This Trope Is Bleep

Note that there's already an F revealed in the puzzle.

Son of a gum chewing funk monster! Why the fruit does all this funny stuff happen to me?! Forget my life! Always surrounded by miserable failing clods, like this whole world just wants to bend me over and find me in the alps! Well, as far as I care, these miserable cows can have a fancy barbecue with a god damn pig!!!

—Vegeta, Dragon Ball Abridged

When a show removes a perfectly innocuous word or words in a sentence, giving it dirty connotations. This can be done intentionally for comedy, to parody censorship, or unintentionally as a result of actual censorship because some one really messed up.

Intentionally bleeping out sections of innocent dialogue to make it sound dirty for comedic purposes has become known as Unnecessary Censorship.

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

Examples of This Trope Is Bleep include:

Intentional Examples

Advertising

  • 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".
  • A Swedish insurance company is currently running radio commercials of the form: insurance clerk repeats the claimant's story, with every third word or so bleeped. The claimant confirms that this is what happened, and the clerk tells him that no problem, we can cover that.
  • Commercials for the then-new TV Land channel featured clips from wholesome shows like "The Brady Bunch" and "The Andy Griffith Show" with random censor bleeps, as if they'd been re-edited into something Darker and Edgier.
  • Around March 2010, limited edition cans of Tango were printed with risqué slogans printed with temperature-sensitive ink, so the cans would have to be chilled to reveal hidden words in phrases such as "Chilled Tango froze my pips off", "Chilled Tango made my stalk shrivel" and "Chilled Tango made my stones shrink".
  • Frank's RedHot. "I put that (bleep) on everything!"

Anime and Manga

  • 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.
  • Lucky Star's Kagami in the OVA:

"I want to ******* with Konata!

    • This is apparently supposed to mean 'cosplay', though that could have its own Fetish Fuel in itself...
    • Kyo Ani also seems to like to censor any names of anime/manga not from Kyo Ani (although it's blatantly obvious what they're talking about), with the exception of Keroro Gunsou. They can get very creative with the types of sounds used to bleep things out.
  • Episode 7 of Full Metal Panic!? Fumoffu has tons of censoring speech by Sousuke, in order to butch up the sissy-pants rugby team. Arguably one of the best examples in anime (and one of the funniest as well).
  • Hayate the Combat Butler has a lot of these effects throughout the anime series, which is due to parody.
  • According to Fairy Tail volume 8's Q&A, Loke's guild tattoo is on his back.
  • Some episodes of Gintama.
  • One of the previews in Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni Kai cover what the hell Hanyuu's horns are. Well, it's obvious isn't it? They're horns!
  • Fruits Basket bleeps when Hana says she'll *BLEEP* you with her poison arrows. This is done both in the manga and anime.


Fan Works


Film

  • The "Lazy Pirate Day" interlude in Epic Movie has a short bit parodying rap censorship.
    • Which in turn is based on "Beep" by The Pussycat Dolls, which does the same thing.
  • Several instances in the Austin Powers movies.
    • In Austin Powers in Goldmember there is a scene where Austin visits Mr. Roboto in his office looking for his father in Japan. He speaks Japanese to Austin for most of the scene but is revealed to have known how to speak English the entire time so subtitles are used to translate his words into English. The subtitles are displayed in white, and coincidentally, many objects in the office also happen to be white. Austin is aware of the subtitles, and as a result of carefully aligned camera angles, certain words in the subtitle are blotted out creating seemingly dirty phrases which elicit shocked reactions from Austin. Of course, once the objects blocking the subtitles are removed, the phrase is revealed to be perfectly normal. Mr. Roboto and Austin lampshades heavily on this trope.
      • "Please eat some shitake mushrooms."
      • "Your assignment is an unhappy one."
      • "I have a huge rodent problem."
  • In The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, Sharkboy is singing to get Max to sleep;
    • "..Dream a dream you little bleem."


Literature

  • 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:

Man: You're such a cutie! I could look you in the eyes all day long!
Woman: Oh, thank you!

