Monty Python’s Contractual Obligation Album came by me as a random selection on iTunes Friday morning. It immediately launches into things with the perky little song “Sit On My Face”, which clearly describes a sexual act (reciprocal oral sex), throws in a couple double entendres on blow (in be blown away), and once uses sixty nine itself (in a verbed version: “Life can be fine if we both sixty nine”).
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission found the song “actionably indecent”, and in 1992 took legal action against KGB-FM in San Diego for playing it and eventually fined the station $9,200. Somewhere along the line it became an incredibly popular — often-requested but for legal reasons never played on the open air — song on the Dr. Demento radio show of novelty songs, comedy, and other oddities.
I’ll take a look at the notion of indecency at issue here (it seems not to be primarily about the use of specific words) and muse some about the status of the expression sixty-nine.
