor does she have legs, so she couldn't wear them even if they did exist. The color of her panties is therefore presented to a Wizard who can supposedly answer anything. It's almost resolved when she does get a pair of panties, but they're magical (that's the only way she can wear them) and they change color.
- Isle of View is not obscene, but it does sound a heck of a lot like "I love you". It was apparently designed to make teenage readers too embarrassed to say the title out loud.
- Most of the episode titles of 3rd Rock from the Sun are puns involving the word "Dick" (the protagonist's name). The writers apparently thought they would never be seen, and some of the ones they got away with are frankly unbelievable.
- The Rural Juror, a movie Jenna auditioned for a part in on 30 Rock, might possibly be a non-raunchy variant, as it's unlikely its in-universe producers missed how the title is physically difficult to say aloud.
- Nadia G's cooking show Bitchin' Kitchen.
- Childish example - the comedy Bottom was originally to be called Your Bottom, so that people would ask their friends things like "Did you see Your Bottom on telly last night?"
- Even better, they were also hoping for things like "I saw Rik Mayall in Your Bottom last night."
- The game show Don't! Some of the ads lampshade the issue with the title: "Don't! Watch it! Yeah, this is going to go great..."
- Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23. The ads pronounced the "B——" as just the letter and got a Sublime Rhyme out of it.
- Hardcore Pawn is self-explanatory. When they had to plug it during the NCAA basketball tournament on truTV, things immediately got awkward when Charles Barkley declared his intent to watch it.
Charles Barkley: I saw four letters and I got excited.
- The Comedy Central series Inside Amy Schumer.
- Jackass is slightly more tame by today's standards, but at the time it premiered resulted in some amusing Politeness Judo when referred to.
- Kevin Can F**k Himself, a Sitcom Genre Deconstruction whose title is an obvious Shout-Out / Take That! to Kevin Can Wait.
- Oh Sit, a Jamie Kennedy-hosted musical chairs game show for The CW that proceeded to use the pun as a running gag throughout.
- In Parks and Recreation the library department gets revenge on people by sending them messages that they have late fines for nonexistent books with this sort of title.
- Peep Show, which, despite being a stellar example of Cringe Comedy, isn't actually about peep shows.
- The show Penn & Teller: Bullshit! is often abbreviated to P&T: BS! precisely for this reason.
- When Penn refers to the show on the radio, he cuts it in the middle with a clap, "Bulls" "Hit", to avoid FCC fines. He's not normally one to mince words.
- Two different covers are available for the complete season DVD collections. The ones you can order by mail are labelled "Bullshit!" The ones on store shelf displays are labelled "BS!"
- Schitt's Creek. While the spelling lets the title pass on print, speaking the title makes promoting it problematic to say the least. Lampshaded during an appearance by its cast on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, where Colbert informs them CBS would only let them say the title uncensored if a Commercial Pop-Up for the show came up each time. They proceeded to do so a lot.
- The William Shatner show $#!+ My Dad Says. Ads encourage calling it "Bleep My Dad Says" to avoid well, you know. Shatner didn't understand the censorship and continued to call it by its original name though. It also proved awkward for a less raunchy reason: Many DVR users were unable to enter any of the non-alphabetic characters in the title, making the show impossible to find.
- There is a Norwegian comedy-drama titled Sigurd fåkke pult, which translates into Sigurd Doesn't Get to Fuck. The trailer is also intentionally awkward — it opens with, "My name is Sigurd. I am 25 years old. And I don't get to fuck".
- Skithouse was an Australian Sketch Comedy show whose title was play on the term "shithouse" (i.e. dreadful). The producers hoped it would sound edgy. Unfortunately, most critics opined that "Shithouse" would have been a more accurate title.
- Dutch NPO broadcaster BNN has a programme called Spuiten en Slikken (Spit and Swallow). The series deals with sex and recreational drug use, both nationally and internationally.
- Stacked: a show on Fox starring the silicone-filled Pamela Anderson who works in a bookshop.
- A Pittsburgh-produced 1996 PBS special by "scrapbook documentary" producer Rick Sebak, about the city's Strip District region (a city warehouse district known for its multiculturism) was titled The Strip Show. The awkwardness is lampshaded by the Sexophone theme music in the opening credits.
- Supernatural episodes "Criss Angel is a Douchebag", "Sex and Violence", and "Slash Fiction".
- In a cross with Pun-Based Title, That's My Bush!, a parody of sitcoms and politics featuring George W. Bush as the main character. The Double Entendre was made clearer in the final episode focused on Dick Cheney, That's My Dick!.
- Most reviews of The Wrong Mans start by commenting on how irritating the title is to say. One reviewer stated that it sounds like 'you've turned into a LOL-cat halfway through'.
- You're Skitting Me is a Sketch Comedy show aimed at teenagers whose title is a play on the Australian expression "You're shitting me", i.e. "you're having me on".
- LMFAO, whose name is an internet acronym for "Laughing My Fucking Ass Off", although it officially stands for "Loving My Friends And Others". Their original name was Sexe Dude, which is also pretty bad.
- The Cherry Poppin' Daddies name was controversial before they hit it big in the late nineties. Once they hit it big, the amount of hosts and announcers who awkwardly announced their name on television was hilarious.
- There is a record label in Portland called Cavity Search Records.
- Snoop Dogg's first album, Doggystyle, was named after the sex position. Some of the songs also qualify, like "For all my Niggaz and Bitches", and "Gz Up, Hoes Down".
- The Fugs, the name intentionally chosen to sound like "the fucks" were the pioneers of offending people. Their album It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest (1968) is another example.
- The album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols from the The Sex Pistols, who themselves invoke this trope.
- Guess where the price sticker is usually found on the CD case for that album?
- Soon after its release the album title was found to be officially not obscene due to "bollocks" also being an Anglo-Saxon legal term for the testicles of a bull. Nobody (the hearing included) was fooled, but there was nothing legally prohibiting it. The guy who won this case, by the way, was John Mortimer QC, perhaps better known as the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey.
- Guess where the price sticker is usually found on the CD case for that album?
- The pornogrind band Cemetery Rapist, along with songs like Herpes Injection, Granny Panty Snatcher, and Dick Sucking Daughters for Cornfield Fun. This band is the embodiment of Squick.
- Fuck, who are actually a not-particularly-aggressive indie-rock band. (Incidentally, KISS considered calling themselves Fuck when they first formed.)
- A Taste of Dick Black
, an album from accordionist Dick Black.
- Nashville Pussy. Especially the Let Them Eat Pussy album, which must have been a fun one to announce at the Grammy Awards.
- Anal Cunt (Often referred to as "AC" or "AxCx" as a result. When their record label would only print "A.C." on their album artwork, they started using a logo where the letters intentionally looked like the body parts that they stood for). The titles of virtually every one of their songs probably qualify as well.
- Tit Wrench
- Schlong
- Prick
- 3 Way Cum
- Pussy Galore
- Pussy Riot, a Russian Riot Grrrl/Punk Rock collective of whom three members were convicted of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" in a trial that attracted international attention.
- There exist at least two bands by the name "Bitch."
- Bitch Magnet
- Bitch Alert
- Bitchcraft
- Bitch And Animal
- Bitches Sin
- Bitchslicer
- Anvil Bitch
- Son of a Bitch
- Psycho Bitch
- Southern Bitch
- Little Bo Bitch
- 7 Year Bitch
- Atomic Bitchwax
- Jack Off Jill (they were originally called 'Jack In Jill,' which isn't much better, before being renamed by lead singer Jessicka's close friend at the time, Marilyn Manson)
- Jizz Janitors
- Slutvomit
- Excrementory Grindfuckers (just for a really obvious example)
- Butthole Surfers, often shortened to BH Surfers by prudish DJs. Actually fairly tame in comparison to one of their earlier names: The Inalienable Right To Eat Fred Astaire's Asshole.
- When they appeared on The Late Show With Craig Kilborn, the host apparently wasn't allowed to introduce the group by name on-air: In order to still slip the band name by, he just played an audio tape of a voice saying "butt" and "surfers," then said "hole!" during a pause between the two words.
- A few years back, Providence had a punk band called Violent Anal Death. Some of their fliers portrayed Bert sodomizing Ernie.
- Alabama Thunderpussy
- SHITDISCO
- The Genitorturers
- Me Mom and Morgenthaler
- Dayglo Abortions. One story has it that they'd decided to pick their band name by looking at the next day's newspaper, taking whatever topic the front page story was about, and putting "Dayglo" in front of it - the news article in question turned out to be about abortion laws. Album titles include Feed Us a Fetus, Two Dogs Fucking, and Holy Shiite. Song titles include "Argh Fuck Kill", "Dogfarts", and "Religious Bumfucks".