  • There was a book called Mother Goose Censored that did this, way back in the 1926, with nursery rhymes. (e.g., "He put her in a pumpkin shell, / And there he [CENSORED] her very well.")
  • In Catch-22 Yossarian is given letters to censor while in hospital. To relieve the boredom, he censors random words rather than actual valuable information.
    • For one letter, just for the hell of it, he blanks out the entire thing and replaces the text with a fake love letter purportedly from one of the other characters. It leads to some unpleasant consequences.


Live-Action TV

  • 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 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.
  • Jimmy Kimmel Live has a recurring segment called "This Week in Unnecessary Censorship", which consists entirely of this trope. So, for example, a clip of the President saying "I visited the Queen and we talked for hours" will have the words "visited" and "talked" bleeped out.
  • The writers behind the Match Game series loved this trope; many of the questions allowed the audience to go make up dirty words for themselves.
  • The explanation of the "Jewish mistletoe tradition" by Jon Stewart in A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift Of All. A forty-five second censor bleep, complete with hand gestures, ending "...with a lamb shank." The audience's mind is always filthier than anything the writers could have come up with.
  • In Time Trumpet, innocuous political rhetoric like "these cuts must be stopped" is bleeped into sounding like "these c__ts must be stopped". Armando Iannucci appears to be quite a fan of subversive wordplay.
  • Similarly subverted in Harry Hill's TV Burp with bleeps dubbed over a wildlife documentary on penguins: "I just can't find any **** king penguins! Ah! There's a **** king penguin!" The presenter is of course searching for king penguins...
  • Done so very many times on Whose Line Is It Anyway, thanks to a combination of Genre Savvy and Medium Awareness. One suggestion in the ever-popular Scenes From a Hat game actually challenged the players to make the censors do this.

"That's never gonna make it to air, if you know what I mean..."

  • MythBusters: The famous clip of Jamie saying "That's what we do on Mythbusters: We blow bleep up!" When the clip was aired without the bleep for for the "Favorite Myths" special, Jamie clearly says "crap", which is a borderline bleepable word in the U.S. (but often considered "optional").
  • Leverage features a visual rather than audio example of this trope. In "The Office Job," the characters are performing a con at a greeting card company and during talking-head interviews (a documentary film crew is filming there at the same time - the episode is an homage to The Office) characters hold up a blurred-out greeting card.
  • Flight of the Conchords - "Mother Uckers"
    • Also, "Boom". The word "boom" is used as a substitute for many words in different contexts. What each usage of the word actually means is up to the audience.
  • Seinfeld does this with The Non-Fat Yogurt episode after Jerry drops an F-bomb and the store owner's kid starts repeating it.
  • Boy Meets World As Corey is being grounded for sneaking off to Disney World.

Alan: For starters this house and school are the only two places you are going to see for the next month.
Morgan: A month? I got more the time I said [BLEEP]
Alan: MORGAN! Get up to your room there, you're grounded for two months!
Morgan: I've got to learn self control.


Music

  • 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.
  • Five Iron Frenzy did this to parody the copious swearing of gangsta rap in Part 8 of their mock rock opera "These Are Not My Pants": loud BEEP's are applied liberally and completely at random over Micah's improvised rapping.
  • When someone on the Lemon Demon forums asked for a version of "The Ultimate Showdown" with the word "ass" bleeped, he was given this instead. Made even better when "ass" remains one of the only words not bleeped.
    • Another Lemon Demon example is his version of Sesame Street's "Song of the count", where everytime the Count count something, it's bleeped out. Watch here
  • One version of Dropkick Murphys "Pipebomb On Lansdowne (Dance Remix)" has bleeps in the entirely wrong spots at times (you'll have bleeps and then a clear "FUCK!" right after).
  • Fall Out Boy has a live album titled **** Live in Phoenix. But what lies behind the **** anyway...?
    • Fall Out Boy also has a song entitled "Our Lawyer Made Us Change the Name of This Song So We Wouldn't Get Sued". Nobody knows what the original title is.
      • Sure they do, it was "My Name is David Ruffin... and These are The Temptations"
  • As mentioned above, the Pussycat Dolls song "Beep" sounds incredibly dirty, as the end of almost every line is a beep, talking about what men "look at" and what men "play with." The most explicit thing mentioned, however, is wanting to hold the singer's hand.
  • Used in the Songs to Wear Pants To song Little Eeeee Foo Foo where 'bunny' is among the random bleeped words.
  • Benny Bell's legendary "Shaving Cream."
  • "Gallows Hill" by Sta' Warz, which was an entry in a songfight competition: It's a mock-gangsta rap song where nearly every line had a bleep or two, but the members also posted the full lyrics, which were completely clean, if pretty nonsensical. For instance, "Mother said you can suck on my peppermints!", and "They call me fireman, 'cause I am one!".
  • Subverted in The Notorious Cherry Bombs' song "It's Hard to Kiss the Lips At Night That Chew Your Ass Out All Day Long". They even Lampshade it with the lyrics 'It's okay if we say it, 'cause the radio won't play it'.
  • Spike Jones' "I Dream of Brownie in the Light Blue Jeans" does this with the song "I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" starting at the 2:10 mark.


