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There's an F and S revealed already — the obvious answers are bluffs.note 

Whenever I feel a-[buzz]
I hold my [buzz] erect,
And whistle a happy tune,
And no-one will suspect I'm a-[buzz]
I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, paraphrasing "I Whistle A Happy Tune" from The King and I

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.

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

Depending on the medium, may be used in conjunction with Narrative Profanity Filter, Symbol Swearing, Fun with Subtitles, or Saying Sound Effects Out Loud (if someone says "bleep").

Compare and contrast Signs of Disrepair, Innocent Innuendo, Accidental Innuendo, Partially-Concealed-Label Gag. See also Cluster Bleep-Bomb, Sound-Effect Bleep, Manipulative Editing, Scunthorpe Problem, *Bleep*-dammit!, Smurfing, and T-Word Euphemism. If Played for Laughs, particularly if it makes the listener wonder just what was said, then it is often an instance of Nothing Is Funnier.


Intentional Examples:

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    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".
  • Nike's "RE2PECT" ad, released to honor the retirement of Derek Jeter of the New York Yankees, features several players of the cross-town rival Mets tipping their hats to the former Yankees captain. The players all have their faces and numbers pixelated out, but it gets absurd when Mr. Met appears to tip his cap, with his head also pixelated despite being immediately recognizable to fans.
  • A recent ad for Canadian cough syrup brand Buckley's censors the sounds of coughs with bleeps, with the spokesperson explaining at that at this point in time, the sounds of coughs and sneezes can be really "offensive". It then ends with a more straightforward example via a modification of their self-deprecating slogan, "It tastes [bleep] awful. And it [bleep] works."
  • CBC Gem introduced a new commercial in 2023 featuring clips with characters being bleeped while saying a word starting with F: at the end, the word — promoted as being everyone's "favourite four-letter word" — ends up being "free" in reference to the ad-supported content on the service.

    Anime & 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. Although, in the novel, she explicitly says she'll accuse them of gang rape.
  • The third episode of Angel Beats!: Ootanashi imagines a pixelated version of Howl's Moving Castle and Castle in the Sky
  • Lucky Star's Kagami in the OVA. This is apparently supposed to mean "cosplay"... except that Tsukasa's reaction doesn't fit at all with that word.
    Kagami: I want to *** with Konata!
  • A common practice in comedy anime in general is to censor any names of anime/manga not from the production studio. Partially because of actual copyright laws, and it's funnier that way. Anime like Lucky Star, Pani Poni Dash!, and Baka and Test: Summon the Beasts love to replace one letter with an asterisk to censor the name while still giving enough of a clue of what they're referring to. Sometimes they censor a different letter each time, making it even more obvious.
  • Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu:
    • Episode 7 has tons of censoring speech by Sōsuke, who was quoting verbatim all the lines from the exceptionally foul-mouthed Gunny from Full Metal Jacket, in order to butch up the sissy-pants rugby team. One of the best examples in anime (and one of the funniest as well).
    • The Beach Episode has another kind of humorous censoring. When Sōsuke notices that Kaname has gone missing, he (incorrectly) assumes she was kidnapped again, and that her kidnappers will probably try to do something naughty to her. Cue an Imagine Spot of strange pink and purple things assaulting Kaname while she's screaming at them to stop. The Pixellation makes it look risqué, but pay close enough attention and you'll notice she's just being tickled all over with feathers.
  • 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.
  • Gintama uses this at times, usually to censor the names of copyrighted material, and also to make things sound perverted when they aren't (which almost always get lampshaded by somebody). The Pixellation they apply to poop and vomit probably could count, as well.
    • Invoked in-universe during a recap episode, where Gintoki proudly shows a clip of him saying the quote that was voted most popular by fans, only for Shinpachi and Kagura to try making it sound perverted by censoring parts of it immediately after.
    • Episode 252, which the cast devotes to apologizing to all the viewers they might've offended (Due to it having been planned as the final episode at the time), has this in spades. They censor things that normally aren't censored, such as the names of copyrighted material they got away with mentioning in previous episodes and Kondo's butt. They also add a Censor Box saying "We're sorry" on top of Kondo's already pixelated groin (though while having him pose in a fashion that emphasizes it and zooming in with each take...). Then Gintoki points that they can make vomiting less offensive by covering up the sound of it with something else, which leads to pleasant music playing while he, Kagura, and Shinpachi puke their guts out for about 10 seconds straight.
  • 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* Minami with her poison rays if she doesn't stop harassing Tohru. This is done both in the manga and anime.
  • Shimoneta: While much of what Ayame says and the pictures she shares in her Blue Snow persona do have to be censored in order to meet Japanese broadcast standards, the anime's production staff decided to take advantage of this by using cartoonish caricatures of her and strategic bleeps to go for this. Played with in the English dub; some images are still censored for comedic effect but all the language is uncensored.
  • Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid:
    • Fafnir's "Curse Anthology", his attempt at making a manga, is completely pixelated to the viewers. Tohru points out that he put actual instructions of real curses, including how to kill people. She also mentioned that selling it at 1000 yen is quite a bargain.
    • Tohru's Christmas present for Kobayashi was some weird and still living thing from her world she'd have to grind up and apply to her back to get rid of her back pain.
    • Some of the leftover ingredients from Tohru's omurice are still wriggling by the time Kobayashi gets back home.
  • The Prince of Tennis: When Inui loses his glasses, his face is a pixelated mess, either to hide how he looks without said glasses or as visual shorthand for how Inui is Blind Without Them (or both).
  • Spy X Family: Yor's culinary disasters have a pixel filter over them, so it's not actually shown what they look like, all the audience gets is the commentary by other characters.
  • Toradora!: The first episode adds a pixelated filter over the sink full of dirty dishes in Taiga's kitchen, as if it were a violent crime scene. Ryuuji reacts to it as if it was a violent crime scene.
  • Haruhi from Ouran High School Host Club sometimes uses the masculine personal pronoun "ore" for herself. While "ore" isn't necessarily a swear word (though it is considered to be rude in polite company), Tamaki tends to overreact and treat it as though it's a Precision F-Strike when she says it, and it's almost always bleeped out.
  • At one point in Kaiju Girl Caramelise, Kuroe asks Arata how he would react if she turned into a "pulpy glob" (which is her way of covertly and indirectly talking about her actual secret ability to turn into a Kaiju). This is accompanied by an imagined picture of a pixelated mass of something.
  • The Kaiju guts that Kafka helps clean up early on in Kaiju No. 8 are pixelated so we can't see what exactly they look like. Considering the series doesn't shy away from depicting gory violence against living Kaiju, the implication is that the guts are simply that disgusting.
  • In Tenchi Muyo! GXP, the freshman boys' attempts to sneak out of the dorms for the night are hampered by air guns that mark them with an obscene symbol or image that is both embarrassing in and of itself but also exposes them as having tried to sneak out of the academy. Said mark is completely pixelated.
  • Excel♡Saga: One of the clues that leads Excel to realize she's arrived in the United States is an American flag nearby, which is pixelated out for no real reason (but still recognizable).

