< Cluster F-Bomb

Cluster F-Bomb/Literature

  • Prey by Michael Crichton definitely qualifies. One character utters five F-bombs in one sentence.
  • Nick And Norah's Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan. 245 uses, more or less.
  • Richard fucking Marcinko. The fucking Rogue Warrior books fucking run on fucking cluster fucking F bombs.
  • Pick a novel by Stephen King. Any of them. He was criticized enough for it that one aspect of Annie Wilkes (the villain of the novel Misery) was a near-frothing intolerance for bad language in her favorite author's books.
    • This is lampshaded in IT, where one of the characters notes that his author friend used the F word 206 times in his latest novel.
      • See also The Tommyknockers, where he refers to himself as that fella who lives up Bangor way, and his books as being full of monsters and dirty words.
  • Parodied in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Life, The Universe and Everything) where the Rory Award for "The Most Gratuitous Use Of The Word 'Fuck' In A Serious Screenplay" is mentioned.
  • Spoofed in The Truth where Mr. Tulip is likely to drop "---ing" bombs. Yes, he actually pronounces the dashes. ("An ---ing werewolf? Are you ---ing kidding me?!") Terry Pratchett has referred to what it sounds like as "the Englishman's version of the bushman 'click' language". Sacharissa later tries to curse the same way, but leaves out the dashes (she just yells "ing", and proclaims it to be very satisfying).
    • Hilariously averted in Feet of Clay, when a mob of priests accuse Vimes of "gross profanity and the worship of idols" for hiring the golem Dorfl as a policeman. Vimes' reply rates as a Missed Moment of Awesome F Bombing:

Vimes: I don't worship him, I'm just employing him. And he's far from idol. {takes deep breath} And if it's gross profanity you're looking for--
Dorfl: {making timely interruption} Might I Offer A Comment?

But Orcs and Trolls spoke as they would, without love of words or things; and their language was actually more degraded and filthy than I have shown it. I do not suppose that any will wish for a closer rendering, though models are easy to find. Much the same sort of talk can still be heard among the orc-minded; dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt, too long removed from good to retain even verbal vigour, save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong.

  • Lady Chatterley's Lover was controversial and banned for its use of "fuck" and other words, but unlike the more typical modern Cluster F-Bomb, the context is explicit portrayals of characters having sex and talking dirty to each other. Who could have predicted ahead of time that when they decriminalized the ban on using the word "fuck" in literature/media, dirty talk would still be as much of a fringe phenomenon as it was before, while the far more striking trend is the popularization of comics who break the taboos against obscenity just for the hell of it?
  • Dave Barry, in the introduction to his novel Tricky Business, repeatedly warns the reader that "THIS BOOK CONTAINS BAD WORDS." This paragraph can be found repeating continually through several of its chapters:

...ROAR VROOM WHAM "FUCK!" "FASTER!" ROAR VROOM WHAM "FUCK!" "FASTER!" ROAR VROOM WHAM "FUCK!" "FASTER!" ROAR VROOM WHAM "FUCK!" "FASTER!" ROAR VROOM WHAM...

"Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck you. Fuck me. Fuck this. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck."

  • In the book Lamb (a comedy about Jesus' best friend), the narrator is resurrected in our time to write his version of the Gospel. He also includes random comments on his bewilderment in the modern world, including a rant on curses, which lampshades this.

"Back home we had maybe half a dozen curse words. Here you can curse the air blue for twenty minutes without repeating yourself..."

    • Pretty much any book by Christopher Moore. Pull one off the shelf, open it to any page, and you're guaranteed to see the word "fuck" at least once.
  • Closing Time, the sequel to Joseph Heller's Catch-22, had this peppery exchange between Milo Minderbinder and the decidedly irreverent Ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen, regarding Yossarian's likely response to their schemes to defraud the United States government:

Milo: He might object.
Wintergreen: Then fuck him. Let him object. We'll ignore the fuck again. What the fuck! What the fuck fucking difference does it make if the fuck objects or not! We can ignore the fucking fuck again, can't we? Shit.
Milo: I wish you wouldn't swear so much in the nation's capital.

  • In his college novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe has a very hilarious discussion of what he calls the "fuck patois", frequently used by college students. It is all very clinical, analysing how the word can be used as adjective, noun, adverb, etc., providing an example for each, and then at the end of this very long list it concludes "And sometimes, it can even refer to copulation! (So, you'll never believe who I fuckin' walked in on fuckin'." The passage itself is very funny in that there is no vitriol behind any of the uses, and were it not for the variants of "fuck" given as examples after every type of word, it could be a regular old discussion of grammar. It is, in a word, AWESOME.
  • The last joke in Isaac Asimov's Treasury of Humor is a subversion of this trope. It's about a foul-mouthed soldier telling his friends what the fuck he did while out on the fuckin' town on a fuckin' 24-hour pass. The punchline is that he uses the word "fuck" to describe everything EXCEPT sexual intercourse.
  • Used liberally in John Dies at the End. In one memorable fuckin' moment, when Dave is being threatened by Robert North...
    "No, no. Keep driving," said a soft voice in my ear. "She will not bite if you keep driving."
    Fuck that. Fuck that idea like the fucking Captain of the Thai Fuck Team fucking at the fucking Tour de Fuck.
  • In The City and The City: "Even though of course those fuckers, those fuckers more than any other fuckers -- and we have our share of fuckers."
  • Any fucking Charles Bukowski book, often in caps making the statement seem bizarrely monotone and awkwardly hilarious.
  • Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum books, anything said by Sally (Salvatore) Sweet. Example:

"Nobody heard of fucking Howling Dogs. I was fucking living in a fucking packing crate in the alley behind Romanos Pizza. I've been punk, funk, grunge, and R&B. I've been with the Funky Butts, the Pitts, Beggar Boys, and Howling Dogs. I was with Howling Dogs the longest. It was a fucking depressing experience. I couldn't stand fucking singing all those fucking songs about fucking hearts fucking breaking and fucking goldfish fucking going to heaven. And then I had to fucking look like some western dude. I mean, how can you have any self-respect when you have to go on stage in a cowboy hat?"
I was pretty good at cussing, but I didn't think I could keep up with Sally. On my best day, I couldn't squeeze all those "f" words into a sentence. "Boy, you can really curse," I said.
"You can't be a fucking musician without fucking cursing."

  • Precious in Push by Sapphire, though it's really more like Cluster B and S Bomb. Every woman she doesn't like is a bitch, and she replaces the word stuff with shit. The most extreme version is her calling her former principal "cunt bucket" all the time. May be justified, in that she is uneducated and doesn't know any better.
  • From The Paranoid's Pocket Guide To Mental Disorders That You Can Just Feel Coming On: The "Inner Monologue" for Intermittent Explosive Disorder, AKA Rage Disorder:

"Mother of [expletive deleted]!! What the [expletive deleted] is wrong with you?! How [expletive deleted] hard is it to [expletive deleted] pick up a [expletive deleted] set of [expletive deleted] keys?! Throw those [expletive deleted] keys across the room! Take that you [expletive deleted] car [expletive deleted] keys!! You can wipe down these stupid [expletive deleted] plates but you can't [expletive deleted] grab some car keys?! Look, all the [expletive deleted] dishes are getting smashed! You're smashing all the [expletive deleted] dishes because you don't [expletive deleted] get to have a [expletive deleted] set of [expletive deleted] dishes! Good! Take that you [expletive deleted] plates. Take that!!