Newspaper Comics

  • The Mad Libs strips of Pearls Before Swine from November 2010, and before them, 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".


Radio

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

"I'm not... that... [three note piano sound]"

  • A certain game on I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again and I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue does this to songs. In addition to the example above, there was a version of "My Favourite Things" from The Sound of Music in which everything except the "and"s and "...all tied up with string; these are a few of my favourite things" was bleeped.
    • One ISIHAC Christmas special played the Censorship Game with "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus". It worked very well indeed. So did one with "Underneath The Arches" ("...I [buzz][2] my [buzz][3] away.")
  • The day after the first McCain-Obama Presidential debate in 2008, an Atlanta radio station aired the audio of the event...with random bleeps inserted, while the DJs tried to determine whose fake profanity-laden tirade was funnier. Obama, apparently. McCain just sounded like a generic Grumpy Old Man.
  • British radio presented Danny Baker inserted random bleeps into John Denver's Annie's Song and the results sounded like this.

"You f*** up my senses; come f*** me again!"

  • One of the stock games on the CBC Radio show Because News is to bleep out words from a politician's sound bite and have the panelists guess what the quote was originally about.

Stand Up Comedy

  • Neil Hamburger has a bit on one of his comedy albums called "The Top 10 List - Censored!". The whole joke is that 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.


Video Games

  • In 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 @#$% 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 family friendly to begin with, although it's soon obvious why the demented Media Watchdog responsible would censor out the information as well ( it's the name "Dick Peacock"...think about it).
  • The visual novel Tsukihime uses it interestingly by (actual spoiler) blanking out the word 'kill' to make the line "I want to her."
  • StarCraft 2 has an interview with the Dominion's best ghost, sadly he cannot reveal any information about his job. But we are told it's very important.
  • BlazBlue does this humorously. Kokonoe in one Teach me miss Litchi say she would use the rocket punch extension on his GIGANTIC TAGER!! She does this again in Rachael's Gag Reel with Ragna the bloodedge attack names.


Web Comics

Web Original

  • Take a look at this YTMND. Now take a look at this one.
    • Here's another YTMND that uses this. If you didn't know, the song is about baking cakes...
  • A popular gag on YouTube Poop videos.
  • YouTube musician Julia Nunes does this in a video answering viewers' questions. Apparently, someone objected to Julia's mild, infrequent language as they allowed their children to watch her videos. Julia responded: "Hot dog! When will you bi lly goats realize that I'm twenty years old, and I'm gonna say whatever comes to my mind? Fu ngus! Ti ngly! Duck!Sh eets! Fondue!"
    • What made it even better, though, is that the beep she used to censor herself was a recording of her own voice saying the word "beep".
  • OAFEnet did this with their review of 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 worked out well:

If nothing else, at least he got to date Cover Girl every month.

"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.
  • Episode 19 of Dragon Ball Abridged makes use of this trope.
  • The IGN review of Pokémon Black and White was "redacted" prior to the game's release to avoid spoilers. This resulted in humorous bits like this:

But then he turns into ¦¦¦¦¦¦, who looks like ¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦ ¦ ¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦ ¦ narwhal ¦¦¦ ¦ drunk bear ¦¦ ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦¦¦. ¦¦¦¦¦ conveys the image of ¦ ¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦ melted ice cream sandwiches ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦ ¦¦¦¦¦¦¦ cigarette butts.

Ant-Man: There were a couple of mercenaries on the beach, and I shrunk them down. Could you make sure the ants don't eat them? Thanks.
The Wasp: Eat them? Eww!


Western Animation

  • 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 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.
    • Another puzzle phrase turned out to be "MY HAIRY AUNT" (not shown onscreen because the hidden "A" in "hairy" would've given it away) and, once again, Peter got it wrong.
  • Another Wheel of Fortune gag turns up in the South Park episode "With Apologies to Jesse Jackson." Randy is a contestant on the show, and is confronted with the following puzzle phrase (in the category of "People who annoy you"): "N_GGERS". With time running out and after several long moments of hesitation, he finally blurts out the only answer that occurs to him...after which the correct answer is revealed as "NAGGERS".
  • Another episode of South Park bleeped out words like "dummies" to make it appear the kindergarten-age characters were swearing as much then as they did in fourth grade.
  • The Sealab2021 episode "Radio Free Sealab": The end of the episode, the Father-Son FCC duo have an exchange that is heavily but masterfully bleeped, implying a nasty conversation. A DVD extra features the unbleeped dialog which is much tamer and in many cases the opposite of what you were expecting. The younger agent's entire last line of dialog is bleeped to implying that he is cursing out his father, when he's actually saying something like "I love you, dad."
    • Bleeped lines of dialog followed by unbleeped lines like "That's legal in Tijuana" make this an example of a Noodle Incident.
  • An episode of Kablam! had Henry being bleeped randomly as a practical joke.
  • Zig-zagged in the Danger Mouse episode "One Of Our Stately Homes Is Missing". The brick-and-mortar theft of the Duke of Bedbug mansion prompts DM to conclude they need help:

DM: Well, Colonel, looks like it's a job for BLEEP.
Penfold: Who's that?
Colonel K: Organization called BLEEP, Penfold.
Penfold: Oh, go on. You can tell me. I'm a trustee.
DM: Penfold, it's BLEEP.
Penfold: All right then. I shan't tell you where I hid the corn flakes.
DM: Penfold, shush. BLEEP is the Building Location and Emergency Expedition Platoon.

Unintentional Examples

Comic Books

  • During Jim Steranko's run on Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. he had drawn a passionate, yet fully-clothed heterosexual kiss. Knowing that it wouldn't pass the Comics Code Authority, Marvel editor Roy Thomas simply replaced it with a blow-up of a portion of an earlier panel—which depicted Fury's gun in its holster.
    • 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.


Film

  • 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, 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.
    • In The Brood, the birthing scene was similarly cut. David Cronenberg lamented at the cut, saying that he had a long and loving scene of Nola biting the infant free of the birthing sac and licking it clean, but the censors cut it just as she bit through the sac, leaving audiences with the impression that she was eating her baby.


Live-Action TV

  • 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 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" -

Our director, he really is the boss,
For yelling and screaming, he's never at a loss,
He's the meanest guy you will ever see,
He should sprout a mustache and move to Germany!

    • Sidenote: Here, Ryan is not subject to Godwin's Law.
    • Drew: "If Tarzan and Tonto were roommates -- oh, I like that, let's make fun of Native Americans, who gives a fuck about them?

"Tonto": "Will you go upstairs and tell Hitler to be quiet?"

    • The magic words are Stephen Hawking.
    • A game of "If you know what I mean" with a gym theme ended in hilarity when one of them mentioned a 200 pound snatch (a weightlifting move). Ryan correctly predicted "I don't think that will make it to air, if you know what I mean." (The segment did make it to air.)
  • One season of Survivor featured a contestant whose regular outfit included camouflage-pattern pants. For some reason, CBS censors blurred out the pants, thus making it look like the contestant was pantsless.
    • The reasoning (well, "Reasoning(TM)") was probably that camo... Somehow... Indicated gang affiliation.
  • In one episode of 7th Heaven, Mary is upset that Simon called her "Big Butt." When the episode airs on the Hallmark Channel, they cut out the word "butt." This leaves the viewer to wonder what parts of his sister's body Simon could think are big.
  • BBC America censors the use of the word "cock" as an exclamation, which makes Top Gear's James May sound much more potty-mouthed than usual.
  • GMC (The Gospel Music Channel) censor words like "stupid" and "jerk" from its reruns of Sister, Sister.
  • On the TV show Never Mind the Buzzcocks, a guest uttered a stream of swear words, which were bleeped out. The guest then informed the production team that they had just broadcast the Morse Code for "fuck".


