2024: Stories of Vulgarity

Superbad is an extremely vulgar movie. There are brief moments of nudity (including an entire sequence of hand-drawn penises), vibrantly graphic descriptions and simulations of sex, and many many curse words. What’s more, the movie is thematically steeped in the misogyny of teenage boys and male-centric comedy of the 2000s.

We had mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, since our movies have generally been totally devoid of cursing and sex, we thought what cursing and sex we’d leave in would get some extra laughs from folks. On the other hand, our party is attended by a wide array of family and friends spanning age ranges and temperaments. Content in our movies has offended people before and we didn’t want to actually upset anyone again.

We always planned to cut the movie down and eliminate the worst, most-vulgar sequences. But as we approached the final days before the party we still worried about what we had left.

We always are racked with self doubt in the days before the party, but this year a new phenomena helped exacerbate this: people were actually watching Superbad to prepare for Supernaughty.

Every single time we’ve overdubbed a movie before we find that at the screening virtually every single person has never seen the original before — or if they have seen the original before (which really only happened in large numbers with The Shining) it was several years ago.

But this year quite a few people informed us that they had made a point to watch Superbad before our screening. And as it just so happened, that vast majority of these people will our moms and our moms friends. All of whom landed somewhere on the spectrum between perturbed and outright scandalized by the original movie.

This had us feeling extra bullish in the final stretch before the party to Christmas-ize the last remaining lines we ourselves were cringing at.

Ultimately, our method for dealing with vulgarity was just to impose Christmas-nonsense over it. Which, ironically, was enjoyed most by the people who had just watched, and been traumatized by, Superbad.

As the dick drawing sequence approached, people braced themselves and were then relieved and all the more delighted by the Christmas movie parody drawings, etc.

Here are some select examples of us tamping out vulgarity with Christmas:

• Replacing lube (on screen and in the script) with a sprig of mistletoe:

• Replacing the sequence where they run away from the liquor store (for plot reasons) to check out the results of a classmate’s breast-reduction surgery with Tom Martin’s cameo as a Salvation Army busker:

• One we changed the day before the party. Covering up “You could bang her for two months and I’m not gonna dance around it, she looks like a good fucker.” We had recorded the actual line in our overdub, but bailed at the last minute and are glad we did:

• Another we changed the day before the party. Covering up “The funny thing about my back is it’s located on my cock.” We had ID’d this as one that would get a laugh because it’s so outlandish and dumb and something Colin would never say, but when a few people saw it during a recording session and reacted blankly, we knew it was doomed.

This change also works on a deeper thematic level. This scene occurs right after the dick-drawing sequence in which Jonah Hill’s character claims his childhood obsession with dicks is long past him. He then immediately works the word “cock” into a terrible joke.

It makes more sense in our version that Colin, having just claimed to be over his childhood phase of drawing Christmas movie parody posters, immediately botches a famous movie line with Christmas nonsense: