“Damned”
as in Damned hampsters!
Well, among the species on this planet that had/have spoken languages, I’m guessing the first curse word would probably be something like “AAAAARGH!”
…After that, and in more historic times, probably the equivilant of “damn.” As in “I damn you” or “I curse you.”
That is the hardest-to-pronounce thread title I have ever seen.
I’m sure our subvocal primate ancestors invented the obscene gesture before the swear word, especially while driving.
Um. I am looking at this thread, and my initial post is not here. What happened to it? Given the responses here, it doesn’t look like anyone else saw it either. I was asking about the first time various “bad” words were used on TV.
Dunno, but I think that Star Trek broke new ground with the use of the word, “hell.” I know that Harlan Ellison said they had one hell of a fight in getting them to use the word “hell” at the end of “The City on the Edge of Forever.”
I believe that a network broadcast of the movie “Network” contained the first utterance of the “S” word. I don’t know the year, but I was in high school, so between '76 and '80. After that, it probably didn’t happen again until this season on “NYPD Blue”. At least not on purpose.
According to the Internet Movie Database, Charles Rocket once unexpectedly blurted out the “F” word on Saturday Night Live, which he was on in 1980-81.
No, there was an oft-publicized use in 1999 on Chicago Hope. And David Letterman discovered the hard way that they could say it, but he can’t. He tried the same thing after an utterance of the bull sort from On Golden Pond.
That just happens sometimes; the OP is missing, and you get a thread with no posts in it. You should always save your post before submitting, and check your new threads to make sure it went through.
The episode of ER where Dr. Green dies, he falls down when his leg cramps up and screams, “Aw, shit!”
G.I.Joe: The Movie included the word “shit” when Beachhead is training with Jinx so that it would get a PG rating, thus (hopefuly) ensuring parents would have to buy a ticket for themselves as well if their kids wanted to see it. But the movie went straight to video. Nowadays, whenever the cartoon is shown on TV, no one ever remembers to bleep that explicative.
I don’t have a first date for the exclamations “damn” or “hell” for U.S. network television, but I do have a tape of the NBC special Destiny, West! from 1960, a live drama about explorer John Charles Fremont, in which one character shouts “Damn!” upon successfully breaching a pass through the Rockies.
Writer and critic Kenneth Tynan broke one taboo on Nov. 13, 1965 when he said “fuck” in a conversation with host Robert Robinson on the BBC’s late night live satire program BBC3.
In the “We’re Having a Heat Wave” episode of All in the Family, broadcast on Sept. 15, 1973, Michael taunts Archie about the ongoing Watergate scandal, saying, “Watergate, Watergate, Watergate, Watergate!” Archie shouts back, “I don’t wanna hear that no more, Goddammit!”
Archie turns to see a shocked look on Edith’s face.
Archie: “What happened to you?”
Edith: “Archie! You shouldn’t swear like that!”
Archie: “I did not swear!”
Mike: “You swore, you swore!”
Archie: “I did not!”
Edith: “Ever since this whole Watergate thing, it’s been nothing but GD this and GD that!”
Archie: “That ain’t swearing, Edith–GD. The first word is God, ain’t it? How can that be a swear word, the most popular word in the Bible. The second word, that’s damn. That’s a perfectly good word! You hear that all the time, like, ah, they dammed the rivers to keep them from flooding, see? And even in the Bible you read someone is damned for cheating, stealing or committing insex in the family. Who else damned them? God! Goddamned him! Edith, beautiful words right out of the Holy Book.”
A network broadcast circa 1979-80 of the one-man movie Give 'em Hell, Harry! (1975), starring James Whitmore as President Harry Truman, included his exclamation, “Bullshit!”
The Saturday Night Live show broadcast on March 15, 1980, had a sketch about a medieval band rehearsing, with Paul Shaffer, guest host Paul Simon, and musical guest James Taylor (also Michael Palin and Harry Shearer?) as the musicians. As Shaffer recounted it, “We made up our own word, ‘flogging,’ instead of ‘fucking,’ and we would say, ‘Well you had the floggin’ beat before” and we were all doing British accents. . . So it went very well in rehearsal. And [writer] Al Franken said to me, ‘You’re getting big laughs. If you want to add any more of those ‘floggings’ go ahead.’ But I got carried away [on the live broadcast], and just without thinking I said, ‘You had the fucking beat before.’ . . . But nobody noticed I said ‘fuck,’ because we were doing these bad English accents."
The SNL show broadcast on Feb. 27, 1981, with guest host Charlene Tilton from Dallas, had a running gag throughout the show about the “Who Shot J.R.?” cliffhanger on Dallas. At the close of the show, cast member Charles Rocket, playing the injured J.R. Ewing in a wheelchair, complained to Tilton about having been shot and moaned, “I’d like to know who the fuck did it.”
ABC News’ coverage of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in Chicago, included a nightly summary of events with hired pundits William F. Buckley (conservative) and Gore Vidal (liberal). But on the August 28 broadcast, after Chicago cops violently quelled a riot outside the convention hall, things got testy, with Vidal calling Buckley a “crypto-Nazi”, to which Buckley retorted, “Now, listen, you queer! Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddam face and you’ll stay plastered.”
I’m beginning to think I hallucinated it, but I could have sworn (appropriately enough) that the word ‘shit’ was used once on Barney Miller. One of their “very special” episodes, when Wojo says it in the course of an emotional outburst about something.
Does anybody remember it?
This thread is perfect timing, because I could have sworn I heard Hank say “Jesus” last night on King of the Hill, as an expletive. Can anyone else confirm this?
Holy narrowminded answers (aside from Walloon) Batman.
BadAstronomer said TV not just American TV so I think you will have to consider that in your answers.
Transformers: The Movie did exactly the same thing, though it was later cut out of some video releases. Those producers/marketers were pretty crafty.
Minors do not need their parents to take them to PG rated movies. PG movies are open to all ages; the rating is a recommendation, not binding like an R or NC-17 rating.
Norm MacDonald dropped the F word on SNL a couple of years back too. I happened to catch it live, and it was pretty funny. There was silence from him for a moment, then he realized what he had done, as did the audience.
I thought that was part of the joke…