Music

  • 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").
  • A particularly odd example occurs in some radio versions of the Nickelback song "Rockstar", in which the words "drugs" is bleeped out, leading to the line "the girls come easy and the --- come cheap".
  • MTV does this a lot with any lyrics relating to guns, violence (particularly against women), or drug abuse. One example that makes the song sound filthier was the video edit for "Le Disco" by Shiny Toy Guns, which turned "on your back, with loaded guns" into "on your back, with ---".
    • There's a line in Eminem's "Cleaning Out My Closet" where he refers to his altercation with a guy who was having an affair with his wife:

What I did was stupid, no doubt it was dumb
But the smartest shit I did was take the bullets out of my gun
'Cuz I'd have killed him, shit, I would've shot Kim and him both
It's my life, I'd like to welcome y'all to the Eminem show

    • MTV censored "shit," "bullets" and "gun," thus destroying a condemnation of violence. There's probably some kid somewhere who drifted into a life of crime because he never got to hear his idol denounce violence.
    • Everlast's "What It's Like" contains the line "He pulled out his chrome .45, talked some shit, and wound up dead" on some radio stations. The second bleep is a legitimate swear word, but the first is "chrome .45." The gun-less version easily leads to some bad guesses about what exactly he "pulled out" that got him killed.
    • British MTV even edited out the line "I drank a fifth of vodka, do you dare me to drive?" in Eminem's "Stan"
    • Perhaps the most ridiculous example: the video for Electric Six's "Gay Bar" (already a masterpiece of comedic raunch) that censors words like "war" and "nuclear war." That's right, "nuclear war" is a dirty word. Even better is how the verse is censored with whip cracks: "Let's start [wha-khish!]/ start a [wha-khish! wha-khish!]/ at the gay bar, gay bar, gay bar!"
      • If The Other Wiki is to be believed, the edits occurred on the UK version due to the song's release at the start of the Iraq war (the one that started in 2003). Which explains it, even if it's still borderline silly. Incidentally (and even more ridiculously) the BBC banned Lulu's "Boom Bang-a-Bang" during the original Gulf War.
    • Maroon 5's "This Love": "Keep her cumming every night". Since even the most censor-prone radio station allows the word, it could lead to a lot of questions from innocent children as to why the word was removed. I was already in high school by that point, so for me it was more like, "Oh, right, that word has two meanings!" type of thing. The non-dirty meaning worked well enough in the context that I didn't even catch the real meaning until MTV pointed it out to me by censoring it. Of course, MTV's just weird like that. Later in the song, there's a pair of lines "Diggin' my fingertips/into every inch of you, because I know that's what you want me to do." Want to know which word got cut? Diggin'.
      • Around the same time, Avril Lavigne's "Don't Tell Me" was on their hits rotation regularly. Due to their strict No Sex Allowed policy, a pair of lines was censored as such: "Don't think that your charm and the fact that your arm is now around my neck/Will get you in my pants I'll have to kick your ass and make you never forget" Never mind that the message of the song is abstinence, or that a minor curse word ("ass") is left unbleeped just six words later. MTV is hilarious when it comes to censorship.
    • Amusingly, they recently had All Time Low performing their song "Poppin' Champagne" live...wherein they censored the word "champagne." This is dumb/amusing for two reasons. One, it's the title of the song, and two, in protest to this, the band, as the last time they said it, replaced the lyric with "snortin' cocaine."
    • Coheed and Cambria's "A Favor House Atlantic" has the line "I'll shoot, you run" in its refrain. MTV censors the word "shoot".
    • The song "Teenage Dirtbag" by Wheatus has the line "Her boyfriend's a dick/And he brings a gun to school" censored on the radio edit and the MTV video version.
  • The radio edit of Ice Cube's "You Can Do It" blanks out the word "ass" in the chorus and replaces it with the sound of a whip cracking and a woman moaning - sounding way more sexual than the original words...
  • The radio edit of Scissor Sisters' "Filthy/Gorgeous" bleeped the word "acid" (slang term for LSD)... but only the second syllable, which makes it sound weird and vaguely sexual ("Trip on a hit of ass"? Really?!)
  • In Malaysia, Katy Perry's song "I Kissed a Girl", after playing uncensored for a couple of weeks, had the word "Girl" censored out of the title and the song. The first thing that comes to mind after hearing the beep in the chorus are certain...erogenous parts of anatomy, which makes the song sleazier than intended.
    • Which seems odd, considering they ran Jill Sobule's song of the same name with absolutely no cuts back in the '90s, much to the delight of Beavis.
  • At Jamba Juice, the music that plays is from disks sent to the stores from the company. In an effort to be more hip, the disks have been including more recent hits, like M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes." They made the choice to censor out the sound effects, leaving us with "All I wanna do is ... and a ... and take your money," which can be interpreted as being strikingly sexual.
  • The radio version of the 30 Seconds to Mars song "From Yesterday" suffers from this as well.

