There are times when it’s just horrible, like when they tweak song lyrics or try to play movies like Goodfellas on network TV. It’s funny when you can see the lips say “Asshole” but the words that come out are “butthead” or something else unrelated. Then you get classics like “Do you see what happens when you meet a stranger in the Alps and you feed him scrambled eggs?” off The Big Lebowski.
I recall a Playboy cartoon from long ago. The first panel is an interview show, a la Johnny Carson, and the guest says, “And I told them I don’t give a damn.”
In the second panel, a family is watching the show on TV, and the guest says, “And I told them I don’t give a beeeep”. The though bubbles over the family’s heads reads, “fuck?” “shit?” “crap?”
When Buster goes on his bleep filled rant about his mother that ends with the phrase “you old horny slut,” I fall out laughing every time. The look on his siblings face from amusement at the start of the rant to discomfort to absolute shock is one of the funniest moments in TV.
I wouldn’t be surprised. They did do that episode where the kids said the word “shit” over and over, uncensored.
Ah, here we go - It Hits the Fan. 162 utterances of the word “shit,” with a counter running in the corner of the screen. The article does mention needing to run the concept by Comedy Central execs, so I suspect they mean something like, “it’s funnier with bleeping - we probably could have persuaded them to let a few swear words past earlier, something huge needed approval, and these days they obviously know there isn’t a big deal since the episode didn’t create much controversy.”
Good imaginative cursing is funnier than bleeping, which is funnier than bad unimaginative cursing.
Joel McHale does bleeped profanity on The Soup quite a bit. To me, the fact that it’s bleeped sounds funnier than if you heard what he said. They also bleeped a lot on Whose Line Is it Anyway. One example of the bleeping sounding funnier is when Colin Mochrie introduces a song called “You Yellow Bellied, Lilly Livered Oooh, (bleep)!” The word he said was ‘mother’. For me, hearing ‘mother’ would be nowhere near as funny as hearing the bleep, and I’m assuming Colin knew it would come out that way on television.
[quote=“begbert2, post:16, topic:548465”]
“Xander, don’t speak Latin in front of the books.”
I enjoy profanity, but I do find bleeped profanity even funnier. The funniest case of it I’ve ever come across was from the Sam & Max game, Season 2.
[spoiler]There was a young rat named Timmy whose running gag was that he was constantly being bleeped. This isn’t the funniest Timmy bit, but it’s on YouTube:
It turns out that there was a department in hell in charge of bleeping words. To advance the story, you have to find out the name of a certain character, which Timmy knows, but it keeps getting bleeped. So, you go down to hell and replace the list of bleeped words with a grocery list. Then, when you talk to Timmy again, not only does it turn out that the words he was getting bleeped on weren’t all that profane (freakin’, heck, and the like) but now he’s getting bleeped on words you know are actually groceries, and it’s still hillarious. The name, by the way, turned out to be Dick Peacock.
And then you have Mrs Doyle from Father Ted going off on a foul-mouthed rant, and that would have been crap with bleeping.
Ofttimes, yes. The only time regular profanity is funnier is when it is actually shocking. The beep simulates the shocking factor by implying impropriety and being annoying enough, so it won’t be used. When the profanity is actually replaced, the word choice if often deliberately funny, and the way people respond to it like it’s real cursing adds to the humor. And again they don’t want to overuse it, not only because lip lock is hard, but also because it will make people focus on it too much.
Also, I found an old TV Land commercial that’s similar to the Count video. Remember this actually aired on TV, and watch the lips.
Not available here unfortunately. Can you give me a rundown? Was it the Irish swearing typical of the rest of the show? Feck arse etc.
On probably the same show, they did a censored version of “I could have danced all night”. Equally amusing.
I could have (bleep) all night!
I could have (bleep) all night!
And still have begged for more.
I could have spread my (bleep)
And done a thousand (bleep) I’ve never done before.
There was several big, hairy bollocks, an arse or two, a few bastards and lots of the “F” word. And not “fecking”, mind you!
One of the local Chicago radio stations (WXRT), not long after the whole hubbub about Janet Jackson’s exposed breast on TV, did a April Fool’s prank where they claimed that the FCC was really cracking down on obscenity, and that therefore they would be censoring their songs more heavily. So the next song on is Norah Jones’ “Don’t Know Why.” Clean song, right? For the joke, they pulled out all of these obnoxious sound effects (like “boi-oi-oiiiiinggggg” and kazoos and so on), and blanked out words like each instance of the word “come,” “ecstasy,” “wine,” etc. I was laughing pretty hard by the end.
This reminds me of the version of Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” that they played on local radio station KROQ here in LA.
“I wanna [dog bark] you like an animal…”
Still makes me laugh.
The funniest example of bleeped speech that I’ve seen is the episode of the X-Files called “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space”. Most of that episode is flashbacks while someone else is telling a story, and whenever they get to someone swearing (within the person’s story) they actually say the word “bleep”.
The Lost one is truly exceptional.
That sounds like it could be fun, although for the most part, my opinion is that Jimmy Kimmel would be a lot funnier if his whole show were one long bleep.