As with most unimportant issues, there’s a generational divide over older movies and TV shows, particularly those from the black-and-white era. People on the younger side seem to find stuff from that time period boring because of how sanitized it comes across; in other words, how funny can something be if there aren’t jokes about penises and poop at any point? Their elders, on the other hand, tend to look back fondly on the so-called “good old days,” when entertainment was clean, and penises and poop apparently hadn’t been invented yet. Well, we’re sorry to burst everybody’s bubble here; the entertainers of yesteryear also managed to sneak in some off-color jokes from time to time despite the restrictions that were in place back then. Here are a few that clearly slipped under everyone’s radar.
6. W.C. FIELDS WAS BIG ON GENITAL REFERENCES
The censors were wise to W.C. Fields’s suggestive jokes as early as 1933, when his character in International House pulled a cat out from under a woman and declared, “It’s a p—y.” An MPPDA secretary at the time called him a “dirty-minded lout,” and said that Fields knew “perfectly well” what he was doing by putting that line in the movie. It wouldn’t be the last time he’d get away with it, either. In Poppy, he mispronounces a character’s name as “Countess De P—y,” and in My Little Chickadee, he suggests that Mae West’s bath rug is made out of “p—ycat fur.” He got even more audacious by the time he did The Bank Dick in 1940. Fields, as the titular “d–k” (which also used to mean “detective”), is frequently seen going in and out of a bar by the name of the Black P—y Cat Café—or as it’s sometimes referred to, “The Black P—y.”
5. THERE WAS A PENIS JOKE IN A BOWERY BOYS MOVIE
In the 1949 movie Hold That Baby!, “Slip” Mahoney and the gang, known collectively as the Bowery Boys, find an abandoned baby in the laundromat that they’re running out of the back of their local sweet shop. As they sit around trying to come up with names for the kid, Slip realizes it needs a diaper change. The rest of the guys throw around names like Cynthia and Gwydolin while Slip takes the baby to the back of the store for some “reupholstering.” He then opens up the dirty diaper to assess the situation, does a bug-eyed double take, and says, “You better call her Charlie.”
4. RED SKELTON GOT ONE PAST THE TV CENSORS, TOO
Although Red Skelton spoke out publicly against comedians telling dirty jokes on more than one occasion, he supposedly wasn’t opposed to telling them himself when the cameras weren’t rolling. One such joke even got through during the December 29, 1959, broadcast of his popular variety show, The Red Skelton Hour. In his opening monologue, Skelton told a joke about a male cow complaining about how rough the new hired hand that milks him is. Yes, him. “He used to ring the bell at the church,” Skelton says, in character as the cow. From there, Skelton imagines what must go through a cow’s head as it’s about to get milked. We then hear a voiceover of a farmer greeting the cow, saying, “I’ve got a little surprise for you today.” Skelton responds, as the cow once again, “I’ve got a surprise for you, too…I’m the bull.”
3. PHIL SILVERS SNUCK IN A CLEVER POOP JOKE
In the 1955 Phil Silvers Show episode “Bivouac,” the ever-scheming Sgt. Bilko (Silvers) plans to feign illness to get out of annual field training exercises. He encourages the other members of his platoon to do the same, and at one point jokes that the “last one into the hospital is a dirty thermometer.” How would a thermometer get dirty, you ask? It makes a lot more sense when you consider that, at one time, it was standard practice in hospitals to take a patient’s temperature rectally.
2. THE HONEYMOONERS ALSO HAD ITS FAIR SHARE OF THEM
Jokes about Ralph Kramden’s upstairs neighbor, Ed Norton, working in the sewer were pretty commonplace on The Honeymooners. Occasionally, those jokes ventured into scatological territory, like when his wife Trixie refused to kiss him after work one day, or when he revealed that he actually had no sense of smell: “You think I’d work in a sewer if I did?” There’s no two ways about it, those are what you call poop jokes. The most blatant example occurred in the 1954 episode “Game Called on Account of Marriage.” While Ralph is visiting Norton on the job aboveground, one of Norton’s fellow sewer workers emerges and asks him for $2. When Ralph is confused by what the guy could need with money down there, Norton explains that they sometimes play dice on their lunch break. As he puts it so eloquently, “You might call it a floatin’ crap game.”
1. JACK BENNY JOKED ABOUT IMPREGNATING A LITTLE GIRL
On the November 4, 1951 episode of The Jack Benny Program, Benny performs a musical sketch in which he plays a hillbilly violinist in a band that’s introduced as his “Mad Mountain Boys.” They start by doing a rendition of “You Are My Sunshine,” sung by child actress Lynette Bryant, after which Benny introduces a couple of members of the band. He then walks up to Bryant, puts his hand on her shoulder, and says, “This is my wife.” Once the audience catches their breath, Benny points to the tall man standing behind them and introduces him by saying, “This is our boy, Sammy.” Simpler times, eh?
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