Bad taste as the paradigm of being. As a primary and spasmodic exigency to communicate, to be accepted at any cost, to make a good impression by any means whatsoever. Bad taste is what no one admits but everyone practices. This is what is dealt with here without haughtiness or moralizing, but with more than a hint of a healthy, cynical sense of humour and more than a few smiles. At home, at work, during free time or on vacation. In everyday life, in politics, at table, in bed or shopping. Thirty-three short stories, that could even have been thirty-three thousand, because from the bathroom furnishings to the bonbonnière, from compulsive hoarding to souvenirs from country fairs, from open air sex to the firstborn’s name, from practical jokes played by a group of friends to the morning defecation ritual, there is no angle of our living immune to bad taste, or its various off-shoots like kitsch, trash and camp. But let’s be clear, not one of us should feel superior to all this. That is the gentle warning of the two authors: «We’ve ridden the wave of emotion and even surpassed others’ beauty. We’ve been baptized in the hellish and divine river of bad taste. Because, dear friends, without a drop of that murky, sacred water, not even life itself would exist. No colour, no perfume, and no flavour: only boredom and drabness, for all eternity.»