Actually, it being Saturday Night Live, I’m sure they could have come right out and said cunilingus. But where’s the fun in that?
“Colonel Angus is an acquired taste . . .”
Maybe censors work on the principle of Plausible Deniability - if you can make a convincing argument that you were actually saying Colonel Angus, everyone involved looks the other way.
Punchline or not, it and Sneed’s Feed and Seed are the most oft-quoted examples in this bi-annual thread, and each time, someone asks for a clarification on its meaning. Arrested Development moves at a quick enough pace that something requiring you to process the exchange to figure out if something was a joke or not can easily be lost in translation.
What I’m confused by is people who think that double-entendres are somehow subversive or things that the censors should have caught (and subsequently disallowed). “How did they let *THAT *through?!?” just doesn’t compute - they let it through because it’s not, on its face, offensive.
Yeah, people often seem to confuse “It took me a minute to work that out” with “Ha! The censors never manged to figure that out!” which seems awfully arrogant, when you think about it.
It’s been that way since I started going to it in 2003 or so. It’s the reason I first got a popup and ad blocker. You probably never noticed because, for a while, the automatic pop-up blockers in every modern web browser were enough to block it.
A couple nights ago I was watching the Simpsons, and there was a Viagra ad parody for a drug called Kramitin.
There was an Animaniacs episode where Yakko (as a detective) tells Dot to “look for prints”. She appears a little later with Prince (the singer, as was his only name at the time). Yakko says, “No, no. Fingerprints!”
Dot takes a look at Prince and says, “I don’t think so.”
As for an example of something ‘getting past the censors’: Kevin Smith (I think, or whoever was doing the commentary) relates that in Clerks: The Animated Series, when Randal tells Dante, “You’re such a 'mo!” that they were asked what it meant. They claimed that it was a Three Stooges reference, and nobody called them on it.