- Vaginal Croutons
- Fucked Up. At least one print media profile of vocalist Damian Abraham opted to tiptoe around his band's unprintable name - the piece in question primarily focused on things like Damian's podcast and his then-recent role as host of Canadian music video program The Wedge, but whenever his musical career was mentioned, the actual name of his group was avoided altogether.
- Porn (formerly known as Men of Porn)
- The Master Musicians of Bukkake
- Fuck The Facts
- Some of the above names could have come right out of Jello Biafra's "Names For Bands" routine which also includes "John Wayne On Acid", "Tits, Ass and Money", "The Absentee Thought Lords", and "Bono's Charred Remains." After all, Why would you want to be the 350th band to call yourselves something like Bad Attitude?
- Even a band name as comparatively tame as "Barenaked Ladies" sparked controversy in Toronto in 1991. The group is all-male and never performs naked, by the way.
- Just before The Rolling Stones decided to found their own record label, they had to produce one more song for their current label to fulfill their contract. However, nobody ever said that the song had to be releasable, and so they wrote one called "Cocksucker Blues" from Exile on Main St.. It's pretty much about what it sounds like.
- The last song on Goats Head Soup was originally titled "Star Fucker". Ahmet Ertegün of Atlantic Records made them change it to "Star Star" (presumably because the "Star" stands for the censoring asterisks).
- The Artist Formerly Known As the Artist Formerly Known As Prince has written and performed a song called "Pussy Control".
- He's also written and recorded a song called "Soft and Wet". Yes, it's an Intercourse with You song, and yes, the innuendo in the title is intentional.
- Diablo Swing Orchestra does this quite a bit with their song titles. Most notably, "How To Organize a Lynch Mob".
- There's also apparently a silly band called Ween, who released a series of download-only songs collectively called Craters of the Sack. These included titles such as "Big Fat Fuck," "Put The Coke On My Dick," and "Suckin' The Blood From The Devil's Dick."
- Ween also has several other odd titles throughout the rest of their discography: "Mushroom Festival In Hell," "Licking The Palm For Guava," "I Gots A Weasel," "Marble Tulip Juicy Tree," "Mister Would You Please Help My Pony?" "Reggaejunkiejew," and "Strap On That Jammypac" (the song doesn't even tell you what a Jammypac is), just to name a few.
- Arctic Monkeys also named their EP Who the Fuck Are Arctic Monkeys?, mainly to stop the disc from getting airplay and becoming widely known.
- Their album, Suck It and See also caused controversy in the US, where the meaning is not as clear as it is to UK audiences.
- The The Bloodhound Gang song "Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo". Record execs had to swap "Charlie" and "Uniform" in order for it to get any airplay, because people (especially uptight Moral Guardians) love to have Fun with Acronyms.
- Also note that this is not just an acronym, but also the Military Phonetic Code for the actual spelling of the F-bomb.
- The same band's album Hooray for Boobies was sold in some stores with an altered cover and the title shortened to simply "Hooray."
- "Too Drunk To Fuck" by The Dead Kennedys actually placed on British radio charts. Of course, the DJs had to refer to it as "the latest song by The Dead Kennedys."
- Quite a few Dead Kennedys songs fall under this, with titles like "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" and "Let's Lynch the Landlord".
- The Birthday Party's live EP Drunk on the Pope's Blood.
- Later in Nick Cave's career, Grinderman's song "No Pussy Blues"
- Wayne/Jayne County's "(If You Don't Want to Fuck Me Baby, Baby) Fuck Off".
- The band Rainbow Butt Monkeys. They later became Finger Eleven, which really isn't much cleaner if you think about it.
- The Nine Inch Nails song "Starfuckers Inc." was usually referred to as "Starlovers Inc." in polite company. The bowdlerized single version changed it to "Starsuckers Inc".
- Adrian Sherwood's remix of "March Of The Pigs", featured on the "Closer" single, was titled "March of the Fuckheads".
- The hip-hop group Niggaz With Attitude, also known as N.W.A. See also their album Niggaz4life - the album title appears in mirrored writing on the cover, so it's also sometimes referred to as Efil4zaggin.
- The Beatles' Remix Album Let It Be...Naked. Often called "Naked" for short and to differentiate it from the original Let It Be. This trope makes it easier, alas, for "Naked" not to exist.
- Warren Zevon's song "My Shit's Fucked Up". The song itself is about the narrator's terminal cancer.
- "Niggerslut", "Rape the Angel", and "Kill All the Faggots" by Demoniac.
- "Fuck This Shit" by Belle and Sebastian. Also counts as some weird form of Soundtrack Dissonance, because it's actually a relaxing, summery instrumental.
- Ditto (on both counts) "Judy Is a Dickslap"
- Brazilian example: Rita Lee, "Tudo Vira Bosta" ("All Becomes Shit").
- Another ones from there: Ultraje a Rigor, "Filho da Puta" ("son of a bitch"), and Raimundos, "Esporrei na Manivela" ("I Ejaculated on a Handle")
- Marilyn Manson has plenty of songs and albums like this, with to help of some puns.
- For album titles, Antichrist Superstar, Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death) and The Golden Age of Grotesque.
- Portrait of an American Family (which had a punny and awkward working title, The Manson Family Album) has "Cake and Sodomy", "Organ Grinder", "Dope Hat", and "Snake Eyes and Sissies".
- Smells Like Children has "May Cause Discoloration of the Urine and Feces", "Everlasting Cocksucker", "Fuck Frankie", "Shitty Chicken Gang Bang", "Dance of the Dope Hats", "Diary of a Dope Fiend", "Scans, Guns, and Peanut Butter", "Kiddie Grinder"... pretty much every track on the album counts.
- Songs from Antichrist Superstar include "Tied Up, Dried, and Dead to the World", "Deformography", and "Angel With The Scabbed Wings".
- Third album Mechanical Animals has "The Dope Show" and "I Don't Like The Drugs (But The Drugs Like Me)".
- The album appropriately called ''The Golden Age of Grotesque' has "This Is The New Shit", the Title Track, and "Slutgarden".
- Eat Me, Drink Me (which might be awkward, specially if you don't pick up on the Alice in Wonderland reference) has "Mutilation is The Sincerest Form of Flattery", "The Red Carpet Grave" and "You and Me and The Devil Make Three".
- The High End of Low has "Pretty as A Swastika", "I Wanna Kill You Like They Do In The Movies", and of course "Arma-Goddamn-Motherfucking-Geddon", which was made solely to troll the label by creating an obvious single that they couldn't market.
- The latest album, Born Villain, gives us "Lay Down Your Goddamn Arms", "Pistol Whipped" and "Murderers Are Getting Prettier Every Day".
- Remixes even sometimes get in on the act, with titles like "Next Motherfucker". Oh, and "Baboon Rape Party" from one of the singles.
- Patti Smith's "Pissing in a River" from Radio Ethiopia. Try telling someone that there's a poignantly beautiful, heart-wrenching song by that name, and they'll probably laugh at you.... until they actually listen to it. Wow! (Look it up on YouTube. You're welcome.)
- Patti Smith was also responsible for "Hard Nipples," "Piss Factory," and "Rock n' Roll Nigger."
- John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "Woman Is The Nigger Of The World", where the title was regarded as a powerful social statement.
- Averted by The Offspring's song "Stuff Is Messed Up", which despite its title features the chorus "Shit is fucked up".
- Van Halen's album For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge isn't an awkward title in and of itself, but since the title puts one in the right frame of mind to notice the acronym...
- The title is itself a reference to a popular folk etymology for the F-word.
- Nas was planning to call his 2008 album Nigger, but due to stores refusing to stock it, it ended up being released with No Title. Meanwhile, Nas also put a mixtape online, called The Niggertape.
- Discussion of the album when Nas was interviewed on The Colbert Report led to the coining of the word "reggin".
- Stone Temple Pilots were called Shirley Temple's Pussy for a short time before Executive Meddling made them change it.
- The Venetian Snares album "Winnipeg Is A Frozen Shithole," an awkward enough title in its own right, contains a song titled, "Die Winnipeg Die Die Die Fuckers Die." Ouch.
- Venetian Snares later came out with an album that's awkward to discuss for quite a different reason: the album
, and all its tracks, are titled in Hungarian. It's not awkward for Hungarian speakers, of course, but for everyone else...
- Venetian Snares later came out with an album that's awkward to discuss for quite a different reason: the album
- The band The The is a bit difficult to discuss.
