An Animated Stan Lee Explains Why the F‑Word Is “the Most Useful Word in the English Language” (NSFW)

FYI. The lan­guage in this video is not safe for work. And, now, on with the show.

In the last cou­ple years of his life, Stan Lee was ill, his health fail­ing, but he stayed engaged and remained his old wise­crack­ing self. His hand­picked suc­ces­sor for edi­tor-in-chief at Mar­vel, Roy Thomas, tells the sto­ry of the last time he saw Lee and showed him his then-new biog­ra­phy of the comics leg­end, The Stan Lee Sto­ry. They talked about the Spi­der-Man com­ic strip they’d writ­ten togeth­er for two decades until a cou­ple years back. Oth­er famil­iar sub­jects came and went. Lee “was ready to go” and seemed at peace, Thomas says.

“But he was still talk­ing about doing more cameos. As long as he had the ener­gy for it and didn’t have to trav­el, Stan was always up to do some more cameos.” Lee’s cameos con­tin­ue after his death in 2018, as is the way now with deceased icons. He has made three live-action appear­ances posthu­mous­ly, in footage shot before his death, one posthu­mous appear­ance in an ani­mat­ed super­hero film, and anoth­er in a Spi­der-Man video game. Soon, these vignettes may be all pop­u­lar audi­ences know of him.

Who knows how much footage–or will­ing­ness to cre­ate CGI Stan Lees—Disney has in store for future Mar­vel films. But a memo­r­i­al in script­ed one-lin­ers seems to miss out on a whole lot of Stan Lee. The man could be count­ed on to make the set on time. (Accord­ing to Jason Mewes, Lee had din­ner with his wife every sin­gle night with­out fail at 6:00 pm sharp.) But he could also be unpre­dictable in some very delight­ful ways.

Thomas tells a sto­ry, for exam­ple, of vis­it­ing Lee in the 80s in a Cal­i­for­nia house with mar­ble floors. “At one point he excused him­self, and he came back on roller skates…. I’d nev­er seen any­one roller-skat­ing on a mar­ble floor.” The short film above ani­mates anoth­er of these unscript­ed moments, when Lee lit­er­al­ly went off-script to deliv­er an extem­po­ra­ne­ous mono­logue on the f‑word. Of course, “I don’t say it, ‘cause I don’t say dirty words,” he begins, before let­ting it rip in an argu­ment for the f‑word as “the most use­ful word in the Eng­lish lan­guage.”

Lee’s off-the-cuff George Car­lin rou­tine rolls right into his rea­son for being in the record­ing booth: get­ting a take of his sig­na­ture excla­ma­tion, “Excelsior!”—the word the cre­ator or co-cre­ator of Spi­der-Man, Thor, Iron Man, Ant Man, Black Wid­ow, Black Pan­ther (and most the rest of the Mar­vel Uni­verse) reserved for empha­sis in his heart­felt, whole­some let­ters to fans over the decades. After he says his catch­phrase, James Whit­brook writes at io9, he goes “right back into hav­ing a laugh with every­one around him. It’s a love­ly, if pro­fane, remem­brance of an icon,” and, unfor­tu­nate­ly, not the kind of thing like­ly to make it in future cameo appear­ances.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Stan Lee (RIP) Gets an Exu­ber­ant Fan Let­ter from 15-Year-Old George R.R. Mar­tin, 1963

R.I.P. Stan Lee: Take His Free Online Course “The Rise of Super­heroes and Their Impact On Pop Cul­ture”

The Great Stan Lee Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness