Children swearing is one of those things Hollywood goes back and forth on embracing. After all, if you’re making a movie for kids, you want it to sound real, but not so real that it gets slapped with an R rating—destroying your ability to reach your audience—the second time someone gets told to fuck off.
It’s not just that hearing a little kid swear is funny—it’s also authentic. Kids curse, all the time and for a bunch of different reasons: anger, attention, or just to feel grown-up. It’s a major part of how a lot of kids communicate and bond when adults aren’t around, and any movie that respects the teen or pre-teen experience is likely to at least touch on it.
This supercut of kids swearing (uploaded by Vimeo user Avaryl Halley) actually opens with a celebrated kid-swearing moment that contains no actual profanity, the “Fudge” scene from A Christmas Story—which cleverly gets around the whole rating issue by making the viewer think “Fuck” without actually saying it. The clips that follow are a bit less restrained, unleashing a torrent of f-, s-, and in one memorable instance, c-bombs from the mouths of babes.
Most of the clips come from the ‘80s, the golden age of kids telling each other to eat shit and die, but young luminaries like Chloe Moretz and Bobb’e J. Thompson are also on hand to keep the fine tradition of foul-mouthed adolescents alive.
Kids Cursing In Movies Mashup from Avaryl Halley on Vimeo.