Chuck Lorre is a gifted comedy writer, director, producer, and even composer for TV sitcoms. He wrote for Roseanne, about which he said, “One of the benefits of working 70 hours a week in hell is that the mind covers itself so you can’t remember it.” He created Grace Under Fire for Brett Butler, then left to create Cybill for Cybill Shepherd; both those jobs left him similarly battered and embittered.
He then created Dharma & Greg, which was a happy time, then Two and a Half Men, and now The Big Bang Theory, both of which are funny and sharp and intelligent. With Dharma & Greg, he started creating “vanity cards” that display a whole lot of text for maybe three seconds on the screen; you have to record the show and pause it carefully in order to read it. He now has a website where all of his vanity cards are archived.
This week’s Big Bang Theory vanity card reads:
CENSORED Tonight’s vanity card is about censorship. It was censored. As always, you know where to look.
It’s not the first card that was censored by the Powers That Be. I think it happens at least once each season. At his website, you get to see the card in all its uncensored glory. Here’s this week’s:
words that confuse the CBS censor fecund, penal, taint, titmouse, cockamamie, cockatoo, cocksure, coccyx, ballcock, cockeye, prick, prickly, kumquat, titter, cunning linguist, prick, insertion, gobble, guzzle, swallow, manhole, rimshot, ramrod, come, fallacious, lugubrious, rectify, Uranus, angina, paradiddle, spotted dick, dictum, frock, cunctation, engorge, turgid, stiff, bush, uvula, crapulence, masticate, Dick Butkus, gherkin and, of course, the always bewildering lickety-split. As you can see, context is everything.
“Paradiddle” is a new one for me. I’m going to try to use it three times this week, though I can’t think when the topic of a snare drum’s tempo would come up naturally in conversation.
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