Blair and Gary MacLean were a Canadian comedy duo in the 1970s and 80s, whose taboo-busting career has been compared to Lenny Bruce’s and George Carlin’s. MacLean and MacLean also had a bit of Cheech & Chong’s countercultural irreverence, although their material was considerably cruder and more juvenile: among their best-known numbers were “Dolly Parton’s Tits” and “I’ve Seen Pubic Hairs,” along with their 1974 album Toilet Rock, which gives you some idea of the level of humor they were aiming for. Thinking back on their legacy, though – Blair died in 2008, and Gary in 2001, after winding down their performances in the 1990s – they might be remembered in other ways, besides being the authors of the immortal “Fuck Ya.” Caution: some readers may already be offended.

The Bruce and Carlin parallels derive from MacLean and MacLean’s legal woes over the content of their live acts; coincidentally, one case stemmed from a 1977 performance they gave in my northern Ontario home town, and dragged all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, which in 1982 finally refused to hear a Crown appeal of the brothers’ overturned obscenity conviction. There were other busts in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Swift Current, Saskatchewan, and London, Ontario. In their own way, MacLean and MacLean helped expand Canada’s standards of free speech, even if their deep-blue Star Trek parody, for example, didn’t exactly rise to the level of John Milton’s Areopagitica. They may have “liberalized” the laws, but they were hardly promoting liberal or progressive politics – they had more in common, perhaps, with the unapologetic working-man’s raunch of Larry Flynt’s Hustler magazine than the satirical George Carlin of seven dirty words or the socially insightful Lenny Bruce of How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. Sons of a miner from Canada’s hardscrabble Cape Breton region of Nova Scotia, Blair and Gary sure talked dirty.

Indeed, if MacLean and MacLean’s public appearances sometimes caught the disapproving ear of the censors and the cops, their albums were virtually contraband. There was never going to be radio airplay for Suck Their Way to the Top or Bitter Reality, with tracks like “Dildo Dawn” or “The Gross Manual.” In the pre-cable, pre-internet age, I actually heard people reciting MacLean and MacLean jokes, as well as Gary Lee and Showdown’s similarly profane “The Rodeo Song,” long before I ever listened to the records themselves. There was thus a folk-art (or maybe fuck-art) quality to the comedy, insofar as most of it was shared by word of mouth among sniggering fans, rather than openly promoted by the entertainment industry. That doesn’t necessarily make MacLean and MacLean underground geniuses, but something was lost when the R- or X-rated routines of figures like Eddie Murphy or Andrew Dice Clay became widely available on home video and other media, instead of being passed around, and sometimes embellished, by the original audiences in the back of high school science class.

In addition to their own catalogue of lower-than-lowbrow humor, I only recently discovered that MacLean and MacLean inspired “The Champ,” a popular fixture of Canadian rock radio for many years. Portrayed by deejay Jake Edwards, the Champ was an ex-boxer who appeared in brief sketches where he always took violent exception to some innocent double-entendre spoken by a victim: “Hey Champ, you’re a good-lookin’ guy – do you have to beat off a lot of jealous husbands?” “Hey Champ, did your wife plant her tulips around Old Man McGuinty’s stump?” “Champ, what are you doing in that rowboat with those two old oars?” “A new computer? Well, come in the back, and I’ll show you my Wang.” Et cetera. Again, none of this would ever fall under the now-discredited category of “politically correct.” The punchlines (literal, in the Champ’s case) were frequently degrading, sexist, homophobic, tasteless, or otherwise filthy. So although the pair have since gone to the great comedy club in the sky, in a sense the shameless puerility of MacLean and MacLean lives on in the white male populism that’s now conducting a militant campaign against decades’ worth of official diversity, propriety, and sensitivity. Except MacLean and MacLean were a lot funnier. Fuck ya.