- Michael McIntyre wondered what would happen if you tried to discuss The The in Yorkshire, where the word "the" is reduced to "t'" (as in t'Internet).
- T'thee, of course. Just like certain American accents would render it as "thuh thee".
- Michael McIntyre wondered what would happen if you tried to discuss The The in Yorkshire, where the word "the" is reduced to "t'" (as in t'Internet).
- The drag queen Vaginal Cream Davis.
- Somewhat more politely than most of the above, the Pet Shop Boys named their first album "Please," because they liked the idea of forcing people to ask, "Could I have the Pet Shop Boys' new album, 'Please'?"
- Parodied in This is Spın̈al Tap (surprise, surprise) with a fragment of an unfinished song- a very sweet, lyrical piano solo. The name? "Lick My Love Pump".
- Real-life example/inspiration: Frank Zappa, who would intentionally give beautiful instrumentals titles like "Sexual Harassment in the Workplace", "G Spot Tornado", "What's The Ugliest Part Of Your Body?" and "I Promise Not to Come in Your Mouth".
- The Motion City Soundtrack song, "L.G. Fuad" is example enough given what it stands for ("Let's get fucked up and die"). But, to go further, the song begins with the titular lyric, followed by, "I'm speaking figuratively of course." Once you think about the figurative meanings of "die" ... Yeah.
- Jimmy Buffett's "Why Don't We Get Drunk (And Screw)" was considered a novelty song and was a jukebox favorite for many years. When there are children in the audience, Buffett sings "Why Don't We Get Lunch In School."
- And there's always "(I'd Just Like To Fuck You) One More Time" and the rest of David Allan Coe's "underground" repertoire.
- In, 1967, The Monkees made a song called "Randy Scouse Git"note (a phrase the band had heard on Brit Com Till Death Us do Part), which went uncensored in the US ...because most of us don't know Britsh slang. Everywhere else in the world, the tune was released as "Alternate Title".
- There's a Japanese pop-rock band named Porno Graffiti. It comes from ''Pornograffiti''
, an album by the (American) band Extreme; it's a portmanteau!
- Nirvana's "Rape Me" from In Utero (labeled as "Waif Me") and it's B-side "Moist Vagina". Also, "Territorial Pissings" and the B-sides album Incesticide.
- The Smashing Pumpkins' "Silverfuck" (labeled as "Silvercrank") from Siamese Dream.
- Metallica and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra once teamed up to produce a somewhat splendiferous live album. The title was S&M, as in "Symphony and Metallica". Try telling people the S&M version of this one is great. Try it!
- And of course, they wanted to call their first album Metal Up Your Ass. An Executive Veto, so they named it after the bassist's reaction, Kill 'Em All.
- The name of Big Black's second album, Songs About Fucking. Exactly What It Says on the Tin, albeit in the wrongest way possible.
- Jello Biafra took advantage of this after the Dead Kennedys were put on trial for obscenity. Following their acquittal, he refused to shake the DA's hand, and then gave him a copy of Songs About Fucking by Big Black.
- Not actually a case now, but the names of Black Sabbath and Judas Priest got Moral Guardians in quite a stir back in the day.
- Serj Tankian's "Beethoven's Cunt", which is also a Non-Appearing Title.
- In addition to his band, "The Flying Cunts of Chaos"
- "Beethoven's Cunt" is the only song in the Rock Band downloadable content library with a censored title, appearing as "Beethoven's C***" on the menu.
- Nelly Furtado's "Shit on the Radio (Remember the Days)" (single is titled "...on the Radio")
- Guns N' Roses named a leg of their Use Your Illusion Tour as "Get In The Ring Motherfucker - Round II" (a lyric of one of their songs).
- Tori Amos' "Fat Slut"
- KISS has "Burn Bitch Burn", which is one of the only times they ever actually swear.
- The Double Entendre titles might count ("Love Gun", "Naked City", "Down On Your Knees", "Lick It Up", "Dance All Over Your Face", "Young and Wasted", "Not For The Innocent", "Take It Off", "Seduction of The Innocent" and plenty more).
- Neil Young's song "Fuckin' Up" was written "F* !#in' Up" on the Ragged Glory album. Young says he wrote the song — a loud, off-the-wall rocker about relationships — hoping to get a warning sticker from the Parents Music Resource Center. They didn't give him one. It's rumoured that one of his collaborations with Pearl Jam, "I Got Id", was originally named "I Got Shit" (because that's really in the lyrics).
- "I Got Shit" is the actual title of the song - "I Got Id" was a one-time alternate title for the "Merkinball" single.
- Adrian Legg's "Pass The Valium" yields a predictable request at his live shows.
- Liz Phair's "Hot White Cum", "Fuck and Run", and "Shitloads of Money".
- Nazareth's Hair of the Dog (both song and album) was originally "Son of a Bitch", and the new title is a pun on this ("Heir of the dog").
- There's a conceptual band called "Fuck Your Stupid Civilization."
- On the not-filthy-but-really-awkward end of the scale, there's the band "!!!". Apparently pronounced "chk-chk-chk".
- Similarly, there's the rapper A who chose that name to make it as hard as possible for people to find his work on Napster.
- A is also the name of a British Alternative Rock band - it's unknown as to whether they were also deliberately making their music hard to search for online.
- There's also Meshuggah's album 'Nothing', which probably made some discussions of it resemble an Abbott and Costello routine. In Hebrew and Yiddish, their name may also count - it means "crazy".
- The blink-182 album Take Off Your Pants and Jacket
- Peaches has loads of them. Some examples include "Slippery Dick", "Diddle My Skittle", "Suck and Let Go", and of course, "Fuck the Pain Away".
- As well as album titles that include Fatherfucker and Impeach My Bush.
- R.E.M. subverts this with "Star Me Kitten", which is said in the song as "Fuck me kitten".
- Holy Fuck
- There's a reggaeton singer called Nigga, who's not black but a Hispanic from Panama. When he started releasing music in the USA, he changed his name to Flex.
- Fuck Buttons
- Jackie-O Motherfucker
- Fuzzass
- Machine Gun Fellatio, who brought us such classics as "Pussytown", "Butter My Arse With a Pigeon" and "Mutha Fukka On a Motorcylcle"
- "I Might Be a Cunt, But I'm Not a Fucking Cunt", "Fuck 'Em, Fuck 'Em - The Lot of 'Em!", "Defecate on My Face", "The Penis is Mightier than the Sword" by TISM
- "I Sucked A Lot of Cock to Get Where I Am" by Regurgitator
- "We Hate You South African Bastards" by Microdisney
- I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass by Yo La Tengo
- The title of Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica was chosen to be awkward — there are clashing consonants in every word. The alternate title Mousetrap Replica, which does a similar thing, was used as part of the title of the song "The Blimp" which appears on the album.
- While we're at it, Trout Mask 's follow up album Lick My Decals Off, Baby is almost always referred to as Decals when talking about it to people because it guarantees funny looks when said in real life.
- Even Britney Spears has one with "If U Seek Amy."
- In case you don't get that one, imagine that the title is spelling something out. F-U-C-K Me.
- A big band put out a record called "If You See Kay". In the 1940s.
- The The Bonzo Dog Band have a best of called "The Bestiality of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band"
- The Wildhearts have songs called "Thunderfuck", "Pissjoy", and "Shut Your Fucking Mouth And Use Your Fucking Brain" among others. (They got one S-word onto Top Of The Pops simply by censoring the lyric sheet and not singing too clearly.) They also released an album called "P.H.U.Q."
- "What the name of Lynyrd Skynyrd's first album?" "It's (Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd)." "That's what I said!"
- The Scissor Sisters, especially once it's learned that not only is there only one woman, but she's the only straight permanent member. This however, is toned down from their original name (the end result of an arms race of vulgarity) "Dead Lesbian and the Fibrillating Scissor Sisters."
- GWAR, or most of their songs anyway: "Fucking an Animal", "Sex Cow", "Sexecutioner", "Preschool Prostitute", "Bring Back the Bomb", "Gonna Kill U", "Knife in Yer Guts", and "Black and Huge". and, while we're at it...
- Their name is thought by some to be an acronym for God, What an Awful Racket. The band, however, have denied this, and said that it "doesn't actually mean anything". Their earliest performances had them billed as Gwaaarrrgghhlllgh, which would be awkward due to being The Unpronounceable.
- Cannibal Corpse, with song names such as "Gallery of Suicides", "Meat Hook Sodomy", "Fucked With a Knife", "I Cum Blood", "Edible Autopsy", "Skull Full Of Maggots", "Butchered at Birth" (also an album title), "Addicted to Vaginal Skin", "Necropedophile", "Entrails Ripped From a Virgin's Cunt, and so on in this vein.
