So I’m watching The Simpsons the other day. It’s the episode where Homer challenges the Southern Colonel to a duel and runs away to the farm where he grew up. To make a living, he grows crops sprinkled with plutonium. At one point he goes to the seed store to get seed. The name of the seed store is:
Sneed’s Feed and Seed
(formerly Chuck’s)
I’ve seen this episode three or four times, and this is the first time I caught that. I was laughing so hard that I missed the next minute or so, and then spent a couple of minutes explaining the joke to my wife (English is her third language, and phonetic jokes are difficult for her).
It got me to thinking. I remember Kent Brockman’s line from last season: “Soon, we’ll all be taking golden showers!”
Another web site (Daily Radar) I used to visit daily that was obsessed with The Simpsons (they believed it to be the greatest pop culture entertainment vehicle in American history) had several other hidden sexual references that got slipped by the censors, but the only one I can remember is Homer reciting a list of great things about America that included “Glory holes.”
After consulting a comprehesive group of experts (three of my friends and my brother), three of us thought the term meant “a mine shaft with a rich vein of gold or silver” but none knew of any sexual connotations. What is the sexual connotation here?
What other things have you seen in network tv shows that you were surprised the network censors didn’t catch and/or edit?
I guess the joke is that since you had “feed” and “seed,” which both rhyme with “Sneed”, you would need words which start with f and s, and rhyme with “Chuck.” Not so much subtle as obscure.
A Google search will get you the meaning of glory hole.
A glory hole is a small fist-sized hole between private video booths in an adult bookstore. The hole is placed about hip high for the average guy and is large enough to place a man’s penis through to let the person on the other side perform whatever sexual activity he pleases on it.
A glory hole is a hole through which a man sticks his penis in order for it to be sucked or otherwise stimulated by another person. They are common to peep shows and sex bars.
Interestingly, the traditional definition of “glory hole” is the hole through which the glass blower sticks his pipe into the furnace. This is what lets the Simpsons writers off the hook: If challenged they can point to the legitimate definition.
Ok, I did a search for glory hole, and got a zillion hard core porn sites that I’d rather not visit, and three sites that use the term to refer to good fishing spots or bait and tackle shops. If it’s something too graphic to explain here, I get the point about why it’s surprising it got past the censors without having to know exactly what it is. I’ll consider that one answered.
Another Simpsons one is from the episode where Homer and Marge look to spice up their love life and end up discovering they like having sex when they might be caught doing it.
They’re in a barn, and the farmer discovers his door is open. He enters the barn with a combination trident and shotgun, and shouts, “You’re in for a real ass-forking!”
On Mail Call a couple of nights ago, Sgt. Ermey referred to the Dutch aviator Anthony Fokker as "one smart Mother Fokker". I literally choked on my beer!
I know it’s not the same as the OP’s situation, but you have to wonder. I guess since it was on The History Channel, it’s considered “cable” and isn’t regulated by censors?
There was this one on The Family Guy. I happened to have recorded it, and I had to rewind the tape a couple times to be sure it actually happened: They did a parody of those diamond commercials which showed a silhouette of a man and a woman. The commercial says: “She’ll pretty much have to”, which I took to mean if you buy her a diamond, she’ll have to have sex with you. But the really subtle part was, just a second before the scene ended, the silhouette of the woman’s head starts moving downwards.
On a recent Twilight Zone epsiode, a woman is trying to seduce Lou Diamond Phillips (the ONLY reason I was watching, honest, he is a hottie) and her husband discovers them and beats up Lou. As he is leaving, he says: She’s always trying to get my attention by screwing the lowest life form available. Thank God we don’t have a * dog *.
My personal favorite is from The Family Guy as well. The son is supposed to be in this soap box durby, but doesn’t really want to take part, whereas Peter is all gung ho about it and pretty much doing it for himself. The son comes up to ask his father an important question:
“Dad, what would you say if I said I didn’t want to be in the soap box race?”
“I’d say ‘Come again?’ And then I’d laugh, cause I said ‘come’.”
It took several times watching the Simpsons episode “Hurricane Neddy” for me to get the unspoken “Dick Face” joke.
Flanders is watching an old videotape of himself as a problem child:
Ned: I’m Dick Tracy – take that, Prune Face (hits schoolmate). Now I’m Prune Face, take that, Dick Tracy! (hits other schoolmate). Now I’m Prune Tracy, take that, Dick…(is haled away by supervising doctor).
Also, according to some Simpsons website I read once, a questionable line was removed in the final edit of “The Cartridge Family”. If you remember, Marge had taken the kids to a sleazy motel because Homer refused to part with his handgun. The pre-edited version had, at checkout time, Marge looking over her bill and saying to the clerk, “I don’t remember ordering a blow job”.
ShadowWarrior– no you’re not thick. Regional difference in slang at work, I think.
While, in the UK, “flaming” is a sort of general intensifier, in the US and Canada it almost exclusively refers to homosexuality.
While “flaming” is occasionally used by itself in an innocent way, (especially among gay folk,) to refer to someone who’s exceptionally camp, “flaming homo” or “flaming 'mo” is an ugly epithet used by knuckle-dragging gay-bashers and ignorant juveniles. It’s a bit of a shocker to hear it, (even obliquely,) in The Simpsons. (Not that I didn’t love the episode anyway.)
