This Trope Is Bleep: Difference between revisions

 

Compare and contrast [[Innocent Innuendo]], [[Accidental Innuendo]]. See also [[Cluster Bleep Bomb]], [[Sound Effect Bleep]], [[Manipulative Editing]], [[Scunthorpe Problem]], [[SMURFING]], and [[T-Word Euphemism]].

 

* A Tecate "cerveza" radio commercial aired in California in 2007 has the word "beer" beeped out.

* A commercial for Knorr frozen dinners deliberately bleeps out the word frozen, but only enough that you can still hear the "f" at the start and "n" at the end. Near the end of the commercial, the narrator notes "frozen doesn't have to be a bad word".

 

 

* ''[[Haruhi Suzumiya]]'': It wasn't a literal bleep, but some people found Mikuru's "I tried to contact but they said Classified Information, etc., thing in Endless Eight similar to this. Especially when you consider what could be in there. Kyon even asks whether it's meant to censor something obscene.

** Haruhi gets bleeped in the anime as she blackmails the computer science club president to give her a computer by taking photos of him groping Mikuru. In the event he tries to deny it Haruhi says she'll say all the male thugs ganged up on Mikuru and *BLEEP* her.

 

 

* ''[[Clash of the Elements]]'': At the end of chapter 40 of Part 1, as {{spoiler|Cecilia Frost}} is beating up {{spoiler|Ezekial Gaia}}, her swear words are censored out by his screams of pain. {{spoiler|[[Don't Explain the Joke|Though it is quite obvious from the first letter that she was going to use the word fuck.]]}}

 

 

* The "Lazy Pirate Day" interlude in ''[[Seltzer and Friedberg|Epic Movie]]'' has a short bit parodying rap censorship.

** Which in turn is based on "Beep" by The {{spoiler|Pussy}}cat Dolls, which does the same thing.

 

 

* In a ''[[Mad Magazine]]'' parody about a reality dating show, one of the crew is a sound editor, whose job is "bleeping out random, inoffensive words of a couple's conversation - making even the most articulate, civilized discussion sound like a drunken sailor's profanity-laced tirade". Example:

{{quote|'''Man''': You're such a cutie! I could {{spoiler|loo}}k you in the {{spoiler|eye}}s all day long!

 

 

* ''[[Sabrina the Teenage Witch]]'': On a [[Jerry Springer]] clone, the Spellman family finds random words bleeped out, so that their arguments sound more heated than they really are.

* The short-lived Jay Wolpert [[Game Show]] ''[[Blackout (TV series)|Blackout]]'' effectively made a game out of this trope, a celebrity had to communicate a word to their partner, but instead of doing it directly with the contestant, they had to record it (while the contestant wore headphones). When it was played back, the other team could use a giant plunger to mute out parts of the recording to make the clue word harder to guess.

'''Morgan''': I've got to learn self control. }}

 

* [[Aerosmith]] does this in the song "Just Push Play" (from the album titled the same) "Just push play, Fuckin' A! They're gonna *bleep* it anyway", with an actual bleep obscuring the word bleep, while "fuck" is left uncensored. This becomes amusing in radio broadcasts of the song, when BOTH are bleeped.

** The amusing thing is that the first two choruses have "fucking" beeped while saying "They're gonna beep it anyway." It's only the last chorus, after doing that twice, that they leave the profanity and beep the actual word beep.

 

 

* The [http://comics.com/pearls_before_swine/2010-11-09/ Mad Libs] [http://comics.com/pearls_before_swine/2010-11-10/ strips] of [[Pearls Before Swine]] from November 2010, and before them, [http://comics.com/pearls_before_swine/2010-06-11/ this.]

* A ''Robotman and [[Monty]]'' comic strip did an inverted version. When the [[Fourth Wall Mail Slot]] gave them a letter complaining about swearing in the strip, the characters explained that the asterisks and other symbols actually stood for words like "puppy" and "Iowa".

 

 

* [[Britney Spears]]' "Oops I Did it Again" was played on Radio Disney with the word "innocent" obviously silenced:

{{quote|"[[This Is Sparta|I'm not... that...]] ''[three note piano sound]''"}}

 

 

* [[Neil Hamburger]] has a bit on one of his comedy albums called "The Top 10 List - Censored!". The whole joke is that [[Laugh Track|the "audience" apparently finds the list hilarious]], but anyone listening to the album can't make anything out because almost every other word is bleeped. Occasionally, the bleep will be too short to actually obscure a word, but the word will clearly be something completely unoffensive anyway: The word "internet" is censored, for instance.

 

 

* In ''[[The Adventures of Sam & Max: Freelance Police|Sam and Max]]: What's New, Beelzebub?'', the Freelance Police replace a list of "bad" words in the FCC office (which is a division of Hell) with Satan's grocery list. This leads to stuff like the Soda Poppers being referred to as the <nowiki>@#$%</nowiki> Poppers for the rest of the game.

** The whole point in this exercise is to get a vital piece of information out of Tiny Timmy, whose [[Tourettes Syndrome]] seemingly turns the little rat tyke into a fountain of bleeped-out cursing. Of course, once you switch the lists, it turns out that his "expletives" were all [[Gosh Dang It to Heck|family]] [[Curse of the Ancients|friendly]] to begin with, although it's soon obvious why the demented [[Media Watchdog]] responsible would censor out the information as well ( {{spoiler|it's the name "Dick Peacock"...think about it}}).

