Bill Simmons Has a Potty Mouth

When Bill Simmons does his ESPN podcasts, they’re preceded by the infamous disclaimer, “The BS Report is a free-flowing conversation that occasionally touches on mature subjects.” That never presages anything more risque than the occasionally off-color or bleeped remark.

When Simmons goes on Adam Carolla’s podcast, he earns that warning and then some. (NSFW language ahead.)

Bill Simmons: red background, blue streak.

Simmons joined Carolla, seemingly in Carolla’s house, for a Friday podcast posted on Thursday, and the topics, as is typical with Carolla, turned scatological quickly.

Simmons’ first line of the podcast is great: “And I all of a sudden feel like I have a very small penis.”

He’s referring to Carolla’s lifetime podcast traffic, which dates back to Monday, being north of a million downloads already, dwarfing Simmons’ best week ever.

There’s some general Los Angeles talk for about a minute, some podcasting discussion, and the talk turns to, well, pleasuring one’s self. They discuss the “Carolla Spunk Rule” at the three-minute mark and “spunk shui” shortly after; there’s also some discussion of efficiency.

The discussion turns to the Oscars, and the inevitable Oscar-winning movie pitches these two are famous for, around the 11:30 mark. Simmons comes up with Brokeback Secret Admirer, about two male best friends falling in love, and then Carolla pitches what turns into Just One of the Gays, a Shia LaBeouf vehicle with him attending Harvey Milk High School, a highly-respected private school with the sort of population you would expect with that name, and falling in love with a cross-dressing Dakota Fanning.

Admittedly, it’s funny, and I chortled along with Simmons. But I don’t have any rules imposed on my sense of humor, and I’m not sure ESPN will enjoy the extremely non-PC nature of this conversation.

At around the 21:00 mark, they start talking about bachelor party etiquette, which elicits the old NBA story about the Jason Kidd-Jimmy Jackson-Toni Braxton love triangle a “famous basketball story” about an NBA team “in the playoffs one year” with two stars “bangin’ the same chick” and a third player telling his wife, who told the star’s wife, and the team lost in the first round of the playoffs. (Thanks for the correction, mr pickles. Anyone know who the team is?)

This also gets Simmons to say “Benedict Cockblock” a few times.

Near the 24:30 mark, Simmons says “I actually get bummed out by strippers.” Then he clarifies: “Not the hot ones!” Then he talks about the “YouPorn premise” of strip clubs, and the folly of waiting for the most attractive dancer. It’s all entertaining and in the vein of classic dorm-room discussions. But, again, how would ESPN feel?

The talk turns to bathroom attendants at around the 29:00 point, which leads to, at 29:08, Bill Simmons saying:

“You don’t want to be thinking about this poor dude who’s trapped in a bathroom, smelling like somebody’s shit the whole night.”

It’s the first four-letter word I can recall Simmons not having censored. It’s not the last of the podcast.

At 32:00 or so, Simmons rehashes the college bathroom discussion from one of his podcasts this week (click to listen, right-click to save), dropping:

“See, you didn’t go to college, so you missed out on—and I talked about this the other day, on a podcast—how fucking disgusting the bathrooms are.”

He follows that bomb with describing his dorm bathrooms on a Sunday:

“You’re just like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to go take a pee,’ and, like, stall one, covered in shit. Stall two, puke and shit. Stall three, just puke. Stall four, maybe I can wipe down the pee and sit on it.”

And he cites reader emails sent to him through ESPN, including, specifically, the old-standing-on-a-used-condom-in-the-shower problem, as evidence that the current state of affairs is no better.

The puerile, scatological humor then turns into puerile, sexual humor, with a discussion about compiling discs of the uncensored nudity of various reality shows around the 37:00 mark that prompts, out of the blue, Simmons taking a shot at college athletes keeping mum about payments. The audio editor in the room, a former Big Brother editor, relays an interesting anecdote about one former contestant, too.

Now, the podcast’s only 45 minutes, and in the wrap-up, Simmons gives his view of the future of podcasting, then Carolla mentions having Norm MacDonald on and shares a brief and horrifying anecdote about him, then Simmons mentions wanting to hear Jim Norton’s “ten most deviant sexual moments.”

