What was the first movie to drop an F-bomb?
It’s rare you’ll find someone out there who doesn’t love to drop a good F-bomb from time to time, whether it’s out of delighted exclamation or intense anger. It’s a versatile word, with widespread connotations ranging from sex to disgust, but it has always remained incredibly taboo, despite the fact that most of us use it on a regular basis.
Due to being widely deemed inappropriate for many centuries, the word ‘fuck’ is one of the first things that censors will leap to remove from a film. In fact, there was a long time when you were much more likely to consume sexist, racist, or homophobic remarks and images within a film than the ultimately harmless word ‘fuck’.
When Hollywood started to become an incredibly popular medium with the potential to become a global phenomenon, censorship was rigidly enforced. The Hays Code, which was implemented in 1934, banned many words and themes that could be deemed as controversial, like interracial relationships, nudity, and, of course, ‘fuck’. It’s hard to imagine a cinematic landscape without swear words being casually tossed around, but for many decades, Hollywood was strictly against it.
Thus, the first instance of a mainstream Hollywood film featuring an F-bomb didn’t come until after the Hays Code had been abolished in 1968 following the success of the racy British flick Blow-Up. A few years later, Robert Altman released his film M*A*SH*, a war film starring Donald Sutherland, Robert Duvall, and Elliott Gould, and it was this classic comedy that saw John Schuck utter the word.
“All right, Bub, your fuckin’ head is coming right off,” his character says during a football game, accidentally making cinema history in the process. Of course, the word had made it onto screens before this, but never in a mainstream American picture. Thus, the film that is said to contain the first F-bomb is actually widely speculated to be the 1967 British picture Ulysses.
Adapted from James Joyce’s classic novel, the film faced heavy censorship due to its bold themes and shocking content. Many scenes had to be edited or cut, and it still ended up with an X rating. While it might not be as memorable as M*A*SH*, it was the first mainstream (just non-Hollywood) film to use an F-bomb.
But which movie has used it the most?
There are some movies that have managed to squeeze an impressive (or egregious) amount of “fucks” into their runtimes, with movies like Anora (517), Uncut Gems (560), and The Wolf of Wall Street (569) coming in runner-up places. However, the film with the most uses of the word is Swearnet: The Movie, released in 2014.
From the title alone, it’s hardly surprising that this is the film that takes the top spot, with a whopping 935 “fucks” delivered across the 112 minute run-time. The film, directed by Warren P. Sonoda, received overwhelmingly negative reviews, although that was surely to be expected from a film purposefully aiming to break a world record for the most uses of the F-bomb.