  • Used for laughs in the Maggody mysteries with Hammet Buchanon, who can barely open his mouth without swearing unless there's an immediate payoff for not doing so. The joke is that Hammet is about nine when introduced, and his siblings' language is even worse.
  • The poem Evidently Chickentown by John Cooper Clarke is a prime example of the Cluster F Bomb, using the word 83 times throughout the poem (though in some versions, he tones it down by saying "bloody" instead).
  • In the opening of A White Merc With Fins the narrator is trying to have a conversation with someone who has brought the F-word game into play, whereby every speaker must say Fuck more times than the previous one. In order to get the conversation back on track the narrator snaps:

You have been listening to absofuckinglutely fuck all, fuck you you fucking dull fucker the whole fucking point is it's not a real fucking gun anyone with half a fucking brain can fucking see it's not a real fucking gun underfuckingstand you monufuckingmentally fucked-up fucker?

  • Rook is the fucking king of the cluster F-bomb. According to a tally kept on the LJ comm, he says 'fuck' or some variation of the word 188 times. His most famous sentence is "Where the fuck is fucking Niall?", which is one third fucked.
    • Lee Broglia has Rook beat; he really goes off once in literature, but it's a total doozy. The then-coach of the Cubs had taken the team from a crappy start to a struggling improvement, but the fans booed. He exploded into a scathing rebuttal with F and S bombs, an CS and a couple of M Fs, all to a reporter, and he said "quote me" in advance. The cubs did much better after reading that, but Jay Johnstone, recapping it all in his autobiography on his baseball career, speculates that that rant pretty well torpedoed the coach's job. Maybe if he'd won the Series...
  • The Lies of Locke Lamora series, while otherwise well-written, is somewhat plagued by gratuitous language, with F Bombs making up a large percentage.
  • Played with in My Bonny Light Horseman Given that Mary Faber is a young lady in Regency England, she unleashes a cluster Bless Bomb on the First Lord of the Admiralty.
  • Subverted in The Subject Steve. There is a lot of swearing going on, but it's not intended to be cool or gritty. It's quite casual and apathetic, like everything else in the book.
  • Aleine Gunder IX from The Night Angel Trilogy. Played for laughs. Poor Aleine or Niner as he is not so lovingly called by just about everyone, swears all the time. He's can actually be quite creative there's only one problem, the only swear he knows is the word shit. Due to this fact, and his childish nature he is prone to rant for several minutes. This is so much the case that when he starts cursing everyone in earshot just tunes him out. It doesn't help much that he's the king and therefore no one will swear in front of him. Then along comes resident badass Durzo.

Niner, "You're...you're shit! You shitting, shitting shit!"
Durzo, "Your Majesty, a man of your stature's cursing vocabulary ought to extend beyond a tedious repetition of the excreta that fills the void between his ears." It wasn't until after Niner saw the looks on his guards faces that he realized he'd been insulted.

Harry: "Hell's holy stars and freaking stones shit bells."

Detective Jacobson: Drop the fucking weapon, you fucking motherfucker or I'll fucking scramble your brains. Hands up! Hands up where I can fucking see them, you fucking cocksucker. You fucking breathe wrong, you fucking blink wrong, and I will fuck you up.
Eve: That was some very creative and varied use of the word fuck, Detective.

Jacobson: Fucker. On your fucking face, you fucking shit coward. Stream my Leutenant in the fucking back? Fuck you!

    • He then proceeds break one of the man's fingers.
  • In Kim Newman's Diogenes Club story "Sorcerer, Conjurer, Wizard, Witch", the Earl of Emsworth from the Blandings Castle novels unleashes a Cluster F-Bomb (dashed out) when faced with someone who has no interest in pigs. Edwin Winthrop reflects on how much PG Wodehouse must tone down the language in his books.
  • Children's book pastiche, "Go the Fuck to Sleep." Even better when narrated by Samuel L. Jackson.
  • In Vortex, Allison/Treya has a bit of an epiphany, illustrating this trope in Inner Monologue form: "There it was, the heresy Treya had always resisted and for which the voice of Allison had silently begged: Fuck Vox, fuck its quiet tyranny fuck its frozen dream religion, and fuck its craven obsession with the Hypotheticals. Fuck especially the madness that had brought Vox to this ruined Earth, and fuck the more profound madness I believed was about to break loose aboard her. Fuck Vox!"
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