On a mountain he sits,
Not of gold but of sin

  • There's at least one radio edit of Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" that blanks out the line: "When it's love, if it's not rough, it's not fun."
  • A music video and a radio version of "Almost" by Bowling for Soup edited out a reference to underage drinking...and ended up making this line sound either really risque or really incomprehensible:

I almost got drunk at school at 14

    • This also happened with "No Hablos Ingles". There's a bit in the video where they microphone up to someone bare ass on the line "Where'd you leave your pants?/No hablos ingles!" When aired it gets the black bar with the song title on it, making it look worse than it actually is. (You can't see anything in the uncensored version.)
  • The original radio edit of Eve's "Let Me Blow Your Mind" simply blanks the cuss in the line, "Don't fight that good shit in your ear / now, let me blow your mind". A cover by Shawn Lee's Ping Pong Orchestra, however, has the line, "Don't fight that [boing] in your ear...", making it sound like something else entirely is being inserted into the listener's ear.
  • Taylor Swift and T-Pain's made a short song "Thug Story". The end of the song was censored for comedic effect, with Taylor Swift protesting "But I didn't even swear".
  • The radio version of "Na Na Na" by My Chemical Romance censors the word "drugs" three times in a row right from the start, while leaving the word "fuck" uncensored later in the song. Priorities!
  • The version of Flogging Molly's "Drunken Lullabies" used in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 censors the word "gun," which is pretty standard for this list. For reasons that are a bit shakier, it also censors "bigot."
  • There is a radio edit of Foster the People's song "Pumped Up Kicks" that censors the words "bullet" and "gun". The Other Wiki notes that the song was intended "to bring awareness to the issue of gun violence amongst youth."
  • The song Love The Way You Lie by Eminem and Rihanna is heavily censored on radio stations to get rid of offensive language and references to violence against women. One line is usually completely censored, which inadvertently gives the message that committing arson is okay by editing out the reference that a woman is being forcibly tied to the bed just before the aforementioned act of arson:

If she ever tries to fuckin’ leave again
I’ma tie her to the bed and set this house on fire.


Western Animation

Rocky: Not so bad?! Pu-lease! Dey’re a bunch’a [censored]!
Pinkie Pie: Oh, c’mon now. “[censored]” might be a little strong, don’cha think?
Sir Lintsalot: After the way they treated you? I say “[censored]” isn’t strong enough!

Real Life

  • Chicago Police released body cam footage showing Jussie Smollet with a noose around his head after an supposed (but by the release shown to have been done by two black men if not outright faked) hate crime. Smollet's face is blurred out even though the video was released because it was of him.
  • 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.
    • Most schools have abandoned actual bells to signal the beginning and ends of periods and instead use a tone played automatically over the PA system at a certain time. If a PA announcement is being made while the tone is scheduled to play, this trope happens.
  1. ↑ Framing, of course.
  2. ↑ dream
  3. ↑ dreams
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