Kevin Smith: An X-Rated Primer

by Patrick Cassels on October 30, 2008

Long before The 40-Year-Old Virgin made films about horny underachievers an acceptable cinematic genre, Kevin Smith was the immature American movie-going male's primary source of highbrow dick jokes. Smith's latest film, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, may seem like a grand experiment of Smith's in X-rated transgression, but an overview of the director's long and delightfully vulgar career shows us that Kevin Smith has been making audiences cringe for as long as he's been making them laugh.

Clerks

Smith's notoriously cheap black-and-white debut may be visually low-key, but the director's pornographic sensibilities were well under way from the moment he yelled his first "action." In the clip below, 14 years before Smith would devote an entire film to the adult entertainment industry, a sex-obsessed video store proprietor named Randall places the most vulgar order of VHS cassettes in home video history:

Mallrats

In his follow-up to Clerks, Smith focused on another pair of pair of 20-something slackers whose conversations follow two consistent themes: sex and comic books. Sometimes, these two topics would intersect one another, as it does in the following dialogue. Listen as Mallrats's Brodie and Quint (fittingly dubbed over Batman and Robin for the Internet's pleasure) discuss the un-explained nuances of superhero fornication:

Dogma

Dick jokes coming from the mouths of stoned New Jersey kids is one thing, but when Smith applied his unique brand of blue comedy to the Bible for his Christian satire Dogma, people took notice. Well, some did. In the infamous news clip below, Smith joins a small group of religious protesters in picketing his own film:

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back

Sex isn't the only taboo Smith has taken pleasure in transcending. More frequently, in fact, Smith is singled out for the language of his characters, who utter more vulgarity in a two hour span than a sailor with a stubbed toe. And his sprawling R-rated epic Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, the director unleashed his largest wave of profanity to date: