Kids Say the Darndest Things

1998-2000 CBS program co-hosted by Bill Cosby and Art Linkletter, based on the "Kids Say The Darndest Things" segments of Linkletter's famous 1945-1970 program Art Linkletter's House Party. Following the format that Linkletter created on the earlier show, he and Cosby would bring out a set of children between the ages of 5 and 10 and gently "interview" them to elicit innocently outrageous comments and observations. In both the original segments and the later show, typical ploys would include encouraging imaginative flights of fancy in the children's responses, and most subversively, asking them what they were told by their parents not to say.

The original House Party segments ultimately spawned several books that gave at least two generations of parents' nightmares about the unexpected truths their children might utter.

Tropes used in Kids Say the Darndest Things include:

Briar Patching: Deliberately employed with the simple question "what did your parents tell you not to say?" Linkletter employed this tactic almost from the first, and explored the idea at length in his 1957 Kids Say the Darndest Things book.
From the Mouths of Babes: The core concept of the show and the earlier House Party segments.