- Cee-Lo Green's "Fuck You" made for an interesting Grammy nominations list in 2010.
- The Cows' Sexy Pee Story, which has a title track as well as a song called "Shitbeard".
- Test Icicles, anyone?
- El-P has a song called "Tasmanian Pain Coaster"
- The song "Constellation Dirtbike Head" by Tobacco
- "Shit Towne" by Live. The band's Google-resistant name also counts.
- My Penis is Made of Dogshit. What kind of music do they play? Mostly acoustic grindcore, with a bit of musique concrète.
- Pornopop. And there are two bands with this name!
- Cock and Ball Torture.
- Sam The Sham & The Pharaohs' "I Couldn't Spell !!*@!". (The chorus goes "I'd have wrote you a letter but I couldn't spell (Bronx Cheer)."
- "Mother !*!*!* Boogie", an instrumental boogie-woogie piece by Mungo Jerry.
- The band "Gary Glitter's Hard Drive," now a bunch of practical unknowns.
- The Broken Penis Orchestra.
- Mindless Self Indulgence. A number of their songs also qualify; one of their most popular songs is "Faggot", and one song is simply "Stupid Motherfucker".
- Mudhoney's single "You Stupid Asshole". There's also "Run Shithead Run" from the soundtrack of With Honors: They titled it that way because they hoped their submission to the soundtrack would be rejected, but it wasn't.
- A non-profane example would be The 6ths and their albums Wasps' Nests and Hynacinths and Thistles - Stephin Merritt has said he specifically chose the band's name and album titles because they would be difficult to say aloud (especially if one has a lisp).
- The Bloody Beetroots give us "Fucked from Above 1985."
- Believe it or not, there is actually a band called Child Pornography.
- In a different kind of awkward: Their second album is titled "The Beatles" and bears a blank white cover.
- Japanese Torture Comedy Hour, a noise act featuring members of Agoraphobic Nosebleed.
- Richard Ramirez (yes, that's his given name) has a real name that was unintentionally awkward and a lot of bands/nicknames that weren't: Priest In Shit, Black Leather Jesus, Anal Drill, Fuck Patrol, Last Rape, 12yr Old Proud Parent, Naked Girl Killed In Park, the list goes on and on...
- While the name is relatively mild compared to some, there's The Urinals, who later changed their name to the less awkward to discuss 100 Flowers.
- Joy Electric has an album called The Tick Tock Treasury. As he described it at a concert on May 1, 2003:
Ronnie Martin: I had a new record come out two weeks ago, and it's called the, uh, The Tick Tock Treasury. And, uh, that is the, uh, the fourth time I've had the guts to say that title in front of people. You know. Sometimes it takes a lot, you know? You take the risks, you pay the price.
- The Fags. They're actually a perfectly accessible Power Pop band who happened to choose a name that pretty much guarantees them no mainstream radio play. They also played on the other, less offensive meaning of their name by calling an album Light 'Em Up.
- Atlanta rapper Tity Boi, though he eventually started going by the more "family friendly" moniker 2 Chainz.
- Perhaps in mockery of these tendencies, there is a hip-hop musician who records under the name "Cusswords."
- Anthony Shaw, of such acts as Haemorrhaging Fetus, Teenage Strangler, She Said No, A Machine Called Orgasm, and Albert Fish Is My Hero.
- The Polish Thrash Metal band Acid Drinkers, who have a song called "When You Say to Me 'Fuck You', Say it Louder". The chorus of the song is pretty much that.
- They have also a song called "Become a Bitch".
- Dominick Fernow of Prurient is also part of Exploring Jezebel, whose albums and tracks all have very long and/or awkward titles involving male feminization, objectification and masochism.
- The Fucking Champs. They originally wanted to be simply The Champs, but found that the name was taken (by the group best known for "Tequila"). Additionally, the band Trans Am did a couple of collaborative albums with The Fucking Champs - once as Trans Champs, and once as the somewhat more awkward to discuss Fucking Am.
- Albeit to a lesser degree, Joy Division's name was this. They were named after the prostitution wing of a Nazi concentration camp from Ka-tzetnik 135633's novel The House Of Dolls
. This often led to fascist fanatics attending Joy Division gigs, and the band are known to have often spat on said fascists in disgust. The fact the follow-up band to Joy Division after Ian Curtis' suicide were named New Order didn't really help matters.
- One of the songs off punk band Pairs' second full length: "A Surgeon At A Hospital In Shanghai Severed A Nerve In My Groin." It's a Non-Indicative Name, much like several of the others in said album.
- The New Pornographers. Unlike most of the bands listed here, they've only produced one song that could be considered sexually explicit, and that's only by their own description: "Entering White Cecilia". The title is exactly what it sounds like, but you'd never guess it from the rest of the lyrics.
- My Dick, a novelty band who cover popular songs and change certain lyrics to "dick" or "my dick". This of course results in awkward song titles like "Don't Go Breaking My Dick" and "Dancing In My Dick".
- Rapeman. Steve Albini also confirmed that it's sort of a Shout-Out to The Rapeman, as already mentioned in the anime section.
- There's a canon in B flat major by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart entitled "Leck mich im Arsch" (literally "Lick me in the arse".)
- Morning Musume's 53rd single very nearly was released under the title "Buresuto" — which is short for "Brainstorming", but when said aloud, brings to mind something else. However, in the end the single was named "Brainstorming" after all.
- The Crucifucks: (a.k.a. "Scribbles") When your opening bands consist of mostly high school kids at all ages shows, you need a back-up name for the fliers. After getting signed to Alternative Tentacles, The Crucifucks were the opening act.
- The Pieces Of Shit, who are Talking Heads' Music/David Byrne and Will Oldham collaborating on songs for the film This Must Be the Place.
- There is one artist called Fucky Fuck and the Fuckers; their only song is called FUCK THE FUCKIN FUCK.
- The final studio album Badfinger recorded for Apple Records in 1973 was titled Ass. A painting of a mule walking towards a carrot on a stick (a Take That! at their financial troubles) as the sun sets ahead was featured on the album cover.
- Early Skinless albums would name about half their songs this way. Memorable examples include "Pool of Stool", "Tug of War Intestines", and the crowner, "Tampon Lollipops".
- Venezuelan band Los Amigos Invisibles have a song named "El Disco Anal" ("disco" here meaning both "music album" and the genre from the 70s). It's a cleverly worded petition of a man to have anal sex with his lover for the very first time, without actually using naughty words or specifying the act, set to disco music. When the thing became a radio single, they cut the Title Drop in the beginning and contorted to call the song "El disco" or "Disco A". Also, a Korean band covered the song and renamed it "Disco Amor".
- Math rock band Giraffes? Giraffes! is already an example, but most of their track titles are either surreal or long, usually both. The most awkward of which is most likely, "I am S/H(im)e[r] as You am S/H(im)e[r] As You Are Me And We Am I and I Are All Our Together: Our Collective Consciousness' Psychogenic Fugue."
- Gangsta Bitch Barbie, who eventually became Nullset. Oddly enough the name was changed not because it was offensive, but because it infringed on Mattel's trademark.
- Meatloaf collaborator Jim Steinman claims to have been in a band in college called The Clitoris That Thought It Was a Puppy. Meatloaf doesn't believe him. A popular misconception is that it was his high school band, which would put it somewhere in the mid 60s!
- Shitdisco. There's probably a bit of Self-Deprecation in their name, as they're a Dance-Punk band who claim to have some unironic disco influences.
- German Punk Rock band Big Balls And The Great White Idiot, who also have the notable song title "I'm Singing To You With My Finger In Your Ass".
- "Leviticus: Faggot" by Meshell Ndegeocello.
- Leftöver Crack is a fairly mild example, but with song and album titles like "Fuck World Trade", "One Dead Cop" and "Baby-punchers". Played straighter with Stza's side project "Star Fucking Hipsters".
- Shit Robot.
- Loverboy depending on the context.
- Steely Dan is pretty much named after a strap-on dildo from Naked Lunch.
- Abörted Hitler Cöck, who probably have the worst band name ever. As if that wasn't enough their songs and albums tend to be full of Black Comedy Rape, Toilet Humor, Vulgar Humor, and other related tropes. Wanna listen to "Using Rapebabies as Riot Shields
" from "Erections at an Animal Autopsy"? This even extends to the band's members, a pair of masked luchadores named El Bukkake and El Fucko.
- The early-80s British anarcho-punk band Flux of Pink Indians are now chiefly remembered for the Intentionally Awkward Title of their album The Fucking Cunts Treat Us Like Pricks, which led to an unsuccessful prosecution of a record shop for criminal obscenity.
- Alphaville titled their fourth album Prostitute even though the word doesn't appear in any of the song lyrics or song titles.
- John Zorn has instrumental tracks called: "Igneous Ejaculation", "Fuck the Facts" (from "Naked City" (1990), "Perfume of a Critic's Burning Flesh", "Jazz Snob Eat Shit", "Pigfucker" (from "Torture Garden" (1990)), "Sweat, Sperm + Blood", "Coprahagist Rituals"(from "Heretic" (1992)), "Sex Fiend" (from Radio (1993)), "Guts of a Virgin", "Handjob" and "Purgatory of Fiery Vulvas" (1991) with Painkiller.
- He also has an instrumental track called "Bone Crusher" on an album called Music for Children.
- Kesha has performed as part of a band called Yeast Infection.
- "Angels of Porn" by Nicole Dollanganger.
- The independent music label Fire Records titled a compilation I Wouldn't Piss On It If It Was On Fire. The title is normally an expression meaning you strongly dislike someone/something, but using it in the context of a record label called Fire implies the opposite.
- "Our Lawyer Made Us Change the Name of This Song So We Wouldn't Get Sued" by Fall Out Boy.
- An Arkansas band had the name Ashtray Babyhead until signing a major-label deal and renaming themselves The Kicks.
- The Pop Group has an album called For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?, and their best-known single is called "We Are All Prostitutes".
- Why did Primitive Radio Gods end up as a One-Hit Wonder? Might have had something to do with the follow-up single to "Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in My Hand" being called "Motherfucker" (complete with several Title Drops in the lyrics).
- Aphex Twin. The worst bit isn't the fact that he has songs called things like "Cunt", "Death Fuck" and "Come On You Slags". Or even that he has songs called things like "Backdoor.Spybooter.A" and ""PWSteal.Bancos.Q". The worst bit is that he has songs called things like "Kladfvgbung Micshk" (one of a few in an album with titles in Cornish!), "Beskhu3epnm", and "s950tx16wasr10". Loads of them. Not forgetting the one that's a mathematical equation, or the entire album where all the titles are blurry photographs.
- The Kendrick Lamar album DAMN.
- Alex Chilton's album Loose Shoes And Tight Pussy, named after a crudely-insulting jibe about African-Americans that cost American politician Earl Butz his job
. The American edition of the album was re-titled Set.
- The Cure mostly avoid this trope, but one of their 80s albums is called Pornography. Have fun asking for that in a record store, or telling someone you downloaded it...
- Another 80s Goth band went by the name of Sex Gang Children.
- Noise Rock band AIDS Wolf. They've given differing explanations of the name: 1) there was a supposed Urban Legend about AIDS-infected wolves attacking pets, which would then pass it on to humans, 2) they wanted to make a convoluted Shout-Out to two of their influences, An Albatross and The Sick Lipstick, by putting both an animal and an illness in their name, or 3) it's "a message that we as humans must take care for our animal siblings as their health is a barometer of our own survival".
- The British/Scottish indie rock band Dogs Die In Hot Cars.
- "The Shark's Own Private Fuck" by Sunny Day Real Estate, which is a Non-Appearing Title.
- "Lo Boob Oscillator" by Stereolab. Ironically, one of their most radio friendly songs, if only DJs didn't have to announce the title.
- Knife Party's song "Micropenis" is an example of this.
- Chris Janson's Take a Drunk Girl Home is about a man escorting a drunk woman to her house, turning on her hallway lights, leaving her keys and his number on the counter, and locking the door behind him. There's the line, "Let her sleep all alone". All-in-all a good message, but many people automatically recoil when first hearing the title due to a belief it'll be a song ignoring the fact the fact consent can't be given in such a situation and encouraging and glorifying sexual violence against a woman too intoxicated to defend herself.
- Some band names can create a Who's on First? situation, including the band actually named The Who, as well as Yes and The Band. "I went to see The Band last night." "Which band?" "The Band." "Yes, but which band?" etc.
- Melvins' Alive At The Fucker Club: It's a Live Album but the venue wasn't actually called that. Topped off with a roadkill dog on the cover artwork
- The Weezer song "Zombie Bastards".
- Green Day's Father of All Motherfuckers (the cover has a strategically placed unicorn
◊ to make sure it's "presentable").
- Lana Del Rey's "Fucked My Way to the Top", along with her sixth studio album Norman Fucking Rockwell!.
- Diarrhea Planet, a Garage Punk band hailing from Nashville, Tennessee.
- Smoke All Day, from Hawaii's Ka'ikena Scanlan. It's not about drugs. In fact, it's very specifically anti-drug, especially meth.
"Smoke meat, not drugs."
- Raging Slab released albums titled Assmaster and (pronounced ēat-shït) - the latter also being a Shout-Out to (Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd) by Lynyrd Skynyrd, a band they were sometimes compared to.
- The jan Misali album (disambiguation)
was named that way as a joking reference to how That Other Wiki does disambiguation pages. They later realized why most people don't do that:
(trying to find things people are saying about my new album) hmm. maybe naming this something confusing and ambiguous as a joke was a bad idea - The Sugarcubes had a song called "Fucking in Rhythm and Sorrow". It's a Non-Appearing Title; the closest the song gets to swearing is an exclamation of "Oh my God and Jesus as well!".
- The B-Side to the title track to Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was a song called "Screw You", retitled "Young Man's Blues" in America to avoid offense.
- Limp Bizkit intentionally named their band after a really gross masturbation activity to drive non-fans away. In the words of frontman Fred Durst, "A lot of people pick up the disc and go, 'Limp Bizkit. Oh, they must suck.' Those are the people that we don't even want listening to our music." A few of their album titles also invoke this, namely Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water and Still Sucks (which, of course, can also be read as "Limp Bizkit Still Sucks").
- Steppenwolf have a song called "Fag", though it's an instrumental piece and named after the chords of the song (F, A, and G). One fan theory holds that this was also meant as kind of a prank on radio DJs - since it's instrumental, you could play it on air without causing offense, but then a listener might call in to ask what the song was called...
- The Prodigy's "Smack My Bitch Up" (the title is one of the two lines heard in the song's recurring sample).
- Goreshit
- Furry band Pepper Coyote's album Blast Radius is filled with this, containing songs that flip between extended double entendres and actual songs about the acts described. The worst ones include 'No Cock Like Horse Cock' and 'Step On My Face (And Tell Me You Love Me)'.
- Buzzcocks' song "Oh Shit!". The band name itself was also deliberate double entendre: It stemmed from a review of the tv series Rock Follies that used the headline "It's the buzz, cock!", with "buzz" being the excitement of live music, and "cock" being Northern English slang for "friend", but the band were amused by the Accidental Innuendo about adult toys in that context, and member Pete Shelley had once worked in a sex shop.
- The British and Japanese clothing line, 'Fcuk' (French Connection United Kingdom). In parody of this, a British company making cute wooden ornaments of wetland birds calls itself 'Dcuk'.
- Derwent College at the University of York also sells 'DCUK' merchandise - the university's symbol is a mallard duck. As the campus is built around a large artificial lake, ducks and other waterfowl are a common sight and feature in any number of popular urban legends and memes.
- When a French Connection UK store was opening, they put up large signs in the windows read "FCUK SOON" (leading to complaints). A pub around the corner called the Five & Lime put up their own signs reading "fluk now".
- Someone's selling "CNUT" shirts celebrating the Danish king.
- The Sedgwick Club, Cambridge University's geology student society, uses the abbreviation SCUK.
- Mixed drinks. Someone decided you need to be either vaguely embarrassed or stupidly impressed with your own wit when you ask the bartender to give you Sex on the Beach, a Screaming Orgasm, a Slow Comfortable Screwnote , Fuck Me Hard, etc.
- Lampshaded in the Yahoo Serious movie Reckless Kelly when Kelly goes into a bar and asks for a Cocksucking Cowboy—and gets one. He opts for a glass of water instead.
- There used to exist a minor league hockey team in Macon, Georgia. The name of the team? Why the Macon Whoopee
of course!
- Eighty percent of Americans are not allowed to repeat the titles of most Richard Pryor albums. These albums were up for Grammy awards most years, which must have made the ceremonies interesting.
- Quite a few guitar effects pedal manufacturers do this, probably inspired by Electro-Harmonix—proud designers of the famous Big Muff, not to mention the Bass Balls, the Black Finger, and the Golden Throat Mouth Tube!
