Post: #1

In Living Color was a sketch comedy show on Fox in the early 90's. It was raunchy (for the time) and caused a few controversies. It featured members of the Wayans family along with then unknown comedians such as Jim Carrey and Jamie Foxx.

Inspired by Tuth's most recent piece over on RoK about rape jokes about men, I remembered a sketch from In Living Color that shows a time when rape jokes about men weren't allowed and flamboyant homosexuality was itself a joke. Men On... was a recurring gag with Damon Wayans and David Allen Grier playing stereotypical gays who give their bitchy opinions about pop culture. Here's a clip from Men On Film that probably wouldn't be shown today on network television because of its portrayal of gay men.





This sketch has two words censored out, "dick" at 1:49 and "soap" at 2:38. Soap is edited out because it references prison rape, something Fox didn't want to do in primetime on a major network. Fox at the time was no family values network either, as it had dealt with an advertising boycott over Married with Children started by a housewife. Fox feared a similar response to the In Living Color sketch, so it censored the sketch.

In Tuth's article, he used this clip from SpongeBob SquarePants, a children's show on Nickelodeon, where there's a reference to not dropping the soap.





The kids watching might not have caught the joke, but I doubt Nickelodeon would slip in such a reference unless it thought that the joke wouldn't be controversial. I doubt they could joke about violence against women without incurring the wrath of the feminist brigades.