So, during a segment on last night’s Daily Show, Jon Stewart does that thing where he reaches into his coat pocket pretending to look for something, and then pulls out his hand with his middle finger extended.
I feel like he’s done this many, many times in the past, and every single time the middle finger was blurred. Last night it was not.
I realize that Comedy Central, being on basic cable, is not subject to external censorship, but they choose to censor themselves (except for very late at night). Unless my memory is faulty (which it might be), they just loosened up their restrictions.
Did anyone else catch this? Am I misremembering earlier instances of the blurred middle finger? I always watch the 11pm DS broadcast, so the time slot isn’t an issue.
Not earth-shattering, by any stretch – but interesting.
I wondered about that, too. Colbert has flipped the bird plenty of times and they’ve always blurred that, too. Maybe something at the network changed recently.
I remember an episode of South Park (also a CC show) once where they said “fuck” (or was it “shit”?) a bunch of times as a gimmick to see how many times they could say it on-air, even though it’s normally censored. Maybe CC just gets bored and does this kind of thing periodically to see what reaction they get.
The South Park episode where they didn’t bleep “shit” was heavily promoted. This was a kind of random thing in the middle of a Daily Show episode. The more likely options are that they forgot - which is hard to believe, but who knows - or that they’ve decided they don’t need to blur out a middle finger on a show that airs at 11 p.m.
Comedy Central has been schizoid on the bird for some time. Several years back I was watching an Amazing Johnathan standup special. They were blurring his bird out left and right. At one point he had a whole row of plastic hands with middle fingers up. All blurred. But during the commercial break, they were plugging that dumb cartoon reality series which showed a character flipping the bird. Okaaaay.
They seemed to have relaxed a bit recently. The s-bomb is now common place. I guess they’re trying to keep up with FX.
(Note that the Daily Show reruns during the daytime the next day. It’s first time slot doesn’t really matter unless they are censoring the daytime airings.)
Cable doesn’t have to answer to the FCC like on-air, but they do have to keep the advertisers happy. Generally, those who choose to advertise on COM have a higher tolerance for moderate bad words, gore, and partial nudity than the TBN advertisers would.
South Park has also ramped up the general rate of swearing IME. I imagine it’s bleeped on TV still, but the "fuck"s are uncensored online.
That might be the answer - maybe one of the shows advertisers had a “no bird-flipping” clause in their contract, and the advertiser either dropped the Daily Show, or didn’t include the clause when they renewed their contract.
I have seen broadcasts of the 11pm Daily Show and 11.30pm Colbert in which they did not bleep out a word, but that they did bleep it out for the rebroadcast the next day at 7 and 7.30 pm.
Interesting. This week’s Onion show on IFC seemed a lot raunchier than previous ones.
I’ve also noticed that on The Daily Show the bleeps are not quite getting the heart of the word to be bleeped. I wonder if that is intentional.
That is one of the many things that has mystified me about how censorship works on US TV. How could someone’s middle finger been deemed so offensive compared to some of the things that are shown.
I remember watching a documentary on A+E a while back and they showed the dead bodies of brutally murdered victims (with a bear minimum of blurring around the face), but completely blurred out someone’s hands when they were flipping the bird in a photo.
I saw him do an uncensored finger some time ago and was surprised by it, given that they bleep or blur most things like that. So it’s not the first time.
A blurred out middle finger seems to me to be a lot more suggestive of something offensive than a non-blurred one (which is, after all, just a finger).
ETA: Until my recent move to England, I used to watch The Daily Show religiously, and I do not recall ever seeing his finger blurred. Could this be a regional thing? (I was in So Cal.)
They do use the word “shit” more liberally. However I do believe Parker and Stone do their own censoring. The only time Comedy Central actually ever stepped in was during the unfortunate incident of the episodes referencing Mohammed, numbers 200 and 201.
We noticed it as well. Perhaps the stick up the censor’s ass got loosened by all the laughing they did watching Stewart’s take on Rick Perry’s “Brain Fart heard 'round the world” and Herman Cain’s equally hysterical following act.
IFC is a completely separate category. More like HBO They will even show NC-17 movies uncensored from time to time, so nudity and and coarse language is no problem there. (Which makes their original program like Portlandia stick out as surprisingly tame.)
One channel that has gone in the opposite direction is BBC America which has cut back on nudity/foul language in recent years.