- The Young Conservatives rebranded themselves as Conservative Future in 1997 after William Hague became party leader. Some bright spark decided to put out literature using a "CFUK" (Conservative Future UK) branding. Given how well the party was regarded at the time (not very highly, to say the least), it backfired. FCUK actually threatened to sue them over the similarity
. The Liberal Democrats put out flyers saying "CFUK are a bunch of AWNKERS". Oh, the irony.
- Starbucks recently began selling "petites", including one called the "Red Velvet Whoopie Pie". Baristas usually just call them "Red Velvets".
- The drug flavoxate, a urinary antispasmodic, was marketed under the name "Urispas" (pronounced "you're a spaz"). Try telling this to someone who's already trying not to pee...
- Similarly, there's a digestive-tract drug named AcipHex. The homophone ("Ass Effects") is way too blatant to be accidental.
- The New Zealand pizza chain Hell
. They specialise in spicy pizzas.
- There's a town in Austria called Fucking. People keep stealing the town's name sign, too. Taking advantage to this, a beer brewer built a factory there to make pale lager, which in German is called Hell. So now you can buy your beer bottles of Fucking Hell.
- Soap And Glory, a toiletries company, have a lip gloss called 'Sexy Mother Pucker' and a body wash called 'Orangeasm'.
- Programming geeks the world over have probably had trouble discussing a certain minimalist programming language
.
- There was a scheduler for Linux called the Brain Fuck Scheduler (no relation to the Brainfuck programming language) written by Con Kolivas. The name likely reflects frustration at kernel development politics that had put an end to an earlier scheduler by the same author called Completely Fair Scheduler.
- The most likely explanation for the GNU Image Manipulation Program.
- Ditto for File System Consistency Check, the common name for the program used to fix corrupted data on UNIX systems. Not only is the name unpronounceable, but it's only one letter off from a major swear word. And if it fails to save your data, then you're fsck'ed.
- NESticle by Bloodlust Software. Playing Nintendo Entertainment System games, it was the first publicly available freeware video game emulator, hailed as a pioneer in the video game emulation scene, and has been cited as being instrumental in starting the video game music genre and console modding communities, as well as introducing a lot of newcomers to the emulation scene as it was easy to use and would run at very high speeds even on low-end machines with 486 and earlier processors running Windows 95 and DOS. All that, and it was called NESticle by The Fecal Lord. And just in case that was too subtle, the windows icon was a drawing of a ballsack.
- "Lolicon" is the name of a useful homebrew application for overclocking the PlayStation Vita. Be real careful googling it. Then again, considering the kind of games the Vita got later in its run, the name isn't exactly ill-fitting.
- WTF with Marc Maron doesn't even try to hide that the initialism in the name is the well-known abbreviation for "What The Fuck?" This fact is made even more amusing when you consider the number of very distinguished guests who have been interviewed on the show, even including a sitting President of the United States.
- Cameron Esposito's stand up comedy special Rape Jokes. The title is accurate, albeit in a different way than one might anticipate - her official site bills it as "a standup special about sexual assault from a survivor’s perspective".
- Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally's "Summer of 69: No Apostrophe" was about their sex life.
- The roleplaying supplement for BESM titled "Cute And Fuzzy Cockfighting Seizure Monsters". Even though the phrase refers to roosters and the book is about Mons, many bookstores refused to carry it because of the title. The authors ended up producing a different edition without the "Cockfighting", and selling the original version only to specialty stores.
- The acronym "BESM" is one letter away from, well, something else.
- Magic: The Gathering's joke set Unhinged has several, including Assquach, City of Ass, and Necro-Impotence.
- The title of Panty Explosion is intended as a parody of the Word Salad Title school of anime naming, but ends up invoking this trope as well.
- The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas has occasionally run into advertising woes.
- Foreskin's Lament. It's about a man nicknamed Foreskin because he's small, useless and nobody would miss him if we went away. It's actually quite a moving performance, but trying to advertise for it is damn near impossible.
- A stage version by Douglas Rodger of the case against Evelyn Dick for the murder of her husband John, whose torso was found missing its arms, legs, and head, was titled How Could You Mrs. Dick? This title is alleged to have been taken from a schoolyard rhyme of the time, which naturally is rather less subtle about the anatomical parallel.
- "People say it's quite unlikely the two of us should stick! But I just tell them, Hey! It's Me and My Dick!"
- Stephen Adly Guirgis's 2011 play The Motherfucker with the Hat, which is often censored as The Motherf**ker with the Hat.
- Once Upon a Mattress is a musical comedy retelling the tale of "The Princess and the Pea". It's less raunchy than the title suggests.
- Ruddigore was meant as an example of this. Ruddigore was the Bowdlerized title; the original, scandalous title was (cover the kids' eyes!) Ruddygore—which, a combination of "ruddy" and "gore", is evocative of the rude word "bloody".
- The 1990s British play Shopping and Fucking, by Mark Ravenhill, sometimes referred to in more sensitive publications with Symbol Swearing or simply as Shopping and...
- "Totally Fucked" and "The Bitch of Living" from Spring Awakening.
- John Ford, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, of which The Other Wiki says:
The play's treatment of the subject of incest made it one of the most controversial works in English literature. The play was entirely omitted from an 1831 collected edition of Ford's plays; its title has often been changed to something euphemistic such as Giovanni and Annabella or 'Tis Pity or The Brother and Sister.
- Urinetown is also an example. Lampshade Hung in the opening song: "How about a bad title? That could kill a show pretty good."
- The Vagina Monologues is an entirely intentional example as a show highlighting the experiences of women in hard situations. (Including a very controversial one about a teenage girl who is fed alcohol and then raped by an adult woman, and closes the monologue with the line, "If it was rape, it was good rape.")
- In an interview about this play on the Today show, Jane Fonda said, "I was asked to do a monologue called 'Cunt'." Yes, she said that on live television. And yes, there is a monologue that is nothing but Country Matters.
- Miss Ensler herself then followed up with her story about "worrying about getting vagina out of [her] mouth". She meant that she was hesitant about saying the word at first... One imagines that somewhere, a stage manager was screaming for a commercial.
- Some productions sell promotional buttons with "I Love Vagina" written on them.
- In an interview about this play on the Today show, Jane Fonda said, "I was asked to do a monologue called 'Cunt'." Yes, she said that on live television. And yes, there is a monologue that is nothing but Country Matters.
- AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity. The developers could have named it something more sensible like "Xtreme Base Jumping", but then they wouldn't have been able to say "This is my game, it's called AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!" This continues with two other games of theirs, titled "1... 2... 3... KICK IT! (Drop That Beat Like an Ugly Baby)" and the less awkward but still hard to talk about in public Drunken Robot Pornography (which isn't a pornographic game in the slightest).
- The title of the games in the Akiba's Trip series is written as AKIBA'STRIP on the box art, with no space between the words. And, yes, it is a game about taking people's clothes off. (Because they're vampires that are destroyed by sunlight, you see...)
- Big Mutha Truckers, anyone?
- What about Clustertruck?
- Dwarf Fortress, full name: Slaves to Armok: God of Blood - Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress: Histories of X and Y.
- Gay Sex!, an iPhone card game. Which rather notoriously rose to the top spot of GameFAQs' most-visited games list, meaning it was on the front page for all to see, and didn't show any sign of dropping, because curiosity brought new people to the page all the time. It was eventually removed from the site's otherwise comprehensive games list for...fairly self-evident reasons. Although this is often considered a blow for both free speech and gay rights on the site.
- Mew-Genics: This isn't the first time Edmund McMillen has created a game with an eyebrow-raising title based on Nazi ideals, but it's by far the largest. (The other game, if it can even be called that, amounts to a random generator of faces made as you type into a box. It's called Facist!)
- The Ratchet & Clank games are well-known for their innuendo-loving subtitles, which are often changed for the European release. What makes them especially clever is that they all tie into a major story or gameplay element.
- The second game started the trend with Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando, referencing Ratchet's status as a Commando for Megacorp. It got changed to Locked and Loaded for some European regions, but sometimes that wasn't enough and the subtitle would be dropped entirely.
- Lest audiences thought that was an accident, the third game was subtitled Up Your Arsenal as a reference to the weapons ability to upgrade to V5 (it also has one of the largest arsenals of any Ratchet title: 20 weapons). This one was so bad that there was never a replacement subtitle for it, the other option simply being Ratchet & Clank 3 (it was originally named Rear Assault. You decide which is more suggestive).
- Deadlocked has connotations of bondage, the European subtitle being Gladiator. One refers to the gladiator show the heroes are forced into, and the other refers to the collars that keeps them in line.
- This was followed up with Size Matters (a PSP title that amusingly got ported to the PS2), which prominently features shrink rays.
- Tools of Destruction likely refers to, ahem, a certain body part, as well as the Dimensionator.
- Quest for Booty had pirates as a major story theme, in addition to Ratchet's search for Clank. This was one of the pitched names for Tools of Destruction.
- A Crack In Time, with a story based around time travel, had the Working Title of Clock Blockers. It's not surprising to see why Sony gave the Executive Veto for that one.
- Sony stepped in again for the game after that which focused around four player co-op: All 4 One had multiple working subtitles including Ratchet & Clank: 4-Play, Ratchet & Clank: Bros B4 Foes, and Ratchet & Clank: Multiple Organisms until it was presented to Sony.
- The eleventh title, Full Frontal Assault, refers to the tower-defence gameplay focus and possibly refers to Up Your Arsenal's working title. There's no Full-Frontal Assault to be found in the game. In Europe it got changed to Q-Force.
- Into the Nexus isn't really that bad, but that wasn't the original title; they wanted Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nether Regions. The antagonists of the game are from a species called Nethers, which come from a place called the Netherverse, which Clank can go into. The rejected subtitle at least made it into the game as a trophy
, and the aforementioned "Clock Blockers" is used for some Skill Points in the game.
- Rift Apart, centered around space-time rifts, can be read as a pun on either "ripped apart" (as Ratchet and Clank are separated from each other for a good chunk of the early game, the latter losing an arm in the process) or... "ripped a fart".
- The SNES homebrew game Shoot Your Load, which is an otherwise unremarkable Asteroids clone.
- South Park: The Fractured but Whole looks innocent when written down but, when spoken, is quickly revealed to be this trope.
- Speed Freaks was a Mario Kart clone released for PlayStation in 1999. While the term was meant in the literal sense (it is a racing game, after all), the pun wasn't exactly subtle, which is probably why it was renamed Speed Punks in the US.
- An action/puzzle game for the Gizmondo and later iOS is called Sticky Balls. Another Gizmondo game, never officially released, was a 3D Pong game titled Ball Busters.
- The rape-themed pornographic game Suck My Dick or Die!
- Time Fcuk (also known as "Time Fkcu" or "Time Fkuc").
- The RTS Wargasm, also the title of the first track in L7's Bricks Are Heavy.
- WTF: Work Time Fun. The abbreviation is almost always printed on the box in huge letters, while the full title is printed in smaller letters and is less noticeable.
- The X-universe series of games features enemy aliens named Kha'ak. Go ahead, explain that they suck to your mother. The in-game computer doesn't even try to avoid the problem. You will be attacked by Kha'ak. X-Play had a lot of fun with the word in their review of X3: Reunion. However, X3: Terran Conflict changed Betty's pronunciation of the word to "Khark" and "Khaah", likely as a result of the X-Play review.
- PeroPeroGames, the development team behind Muse Dash. "Pero pero" is a Japanese onomatopoeia for licking, often as an expression of shameless lust. It would explain why Muse Dash is filled with Fanservice.
- There’s a Doom mod pack titled Doom Clusterfuck. As anyone who has played it will tell you, it’s a pretty apt title.
- Blue Revolver's boss theme is called "Mothertrucker". You know, as in motherfucker.
- In-universe in the Ace Attorney series, magician Trucy Wright's signature trick is "Magic Panties", where she pulls various items out of a large pair of prop underwear. This gets overused to the point of absurdity in "Turnabout Corner", Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, where her prop is stolen by one of the witnesses and Apollo, Trucy, the witness, and the Judge are discussing Trucy's panties without thinking anything of it.
Trucy: I can still remember that moment... You brandished those bloomers on high, and shouted... "Objection!"
- Katawa Shoujo is a VN in which most of the main characters have a physical handicap. While the word "katawa" can be used to describe a physically handicapped person, it is very much not a polite term to use (specifically, it means "cripple"). This is the Japanese equivalent of making a Dating Sim where all of the girls are on the autism spectrum and naming it "Retard Girls". Although based on a tongue-in-cheek doujin, it does handle the subject matter a lot more respectfully than one would expect from the title. The creators were initially unaware of the negative connotations of the title; partway through development, they were informed what the title actually meant, but opted to keep it as-is.
- YouTube Poop. Makes you feel kinda icky just typing it.
- The titles for the videos themselves fit this trope as well. Try Robotnik's Sexy Suspender Striptease
.
- Or Mama Luigi Visits a Soapland
.
- Or the community, which hangs around at a website called YouChewPoop.com
. Members there have often tried to explain that it is not a scat site.
- "Smexual" videos note often have titles as absurd as the events within them. For example: "mentally_defective_sniper_on_serious_cocaine_addictions.piss.mp4.ogg
," "the_misleading_book_adventures_of_the_endangered_goggam_engineer_and_his_fuckmates.this
," and "psychically_unstable_merasmus_and_his_wacky_roommates.cornflakes
."
- The titles for the videos themselves fit this trope as well. Try Robotnik's Sexy Suspender Striptease
- Bear Nuts. Got nothing to do with animal testicles, but comes awfully close in mature content anyways.
- City of Reality. The name is eerily dissonant to both readers and outsider characters. (The residents of said city think it fits perfectly, though.) It's apparently based on a rather unconventional definition of the term.
- Dog Nigga, a.k.a. Dog Ningen. The main character is indeed half dog and half African American.
- The Devil's Panties: It's not satanic porn! Honest!
- Fruit Incest. The name is meant to be nothing more than an eye catcher. Also ironic since the comic itself is usually squeaky clean.
- Gunnerkrigg Court. That is an odd combination of syllables. Tom Siddell confirms
that this was intentional: "I wanted a title that was intentionally awkward and easy to search for on Google."
- The title Questionable Content sounds as if the page's content were questionable. Gives it an Forbidden Fruit appeal.
- Sinfest. Despite the name, it's almost clean enough to pass as a newspaper comic (it actually started as a comic in a college newspaper).
- AlternateHistory.com has a timeline titled "The Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies
.
- The Best Page in the Universe: It's difficult to take about the title of the work without sounding extremely subjective.
- The comedy podcast hosted by Nick Mullen, Stavros Halkias and Adam Friedland is titled Cum Town.
- The Daily WTF; a tech site with stories about horrible coding and business practices. An attempt to rename the site to the cleaner backronym "Worse Than Failure" was met with massive fan backlash.
- DeviantArt, almost certainly. The official name for those registered there is Deviants, which can get a little, ah, interesting when trying to explain IRL that you already exhibit your art, and where.
- Experts Exchange is a jobhunting site. Seen as a URL, it looks more like ExpertSexChange...
- MaxterBexter: "Fish Tacos" would probably be a case of Have a Gay Old Time, were it not for this dialogue:
Becki: I got fish tacos! Nothing bad implied there...Max: Your fish tacos?Becki: Shut up!Max: Very nice...Becki: Little children watch this! Be discreet, come on.
- FuckedCompany.com
- Reddit features a series of forums called the "SFW Porn network". This is simply meant in the sense of Scenery Porn or Food Porn, gorgeous pictures of the subject. (Popular entries include "Earth Porn", "Space Porn", and "History Porn".) It is often subject to complaints because, even though the pictures are innocuous, you'll still have something named "Porn" in your browser history, which can cause trouble at work or with your network firewall. For extra bonus awkwardness points, there are entries entitled "Animal Porn" and "Human Porn".
- Also the intentionally childish meme subreddit r/okbuddyretard.
- Just try pronouncing https://slashdot.org aloud.
- Superdickery.com
is occasionally subject to this in conversation.
- Weirdly, moreso than the much less ambiguous original name of the site, Superman is a Dick.
- Total Dick-Head
: It's a blog about science fiction author Philip K. Dick.
- It's popular on Tumblr for fansites to name themselves following the Snowclone, "Fuckyeah, [subject]!" Common alternatives are "hellyeah", "heckyeah", or "fyeah", if the person in charge doesn't want to swear in the blog title.
- Individual Tumblr users also frequently choose profane names for their personal blogs. Lewd puns and fictional characters' naughty bits are popular.
- The website Uke Hunt
(say it out loud, and it's the instrument, not the other kind of uke). The site owner has acknowledged this and seems amused by it.
- You Can't Fuck Osmosis Jones
is a blog dedicated to tongue-in-cheek rants about cartoon characters where having a Perverse Sexual Lust for them would be especially impractical or ridiculous.
- There's a website whose function is to create Raster Graphic versions of images. The name of the site? Rasterbator.
