The "F" word on TV

General Questions
#21

SNL is in fact live, the only time that i remember it being delayed was when andrew dice clay was host. unless something has changed in the past 2 years or so, it’s still live.

and as a broadcasting student, 4 year radio dj, and broadcasting law lover, anything can be played after 10pm eastern and 9pm central (10pm mountain and 9pm pacific, i think) as long as it’s not obscene (which is hard to do just talking). same goes for tv, but the obscenity is easier to accomplish. and community standards play a big part too. in any decently big city, on their classic rock station, you will hear “funky shit” from steve miller “who the fuck are you” from the who, “bull shit” from pink floyd, and countless “bitch” and "god damn"s. and you will hear them anytime of the day. the FCC has been pretty lax lately, and they don’t have the manpower to go and fine every incident of these words. and the only way they find out, is if someone complains. and very few people do.
when i listen to music to air, i generally will allow a swear word to air if it gets aired on a commercial tv station before 9pm (or 10pm eastern). you won’t hear ‘god damn’, but you will hear ‘bitch’. ‘god damn’ is still one of the biggie swear words for some reason.
closed captioning is great, especially when a chris rock comedy special is on comedy central. they’ll edit the audio track, but not the closed captioning track.
chicago hope is sort of ground breaking in ways. i remember during the first season, i think, i saw breasts on there. she was a young woman who had breast cancer, IIRC.

there’s really no special pass from the FCC. technically, TV stations can do anything they want. but if they don’t abide by the rules, they’ll get fined big time. a college radio station got fined $22,000 for playing a Kid Rock song 5 or so years ago. the fine got cut to 6,500, i think.

as far as i know, swearing by actors on SNL has only happend the three times that we’ve mentioned. musical acts, on the other hand, are a different story. there’s a good SNL fan page somewhere that has a nice detailed list of what happened and when.

BTW, what’s a Coho?

#22

Somebody mentioned this in another thread,but Paul Schaeffer was in a bit where they were stoneage Beatles,trying to come up with a song.He had to keep saying its floggin 4 beats! Eventually,he said the f word.

#23

I don’t know if it still is, but SNL used to always be on a 15 second delay. I remember a couple of blank outs in the early days that were clearly fu… err… umm… slip ups by the actors. I seem to remember a discussion about this and the explanation was that most of the players are not used to having any restrictions on their language in their live acts and therefore could not be trusted to not make a mistake here or there, especially since there used to be a lot of ad libs in the skits.

Also, I spent three years in the U.K. and they get away with a lot. My favorite line from a TV program was on the Thin Blue Line. Rowan Atkinson was talking about someone making an error and he said, “It was a bit of a cock-up.” Then the abrasive detective (I forget his name) says defensively, “Cock-up my ass. That was no cock-up”. I nearly died of asphyxiation, I was laughing so hard. Another time my kid was watching a childrens’ program and there was this hillbilly boy laying in a haystack. A little girl came up and said, “I wouldn’t lay there if I were you”. They argue back and forth and finally he asks, “Why not?” The little girl replies, “Because that’s where they dump the shit!” The next scene is the boy covered with manure…

In Germany, they often show fairly explicit (R rated) movies on commercial TV after 9pm. They even showed a Japanese film one night complete with explicit penetration and an oral sex scene, complete with climax. It was very peculiar to see this messy sex scene one minute and then see a commercial for a soft drink in the next…

Having young kids, I’m thankful that US TV is as restrained as it is, but even it goes too far sometimes, for instance the recent episode of “Odd Man Out” where Erik Von Detten drops a condom and his mom finds it… try explaining that whole scenario to a 7 year old tactfully.

#24

Charlie Rocket was part of the “new” cast of SNL starting in 1980.

IIRC, the SNL show in question was the last show of the season (I think it was '81) and the skit was a running gag throughout the show, spoofing the “Who Shot J.R.?” madness. Charlie was the one shot, but the identity of the shooter was not going to be revealed to make the show a real cliffhanger.
At the very end, Charlie said something like, “Yeah, I want to know who the fuck shot me.” End of show and end of Charlie’s career with SNL.

#25

What gets me are the awful hatchet jobs that cable channels like USA and TNT do on the movies they show. In their zeal to root out every obscenity, they mangle the audio beyond belief, either dubbing in something else or leaving a blank spot. But as someone upstream noted, they almost always forget to edit the closed captioning. I keep the CC on most of the time because I have a son with logorrhea who insists on babbling about nothing when I’m watching TV. The closed captioning also allows me to pretend I’m listening to my wife on the phone without missing the on-screen action. CC is great.

Live a Lush Life
Da Chef

#26

I don’t know about tv, but it can be fun to call up radio call-in shows and “accidently” slip an obscenity in and see the reaction. For example, you pretend to be trying to think of something “hm…er…shit…ack! sorry!”, ie, just pretend you forgot to keep your tongue in check. Fun!

#27

“Live” talk-radio uses the FCC-mandated seven-second delay. Deejays call it the “cough button” and they push it to erase the offending portion of the tape that is being aired. The refusal to use the button in certain instances is what keeps Howard Stern in million-dollar fine difficulty.

SNL uses the same type of system, and any “profanity” aired on these kinds of shows is NOT accidental, although they desperately want you to think it is.

#28

Archie Bunker used G-D’s on his show. They were censored out later on reruns. So God D… was a word that was said that isn’t now.

#29

actually the button is usually called the dump button…a cough button is just that–when you cough or sneeze…it just cuts out the mic until you let up on the button.
howard stern is live in NYC, but delayed 1 minute and 15 seconds (1 minute in best of shows) across the country. i had to board op his show on a local radio station this summer…and he doesn’t get fined…his radio station’s owner (infinity, i think) does.

“Live” talk-radio uses the FCC-mandated seven-second delay. Deejays call it the “cough button” and they push it to erase the offending portion of the tape that is being aired. The refusal to use the button in certain instances is what keeps Howard Stern in million-dollar fine difficulty.

#30

The precise question was:

… and I don’t know the answer to that. However, I would like to point out a related matter that I noticed. Before Lorena Bobbit wisked off her husband’s ding-dong, you never heard the word “penis” on the air. Nowadays, though, you hear it all the time.

I am quite certain that the word was never said (except perhaps on medical shows) before the Bobbit incident.

#31

again, SNL is brought up. anyone remember the penis song? buncha guys at a nudist resort and every word was ‘penis’…kinda like the ‘spam song’ on monty python