“It’s a podcast,” Simmons reasons, “it’s not like people—you have to listen to it.”

Sure, it is, and this particular one is enjoyable, but I can only imagine how quickly ESPN shuts Simmons’ moonlighting down when they catch wind of Simmons’ potty mouth. Yes, he’s been profane in Internet ink before, while roasting Will Leitch on Deadspin, but that wasn’t part of his burgeoning podcast career, and definitely wasn’t while he had a sponsor attached to the podcast. (Though, really, this is an actual fresh take from Simmons.)

Considering the controversy last year that got Simmons’ podcast shut down briefly and was part of the greater Rick Reilly-Bill Simmons feud, I should think ESPN has rebuked Simmons by email and phone already, that someone’s made mention of this. That this should happen in the same week Simmons is featured in an ESPN.com commercial is even less opportune for the Worldwide Leader.

But the profanity is far less important than the perceived gay-bashing.

ESPN has had all sorts of incidents in the past few years, and thanks to the magic of the Internet and Deadspin, we know about most of them.

When Chris Berman bellowed the f-word at the Monday Night Football crew, ESPN handed down an apology. When Dana Jacobson ranted about Notre Dame at a roast, she was suspended for a week. When Scott Van Pelt ripped into Bud Selig, he left the airwaves briefly.

The thing is this: ESPN can be capricious and short on explanation with its suspensions (you can read this excellent column from the former ESPN ombudsmarm, about other suspensions, to confirm that), but one of the things you must not do is offend the sponsors or meal tickets.

ESPN televises Major League Baseball. ESPN has many Notre Dame connections. ESPN doesn’t care as much about the feelings of the faceless interns Berman shouted down.

You might be able to connect those things to the respective punishments.

Because of this, and because Simmons has gotten away scot-free with the four-letter words on a competitor’s site in a similar environment (though, to be honest, ESPN having to acknowledge Deadspin in any sort of response would have complicated the problem), I’ll guess the profanity, directed at no one, and offensive only to the overly sensitive, leaves no lasting marks.

Now, the off-color comments in the movie pitches might not play well in the LGBT community. Disney prides itself on being a gay-friendly company, even risking protests from the other front in the culture wars. Heck, gay couples can even get married at Cinderella’s castle if they want.

So what Disney and Simmons’ podcast sponsor do in reacting to his tongue-in-cheek enthusiasm for Just One of the Gays is a little more difficult to predict. My gut tells me that ESPN’s had a phone conversation with the Sports Guy since that podcast went up, and that we may never see Simmons on Carolla’s show or vice versa again.

The latter would be a shame, but, whether the masses of anti-censorship fans like it or not, ESPN has a contract with Simmons that restricts him to a certain vocabulary and set of topics. He can either fulfill the contract, which pays him tidy sums of money, and toe the line most of the time, or he could consciously self-immolate, gun for a breach of contract, and try to head for less fenced-in fields. (I’d assume, though, that he has some sort of non-compete clause that would preclude some of that.)

Conspiracy theorists (like, for example, Simmons himself) would tend to think that there’s some truth to the “I want to be fired” line of thinking, but Simmons is a husband and father with two kids living in a nice home in Southern California. He would be beyond stupid to try to negate a contract that rewards him as handsomely as his current one does, especially as he’s settling into a rhythm with this NBA season, spending the day of the trade deadline with Baron Davis and writing this tome of a column, one of his best in years.

Update: From the man himself, in another rambling Mailbag:

Q: I listened to your spot on Adam Carolla’s new podcast, and for the first time ever you swore and it wasn’t bleeped out. It was surreal, and I gotta say I’m developing a taste for it, Simmons. I’m afraid I won’t be able to go back to the genteel Sports Guy. It’s like your long-term girlfriend, who’s really conservative in bed, gets really drunk one night and she unexpectedly turns into an animal. How can you go back? How?!
— Max R., Sydney

SG: Just wait until my book comes out! Lots of swears and even a few completely inappropriate topics handled without any diplomacy whatsoever. I couldn’t be more delighted. Get ready for more animal sex with me, Max from Sydney. OK, bad choice of words.

You can, again, visit the post with the podcast here, but you can also right-click and download this, which is the podcast in MP3 format.

Thanks for reading.