- Felicia Day has coined the term "Vaginal Fantasy" as a tongue-in-cheek description of urban or historical fantasy fiction that is aimed at women and prominently involves romance and/or sex. Once a month, she'll discuss such novels with her friends in a Google+ Hangout On Air, and also post the discussion to YouTube - naturally it can be awkward mentioning that you were just watching something called "Vaginal Fantasy Hangout #2".
- There's a KateModern episode called "Pissed".
- A number of lonelygirl15 episodes have titles which could be read more than one way, such as "Awkward Threesome", "Girl Tied Up" and "Jennie Bares All", which Amanda Goodfried has claimed responsibility for. There's also an episode called "Lying Bastards".
- The Nostalgia Critic videos "Top 11 Fuck Ups" (three parts), "Top 11 Mindfucks", and "Holiday Clusterfuck" (although some of the titles are censored on the episode page).
- The Socialist. Has absolutely nothing to do with the socioeconomic movement called Socialism. The main character works at a social media marketing company, despite having no experience in social media. She thinks that those who use social media are called "socialists".
- Strip Search; a talent search for comic strip artists. The other meaning is never referred to, but considering the creators are known for enjoying crude humor...
- The Super Best Friendcast names all its podcasts after a line contained therein. Friendcasts tend to go into extremely bizarre and profane tangents, and the titles follow suit. At one point, a fan and an editor from PC Magazine wrote in to the Friendcast
, telling them that they probably would have made a list of podcast recommendations if not for so many NSFW episode titles.
Liam: God, I forgot about "Underwater Racism". - What the Fuck Is Wrong with You?. Often referred in more polite environments with just the initials.
- Try explaining to your significant other what Lonely and Horny (a web series by Jake and Amir of CollegeHumor fame) is doing in your search history.
- The makers of Batman Beyond considered naming the show The Tomorrow Knight, which they recognized could prompt advertising like "Tomorrow night on Tomorrow Knight".
- The Powerpuff Girls is a perfectly innocent name, but it's actually a Bowdlerisation of the original name for the series: The Whoopass Girls. (The original formula for how the girls were made was "Sugar, Spice, Everything Nice, and a can of Whoopass")
- Some of the episode names for TV Funhouse (both on Saturday Night Live and its own series) recurring sketch The Ambiguously Gay Duo, including: "Blow Hot, Blow Cold", "A Hard One To Swallow", "Trouble Coming Twice", "The Third Leg Of Justice", "First Served, First Come". But considering the whole point of the show is to slap around random innuendos, the episode titles are tame.
- Episode titles don't get much more intentionally awkward than The Simpsons episode "Grampa vs. Sexual Inadequacy".
- South Park has several awkward episode titles. "Cartman's Mom is a Dirty Slut" (and its sequel, "Cartman's Mom is Still a Dirty Slut"), "Sexual Harassment Panda", "Two Guys Naked in a Hot Tub", "The Wacky Molestation Adventure", "Bebe's Boobs Destroy Society", "The Biggest Douche in the Universe", "Major Boobage", "Eek, a Penis!", "You Got F'd in the A", "Butters' Bottom Bitch", "Ass Burgers", "Reverse Cowgirl" and several others. There were some that actually got censored, such as "An Elephant Fucks a Pig" (censored to "An Elephant Makes Love to a Pig", which Trey Parker found ridiculous) and "Chickenfucker" (censored to "Chickenlover" - both terms are used in the episode itself). "You Got F'd in the A" was originally actually titled "You Got Fucked in the Ass", and some sources simply refer to it as "You Got..."
- When it came to picking a show's name, Stripperella probably wasn't the best to go by, as well as her alter ego going by the name "Erotica Jones". Stan Lee and Pam Anderson have since admitted that marketing such a show would be impossible, despite opting for a PG-rated tone, as the name of the character would undermine the effort.
- Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!, and yes, the exclamation point is part of the official title. If you can avoid giggling to yourself when you say this out loud and can spit the whole thing in a single breath, the people you said it to will usually react with raised eyebrows, Flat "What", polite giggles or stepping away slowly. Which is a pity, since the show is actually pretty good, the title is just deliberately over-the-top.
- While My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic has had it's share of episode titles that fit this, the one that really takes the cake is Grannies Gone Wild. Just try and tell a friend or family member that you watched "Grannies Gone Wild" last night and see how they react. Though, even more disturbingly so, there actually is a scene of the grannies sexually harassing a bellhop...
- Wishfart has the exact kind of title that causes people to raise their eyebrows when they hear or read it, with most assuming it to be Toilet Humor and little else. However the show's title is actually a play on "brainfart", since the show's about a leprechaun who grants wishes that always go wrong. Furthermore, the show itself actually has very little potty humor, being mostly a surreal Urban Fantasy with the title arguably adding to the "wtf" nature of the show.
- North Carolina's yearly What The Hell Con is a minor example.
- On a slightly more local scale than most examples, the improv comedy club at the University of California, Irvine is called "Live Nude People".
- The Government of Ontario, Canada has an energy conservation campaign called "FLICK OFF", with the already-titillating slogan universally written in uppercase letters with a slightly curved L. The website for the campaign is replete with Double Entendre.
- The Victoria University of Wellington Student Association ran a campaign in 2008 promoting sexual health checkups for men. The campaign's name? "I Heart My Penis". It got a bit awkward when the Association president wore a shirt with the campaign name on it to a graduation ceremony.
- An annual sex Q&A/safety education thing at one college: "I <3 Female Orgasm". Besides posters all over campus, there were also 2-inch buttons handed out for publicity.
- There have recently been a few irreverent breast cancer campaigns. To wit: "Save the Ta-Tas" (started by film critic Joe Bob Briggs), "Feel Your Boobies", "Boobapalooza", etc. One made for Mexico pictured women wearing a T-shirt with the legend "Favor de tocar" ("Please touch").
- In the 1960s an anarchist group formed that called themselves "Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers", mainly to frustrate news media by having an "unprintable" name.
- A clothing store in Gujarat, India, made international headlines
in 2012 when it was discovered that it was operating under the name "Hitler", complete with a little swastika nestled in the dot of the "i".
- The audio electronics company Schiit
. Three guesses as to how you pronounce the name. And they're proud of it. From their front page:
Yes, that is our name. Shih-tah. It's a proud German name, host to a long line of audio engineers who slaved away in crumbling Teutonic fortresses as lightning lashed the dark lands outside, working to perfect the best amplification devices in the world...
Or, well, no. Yep, Schiit is our name, and it's pronounced, well, like "hey man, that's some really good Schiit!" And now that we have your attention... - A street sign in Fountain, Colorado reads "A Dog Will Lick His Butt But Won't Eat A Pickle Rd"
. It's not an officially recognized street name - reportedly, it was an originally unnamed dirt road on private property, and the local Homeowners Association insisted the property owners give it a name and a street sign.
- The company Big Ass Fans
is most well-known for designing and manufacturing very large industrial-grade cooling fans for places like factories and barns. Founded under the name HVLS Fan Co., the company changed its name after receiving call after call from prospective customers asking if they made "those big-ass fans". Being an American company, they're fully aware of the name and wholly embrace it- they describe everything they do as "Big Ass", made their company mascot a donkey named Fanny, prominently feature Fanny's hindquarters in their company logos, and maintain both a YouTube channel and a Facebook gallery of hate mail from people offended by their name.
- The JavaScript test running tool Testacular was renamed Karma
because people familiar with its technical merits were reluctant to use it on work projects or write blog posts about it, which is generally fatal to open-source software. (OSS codes of conduct
usually favor inclusiveness.)
- Rooster Teeth:
- Rooster Teeth once hosted a panel at South by Southwest which they were originally going to just call "Rooster Teeth Panel" but they decided to change it to something better and deliberately came up with "the longest, most ridiculous title" they could possibly think of. They settled on "Alternative Careers in Gaming: The Science of Play Redefined as Art via Content Creation in the Ongoing & Evolving Paradigm of the Post-Network Media Environment. What Does it Mean to You? (featuring Rooster Teeth)". Related in this Rooster Teeth Animated Adventures episode
.
- Averted by Rooster Teeth themselves, as they originally intended on calling themselves "Cock Bite", but decided to go with a more advertising-friendly name.
- Rooster Teeth once hosted a panel at South by Southwest which they were originally going to just call "Rooster Teeth Panel" but they decided to change it to something better and deliberately came up with "the longest, most ridiculous title" they could possibly think of. They settled on "Alternative Careers in Gaming: The Science of Play Redefined as Art via Content Creation in the Ongoing & Evolving Paradigm of the Post-Network Media Environment. What Does it Mean to You? (featuring Rooster Teeth)". Related in this Rooster Teeth Animated Adventures episode
- There's a Norwegian underwear company named Comfyballs.