 

 

* [http://www.drunkduck.com/Stickman_and_Cube/index.php?p=296810 This] ''[[Stickman and Cube]]'' comic.

* An early ''[[El Goonish Shive]]'' strip used [http://egscomics.com/?date=2002-01-26 this gag] [http://egscomics.com/?date=2002-01-27 retroactively].

* ''Lowroad'' used [http://lowroad75.comicgenesis.com/d/20090816.html another variation.] "{{smallcaps|Mosaic filters.}} The instant porn maker!"

 

* [http://sonicsez.ytmnd.com/ Take a look] at this YTMND. Now take a look at [http://sonicbeep.ytmnd.com/ this one].

** [http://doitbythebook.ytmnd.com/ Here's] another YTMND that uses this. If you didn't know, the song is about baking cakes...

* OAFEnet did this with their review of [[G.I. Joe|Shipwreck]], under the conceit that since he's a sailor, he'd be cursing like one. Though all of the bleeped words were chosen at random, some of them [http://www.oafe.net/yo/gij25ship.php worked out well]:

{{quote|If nothing else, at least he got to {{spoiler|date}} Cover Girl every month.}}

{{quote|"I ''beep'' the spiders on the wall/I ''beep'' the cobwebs in the hall/I ''beep'' the candles on the shelf/when I'm alone I ''beep'' myself!"}}

* Due to difference in cultures, some Australians are amused when commonly used words such as ''hell'' and ''damn'' are censored on some websites and message boards, making the censored words seem a lot worse than they actually are.

 

 

* ''[[Family Guy]]'' uses this in the episode "A Hero Sits Next Door": On ''Wheel of Fortune'', a contestant ponders the incomplete puzzle phrase "GO _UCK YOURSELF". After the complete phrase is shown as "GO TUCK YOURSELF IN", Chris - watching at home with Peter - turns and says, "You were close, Dad."

** Actually, "GO TUCK YOURSELF IN" is the [[Fridge Brilliance|only option that is actually possible]] - there is already an "F" in "YOURSELF", which would have revealed the other "F" had it been guessed. Also, the two unguessed letters in the word "in" would have been visible on a real-life Wheel of Fortune board.

'''DM:''' Penfold, shush. BLEEP is the '''B'''uilding '''L'''ocation and '''E'''mergency '''E'''xpedition '''P'''latoon. }}

 

** The best part is that Thomas didn't realize what he'd done until Steranko called him up to congratulate him for making the page dirtier than he himself could ever have dreamed up.

 

 

* Occasionally efforts to censor or cut a scene on the grounds that it would be objectionable to viewers might make the result seem worse due to [[Nothing Is Scarier]]:

** In ''[[Frankenstein (1931 film)|Frankenstein]]'', there is a scene where the Creature is playing with a little girl, throwing flowers onto a pond. After they are out of flowers to throw, he looks for something else pretty to throw into the pond, and chooses her, not understanding that she would drown. His killing the girl accidentally was deemed too intense for audiences of 1931, so execs cut off the scene just as he reached for her, jumping to her bereft father carrying her lifeless body back to town. Unfortunately, audiences imagine that the Creature had done something far worse than accidental murder.

 

 

* The first time episodes of ''[[Monty Python's Flying Circus]]'' were shown in the US, on ABC (yes, ABC's ''Wide World of Entertainment''), there was some interesting censorship. Specifically, for this trope, in the episode about the Montgolfier brothers the narrator says "That night the Montgolfier brothers had a good bath, they washed their [a list of body parts follows] and also their BLEEP BLEEP." The words that were censored were "naughty bits".

* On [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFX3C-QO4RM&t=1m30s one episode] of the American ''[[Whose Line Is It Anyway?]]'', during game called "Title Sequence", Drew asked the audience for "Unlikely Roommates in a Sitcom". One audience member shouted "Bill Cosby and Hitler!", and the group all looked really excited to run with it... until the director walked over and told them they couldn't use Hitler. Carey and the crew, obviously pissed, ripped on the whole fiasco up until Ryan's fantastic verse during "Hoedown" -

 

 

* The radio version of Lily Allen's "Alfie" lets her mention her brother's "lazy arse" but transforms "smoking weed" to "smoking ..." and "high on THC" to "high on ...". It's not even a positive portrayal of drug use, and seems especially bizarre.

** Similarly, MTV's version of Third Eye Blind's "Semi-Charmed Life" uses back-tracking to garble the words "crystal meth" and mutes out a couple of other references to drugs ("hit a bump") and sex ("She goes down on me").

I’ma {{spoiler|tie her to the bed}} and set this house on fire. }}

 

* [[Treehouse TV]]'s broadcast of ''[[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic|My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic]]'' [[Political Correctness Gone Mad|censors out every instance of the word "loser".]] This only makes anything the character said sound like it must've been worse, the most jarring example being in "Party of One" when Pinkie Pie holds a party with inanimate objects after believing her friends abandoned her and provides the objects with voices.

{{quote|'''Rocky''': Not so bad?! Pu-lease! Dey’re a bunch’a [censored]!

 

 

* Some local TV stations' weather tickers will have three beeps as a sound effect, which may overlap with dialog and unintentionally censor it.

** Also happens on BBC radio when presenters "crash the pips" - accidentally overrun so that their dialogue overlaps with the hourly time signal.