てめえ, この野郎, ふざけんな: the rude Japanese you hear in comedy (and shouldn't say)

What the rough words that keep coming up in live comedy really mean, how strong each one is, and what to say instead in real life.

Ukeru notes · counts are from the current library (1,905 routines, 174,812 machine-transcribed lines) and update as it grows

Words the textbook leaves out

Textbooks teach you how to be polite. They almost never teach you how people shout at each other. Comedy has plenty of shouting. In a typical duo, the straight man snaps at the partner's nonsense, and the words can be rough: てめえ, この野郎, ふざけんな, うるせえ. If you only know textbook Japanese, these lines can sound shocking, or they can fly past you completely.

This note covers the rough words you are most likely to hear on stage, what each one means, and how strong it is. Learn to recognize them, but don't use them yourself. The counts come from machine-made transcripts of the 1,905 routines in our library, so treat them as rough guides.

A quick map

てめえ: the hostile "you"

てめえ comes from 手前, a word that once meant "myself" and later came to point at the other person. Today it is the "you" of someone who is picking a fight. お前 is rough, but between close friends it can be warm. てめえ almost never is. In our library it appears on 69 lines from 29 comedians, usually in short bursts like なんだてめえは, "who the hell are you?" For the milder rough "you", see お前 and 俺 and お前.

この野郎: "you bastard"

野郎 means "guy" in an insulting way. この野郎 is "you bastard" or "you jerk", and in a real argument it is a fighting word. On stage it works a little differently. It often gets tacked onto the end of a line almost like punctuation, even when the line itself is harmless, and that mismatch is part of the joke. You will also hear the same insult in バカ野郎. In our library, この野郎 appears on 58 lines.

ふざけんな: "quit messing around!"

ふざける means "to fool around" or "to joke". ふざけるな is a blunt negative command, "don't fool around", and ふざけんな is its squeezed spoken form. The る turns into ん, the same pattern you see in 〜すんな. Depending on the moment it means "knock it off!", "you've got to be kidding me!" or "don't mess with me!" In our library it appears on 68 lines from 40 comedians, so it is spread across more acts than てめえ (29 comedians). The polite version is ふざけないでください, but in real life you would more likely say やめてください, "please stop", or 冗談でしょう？, "you're joking, right?"

うるせえ: "shut up"

うるさい means "noisy" or "annoying". When it is aimed at a person it means "shut up", and the rough "-ee" sound in うるせえ makes it harsher still (see すげえ, うるせえ, 知らねえ). In our library, うるせえ and its variants appear on 186 lines, about 3 to 1 compared with てめえ. In comedy it is a quick way to shut down a partner who won't stop talking. More on うるさい／うるせえ.

バカ and アホ: "idiot"

Of the words we can count reliably, バカ is the most widespread. It appears on 587 lines from 155 comedians. That count includes everyday phrases like バカにする, "to make fun of", and バカみたい, "silly", which are not insults aimed at a person. アホ is the "idiot" word traditionally associated with Kansai. Its raw count is too noisy to rely on, because the transcripts catch the same sounds inside other words.

Between close friends, either word can be affectionate, but said coldly to someone you don't know well, both of them hurt. The difference is covered in バカ and アホ and on バカ／アホ.

クソ: "damn", "crap"

クソ literally means "excrement". You will hear it on its own as くそー, "damn it!", or stuck in front of a noun or adjective as a vulgar intensifier: クソガキ, "brat"; クソダサい, "super lame". The raw count for クソ is inflated, because the same sounds turn up inside unrelated words (names like ジャクソン, for one), so we won't lean on it. It is vulgar rather than aimed at a person, but it is still not something to say at work. しまった, "oh no", or 最悪, "the worst", cover most of the same ground.

Why it works on stage and not in life

When the straight man shouts ふざけんな at the partner, everyone in the room knows it is a performance. The two of them have rehearsed it and they trust each other. The audience is laughing at the nonsense that set it off, not at the insult. The rough word is a signal: "that was absurd". That is why so many tsukkomi phrases sound harsh on paper.

Take away the stage and the trust, and the same words simply attack. Coming from a learner, they can also sound strange rather than funny, because the listener can't tell how seriously you mean them.

Using them yourself

• てめえ, この野郎: don't. Not to friends, not as a joke. Recognize them and move on.
• ふざけんな, うるせえ: also avoid. If something really bothers you, use やめてください or ちょっと静かにしてもらえますか, "could you be a little quieter?" With close friends, a light やめてよ or うるさいなあ, said with a smile, is about as far as it is safe to go.
• バカ, アホ: only with people you are very close to, and only playfully. Even then, many people dislike being called either one.
• クソ: keep it to muttering to yourself, if at all. Never use it at work, with strangers, or with anyone older than you.

The safe rule: if you heard it in a comedy routine and it sounds aggressive, keep it for your ears only.

Try it

• Search the library for てめえ, この野郎 or ふざけんな, and for each line, decide what nonsense set off the outburst.
• Watch the scenes on うるさい／うるせえ and バカ／アホ, then rewrite each rough line in the polite way you would actually say it.