For some reason I can't get this anecdote about mid-20th-century variety show host Ed Sullivan out of my head. In the words of Jack Carter (former TV comedian,

For some reason I can't get this anecdote about mid-20th-century variety show host Ed Sullivan out of my head. In the words of Jack Carter (former TV comedian, host of Cavalcade of Stars in the 1940s, and who OMFG is still performing at age 88): The censors flagged you on everything. When you did [the Ed Sullivan show] you couldn't say belly button. You couldn't say navel. You had to say aperture. Sullivan once said to me [imitating Ed Sullivan's voice], "That's an aperture in the human body." I said, "It's an asshole, but I'm not saying it." "You can't say that on my show. I don't want any belly buttons or navels." (That's from Jeff Kisseloff's The Box: An Oral History of Television 1920-1961, which is basically the Founders at Work of TV and is one of my favorite books.) Of course, Ed Sullivan had the advantage of running a broadcast TV show. It was one-to-many broadcasting and it didn't try to scale, so it could be censored directly by one human, Ed Sullivan. And according to Jack Carter, Sullivan had an unmistakably human approach to censorship: JACK CARTER: The exposure you got from being on Sullivan was unbeatable, but Sullivan was vicious. Sullivan was crazed. That veneer of being [slips into a perfect Sullivan imitation] very holier-than-thou. "Hi there, the moms are out here, and the priests are my dear friends. These nice youngsters..." But when you got into the dressing room after your run-through, he called you in [again, as Sullivan]: "What kind of fucking shit is that? You do that shit on my fucking show. You asshole. Fuck you with that shit... [et cetera, et cetera - ed] You can't do that." It was hysterical.