Passing between channels on my tv on the 6th, I caught a moment from the show Mr. Robot (S3 E9) in which Terry Colby, an exec at the Allsafe Corporation, spins out a riff in high-macho figurative language, a piece of crude poetry:
That’s all teddy bears and hand jobs, but what are your financials? We can’t wake up one day and find ourselves tits up, dicks blowing in the breeze.
The masterstroke in all this is all teddy bears and hand jobs, an invention intended to convey an ironic, dismissive version of the high-toned all sweetness and light or, better, the vernacular all beer and skittles ‘all fun and pleasure’ (skittles, the game of ninepins)
On the tv show, from Wikipedia:
(#1)
Mr. Robot is an American drama–thriller television series created by Sam Esmail. It stars Rami Malek as Elliot Alderson, a cybersecurity engineer and hacker who suffers from social anxiety disorder and clinical depression. Alderson is recruited by an insurrectionary anarchist known as “Mr. Robot”, played by Christian Slater, to join a group of hacktivists called “fsociety”. The group aims to destroy all debt records by encrypting the financial data of the largest conglomerate in the world, E Corp.
(all) sweetness and light. From NOAD:
sweetness and light: social or political harmony: the relationship was by no means all sweetness and light; a reasonable and peaceable person: when he’s around she’s all sweetness and light. [taken from Swift and used with aesthetic or moral reference, first by Arnold in Culture and Anarchy (1869)]
With all, the expression is often used in a negative context, either explicit or implicit (“Things aren’t all sweetness and light today”, “That’s all sweetness and light, but…”).
(all) beer and skittles. From NOAD:
(#2) Graphic by Fox in the Loft, Nottingham (UK), “Funky Crafts & Unique Graphic Design”; no idea why the skittles are in rainbow colors, but I approve
beer and skittles: [often with negative] British amusement or enjoyment: life isn’t all beer and skittles.
The Mr. Robot version, all teddy bears and hand jobs, names one thing presumed to be amusing (teddy bears) and one presumed to be pleasurable (hand jobs), but in the context conveying the dismissal of the thing said to be all teddy bears and hand jobs.
tits up. Figuratively, ‘non-working, dead’; the relevant image is presumably of an immobilized person lying flat on their back.
(#3) A notably un-deep quote from the actor Max Irons
The source of the image (AZ Quotes) has quotations from a great many people, including a fair number who seem to have been included on the basis of their celebrity (rather than on their ideas). So we get thoughts from Max Irons, the hunky actor with the interesting face. From Wikipedia:
(#4) Irons in The White Queen, showing nipple (continuing the tits theme)
Maximilian Paul Diarmuid “Max” Irons (born 17 October 1985) is an English-Irish actor and model. He is known for his roles in Red Riding Hood (2011), The White Queen (2013), The Host (2013), and The Riot Club (2014).
Irons was born in Camden, London, the son of English actor Jeremy Irons and Irish actress Sinéad Cusack. He is a grandson of actors Cyril Cusack and Maureen Cusack.
dick(s) waving/blowing in the wind/breeze. Conveying, more or less directly, ‘naked and exposed’, but figuratively ‘helpless’.
Notes on form. Teddy bears and hand jobs is a nicely parallel coordination, of two N + N compounds, the whole thing making a trochaic tetrameter line with a superstrong second half:
S W | S W | S | S
Later there’s the half-rhyming pairing dicks … tits, all alveolar obstruents:
/ dɪks … tɪts /
And then the whole thing ends with the alliterative blowing in the breeze (as a variant of waving in the wind).
December 11, 2017 at 9:41 am |
As an earlier precursor to “sweetness and light” and “beer and skittles,” I am reminded of the line from Twelfth Night, “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” This actually doesn’t resound with me as much as it might, in part because I’m not quite sure what kind of cakes would go well with ale.
Of course, “teddy bears and hand jobs” is a particularly clever variant.
December 11, 2017 at 11:09 am |
“Cakes and ale” appear to have been very much a thing in England in the 16th-17th centuries. Cf. the Purcell catch that starts out “I gave her cakes / and I gave her ale, / I gave her sack and sherry…”
December 11, 2017 at 7:36 pm |
OED2 and other sources have cakes and ale as ‘the good life’ or ‘the good things in life’, as here:
with citations in 1606 for cake and cheese, in 1623 for cakes and ale from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (see below), and lots of take the cake.
From Wikipedia: