Preface To Confessions: That's Not Funny, That's Sick!

I was a child in the 1970s, & had two older brothers who lived with us in their teenage years & whose cultural detritus littered my life.  Mostly I read their comic books, but increasingly I was exposed to their music & some of the other stuff (like drug paraphernalia & girlie mags) they left around or kept in their room where I & my little brother would break into & explore when they were off doing stuff.  (Remind me to tell you of the time I ate a lot of strawberry-flavored rolling papers because I thought they were supposed to be a treat.)  (Oh, wait, I just told you.)

One of the more enduring records they left lying about was this National Lampoon record, released in 1977 & featuring people like Bill Murray, Christopher Guest, & Larraine Newman.  I listened to this record a million times - & frankly I didn't understand much of it.  I just liked the way it sounded.  I didn't get that Mr. Rogers was portrayed as a pedophile, I definitely didn't get the Jewish humor, & I have never really heard a call-in show like the one Richard Belzer is making fun of.  But probably by the age of ten I had good chunks of it memorized.

I didn't know what a Catholic was when I was ten, & I barely knew anything about sex, not to mention euphemisms for our naughty parts.  So I had no context for this amazing (& short) sketch between Bill Murray & his brother Brian Doyle-Murray, with the latter playing a priest & the former a fellow in the confessional.  Have a listen courtesy of Youtube, but be warned - there are lots of bad words here:



It's really funny when you understand the set-up - a guy says a bad word in the confessional, the priest says "I've heard it all before," & then the two banter horrible indecencies back & forth.  Imagine a nine or ten-year-old who had barely been to a protestant church trying to make sense of them.  Never mind the outright dirty phrases - I wouldn't get "Madame Ovary" until I was in my late teens!

I do remember repeating the "afterbirth on toast - that's pizza" to a friend who found it very funny, but even then I didn't know what the hell afterbirth was.

It was fun learning the context of the sketch & revisiting the record years later.  I played that record so much that it came to skip on certain tracks - the curse of the cheap turntable - & I eventually just put it back in my brothers' record collection & hoped they never noticed it.  If they did, they never told me.

I am thinking about this because I would love love love to play this on WRFL tomorrow for my confession show, but the station's policy on indecency makes it impossible - & editing it would take all the funny out of it.  But I can post it here!