Fuzz Against Smut: The Saga of the Anti-Smut Brigade

Fuzz. For some, it is a name to conjure with, a name steeped in mock heroic associations and synonymous with ever-vigilant and overzealous law enforcement. Fuzz: surname of the eminent sleuth, bane of beatniks, scourge of junkies, Sir Edwin Fuzz, whose exploits were chronicled by Akbar del Piombo in the classic satirical collage novel, Fuzz Against Junk (1959). In the newly published Fuzz Against Smut, the reader encounters Sir Reginald Fuzz, brother to the more famous Edwin. In common with his celebrated brother, Sir Reginald Fuzz is a detective for the London police force. An investigator no less distinguished by mental keenness and steadfast right-mindedness than his brother, Sir Reginald is a "foremost moralist, expert on the perils of pornography, and chief of the Anti-Smut Brigade." In the riotous adventure recounted here, Fuzz faces the greatest and gravest challenge of his law enforcement career: the city of London is being inundated by a massive wave of sexually explicit material in the form of books and films, with the result that citizens of every station are fast becoming craven and insatiable consumers of the vilest pornography. The "carnal carnage" engulfing the great capital must be brought to an end before anarchy overtakes the whole social structure of the United Kingdom. Cometh the hour, cometh the man, as the proverbial phrase has it, and Sir Reginald Fuzz is that very man.

Fuzz Against Smut is at once an homage to and a pastiche of Akbar del Piombo's illustrious, hilarious Fuzz Against Junk. Like the original model on which it is patterned, Fuzz Against Smut consists of text and images, colliding and colluding with each other. As the story is set in late Victorian London, the prose is a deadpan burlesque of the sensationalism and perpetual moral panic characteristic of certain popular newspapers and periodicals of that era. (And, alas, of our own era, as well.) There are also sly stylistic touches drawn from the "boy's own adventure" genre, together with parodic allusions to the Sherlock Holmes stories. The illustrations, reciprocally reverberating with the narrative, are cleverly contrived collages created from Victorian era steel engravings and other print sources. These lend a specious plausibility to the irrational chain of events of which the plot is comprised and augment the mad humor of the book. Both text and image are employed to ideal effect here.

The book abounds in puns ("feeling prickly" ... "getting the lay of the land") and jocular word coinages, such as "pornsumers," "pornosophy" "pornoforensics," "hornology," "smutography" and "phallosaurus." This latter is a giant reptilian creature with the body of a Tyrannosaurus Rex and the head of a phallus, stalking the city, invading public gatherings and private homes, a nightmare embodiment of the consequences of civilization's collective sexual repression, an upward thrust from the underworld of the universal unconscious given independent corporeal life in the form of a monstrosity. As readers/viewers of Fuzz Against Smut, we become aware of a potent latent sexuality lurking beneath the surface of objects and intentions. The utilitarian metal surfaces of the Decrytomatic machine, for example, a mechanical wonder far ahead of its time, are seen to be furnished with "phallic appendages" and a "suggestive-looking aperture," while the printed version of this proto-computer's computational analysis is discharged from the mechanism with a "long, low orgasmic moan." Even the redoubtable, unimpeachable Sir Reginald Fuzz himself manifests every sign of an imperfect subjugation of his erotic instincts. We note, for instance, that when Fuzz investigates a showing of a pornographic motion picture at the prestigious Atheneum club, he sits through repeated screenings of the film, offering by way of explanation that he is obliged to accommodate his penchant for detail. Equally dubious is the justification given by Fuzz for his vast personal library of eroticism, the possession of which he accounts for as being necessary to his investigative research. Can such a man be trusted to curb the inundation of prurient material unleashed upon an eager British public? (My lips are sealed.)

To take tittering pleasure in the pages of Fuzz Against Smut, it is by no means necessary for the reader to be familiar with Akbar del Piombo's Fuzz Against Junk, nor to know anything concerning rogue publisher Maurice Girodias and the infamous Olympia Press, to be acquainted with Alfred Jarry and Alfred E. Neuman, or to be aware of the farcical and futile ordeals undergone by victims of Conversion Therapies, but such knowledge will enrich and extend the reader/viewer's encounter with the book. Fuzz Against Smut reanimates what has become an endangered subspecies of comedy: madcap, manic, wildly absurd, sublimely subversive humor. (As exemplified by—among others—the Marx Brothers, Lenny Bruce, William Burroughs, Terry Southern, Lord Buckley, and Akbar del Piombo.) This is a zany, quirky and very funny book, an antic fable for our fractured times and a balm for weary minds.