Six Words You Can’t Say on Television

This is something I saw a couple weeks ago, but never got around to writing until now. On Election Night—I promise this isn’t a political post—I decided to watch The Daily Show’s live coverage on Comedy Central. I had no idea what to expect: maybe the show would be on all night and be less ridiculous than some networks that take themselves seriously (CNN, MSNBC, FOX, etc.). The truth is that it was still half an hour long, it still had commercials and it was… sorta live.

During the course of the show, they had a correspondent broadcasting from each party’s headquarters, made possible through the magic of green screens. Yay for magic! Aasif Mandvi was talking about the big celebration in the Romney camp, which they were calling… there were blank spots in the audio as opposed to bleeps, but if they had used bleeps instead, it would have sounded something like this:

*BLEEP* piss *BLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP*

To clarify, Jon Stewart said the audio probably cut out completely because Mandvi had just recited the list of George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words”. (I’d write the list on here, but I thought you’d appreciate reading the entire bit plus my grandmother might see this blog entry some day.)

So given the audio feed on Comedy Central, “piss” is now considered acceptable language for television viewers and I’m trying to decide how happy Carlin would be about that. Sure, the list is shorter, but just one word since 1972? What a bunch of *BLEEP*ing squares.