Word: smut
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...smart to be bawdy may possibly be credited to magazine artists of the Arno-Soglow-Klein-Steig school. In The New Yorker their drawings are politely risque. In published albums (like Stag at Eve) they are elegantly ribald. From its first issue last summer Ballyhoo capitalized the discovery that smut, when smart, could tap an unashamed market. It based its appeal chiefly upon the business of making fun of the advertising business, but knew and pursued the sale value of scatology...
American audiences in general and Mae West's audiences in particular have a unique and proverbial capacity for smut. As Mr. Krutch pointed out, this capacity is also shared by adolescents. Mr. Smoot of Utah probably knows more about pornographic literature than any living American, or European. However, in spite of this hearty endorsement, it cannot be repeated too often that this capacity and this knowledge is not a prime requisite for holiness. Hunger, not holiness, must be the explanation of this strange preoccupation with sex in its cruder forms...
...effect, the outline aims to make respectable, sanitary and uplifting the official "smut session" familiar to every preparatory school and college student. "One object of [the word] test," say its authors, ''is to draw off the emotional tension of the group-to get them talking and laughing freely over their own responses; to win one another's confidence and to gain confidence in the leader; to see how many absurd and unfounded opinions we hold. . . ." Words are given to the boys & girls, to be pondered for not more than five seconds, crossed out if disagreeable. Sample words...
Chaplin films there are touches of smut: Chaplin as a busy street cleaner seeing an endless troop of mules, hurrying in the opposite direction, only to meet an elephant; Chaplin acting girlish toward a prize fighter stripping for battle...
Miss Akins has managed to throw together three entirely unrelated acts-the first smut comedy, the second society drama, the third travesty. Sprinkled here and there is amusing dialogue. The three ladies are characters, their gentlemen friends are only inflated haberdashery...