    Comedy 

    Comic Books 
  • Archer & Armstrong: The villain General [Redacted] constantly does this, even to his own name.
  • Spider-Man: In The Amazing Spider-Man (J. Michael Straczynski), a Video Editor for a News Station was pulling out archive footage of Spider-Man in battle, all of which involved Spider-Man swearing (covered with bleeps), one of which involved more 'bleeps' than words and one incident where, fighting a Sentinel, Spider-Man says 'Hey buddy, that's not a bag of peanuts you're crushing!'.

    Comic Strips 
  • The Mad Libs strips of Pearls Before Swine from November 2010.
  • 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".

    Fan Works 
Vanitas: The (BLEEP)-Blade is made of your (BLEEP) too, idiot. If you (BLEEP) it, your (BLEEP) will vanish forever.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • 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 lampshade heavily on this trope.
      • "Please eat some shitake mushrooms.note "
      • "Your assignment is an unhappy one."
      • "I have a huge rodent problem."
      • And at the end of the scene, Austin says "I do have a huge rod.... I wish."
    • Austin isn't the only one. The third phrase results in Roboto's female assistant shockingly covering her lips after reading it. For reference, she's Japanese, so she should understand what he said without reading English subtitles.
  • In The Adventures Of Shark Boy And Lava Girl, Sharkboy is singing to get Max to sleep;
    • "...Dream a dream you little bleem."
  • The Coen's decided to have fun with this with the television censorship of The Big Lebowski. This is what happens when you Find a stranger in the Alps!
  • Invoked in the PG-13 Deadpool 2 edit Once Upon a Deadpool, where Deadpool tells the story of the film to Fred Savage through a Narrative Profanity Filter in tribute to The Princess Bride. At one point, Savage goes on a long-winded rant about wanting to fight Matt Damon, so Deadpool starts using a buzzer to bleep out "fight".

    Literature 
  • In a MAD 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!
  • Also in MAD, Al Jaffee showed us that what we were thinking when we heard *bleep* was probably a lot dirtier than what was actually said. A family is watching Johnny Carson, and the guest says "And I said *bleep* *bleep*." Each family member (including the dog) is thinking something unbelievably filthy, indicated by symbols.
  • In that or another piece, Jaffee has "if censors had their way." Some older men are sitting around talking, one says "I played poker last night and was dealt a royal rinse!" Another says "This censorship is all a hemorrhaging nuisance!"
    • These may have been written in response to the hue and cry that was raised by the Moral Guardians when Jaffee used the word "schmuck" in an earlier piece.
  • There was a book called Mother Goose Censored that did this, way back in 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.
  • The Truth has a character named Mr. Tulip with an odd Verbal Tic — he keeps peppering his speech with a brief pause followed by "-ing" as if he was cursing and being censored. Another character tries adopting this behavior, but leaves out the pause, causing her to just start describing everything as "ing."
  • Done In-Universe in Calamity. David's phone has a profanity filter that substitutes swear words in texts for random words. David likes how dumb it makes people sound when it replaces a swear with something like "didgeridoo".

    Live-Action TV 
  • Done to comedic effect on Arrested Development. The bleeping makes the cursing funnier than if it were left in and preserves the generally light-hearted tone of the show. In one scene, in particular, Buster is being encouraged by his siblings to gently deride their mother; Buster gets over-excited and launches into a string of epithets that are mostly bleeped out and goes on for quite some time while the increasingly shocked expressions of those around him convey just how big a leap down the slippery slope he has taken.
    • Another one that gets Lampshaded by the Lemony Narrator involves a British woman named Rita calling Michael by a word that gets repeatedly bleeped out, even though the British usage is non-profane and meant as a compliment. After one such occurrence in an otherwise heartwarming scene:
      "It's such a shame we had to bleep that. It would've been such a nice moment."
  • Galavant has the Cut Song "Your Mother Is a Whore" that has its many bleeps written into it as part of the lyrics. The network decided it was too vulgar and axed it.
  • The episode End Game from Homicide: Life on the Street had these news interview segments interspersed with the real-time events of catching and interrogating the suspected shooter of the three detectives. Meldrick's interview is notable in that the, not-usually profane, Meldrick takes the opportunity to swear at the reporters, each of these instances covered with a 'bleep', which adds humour to an otherwise fairly bleak episode.
  • Can happen occasionally on Jerry Springer or Maury. They are cutting out actual swear words, but most of the time, this is an audience member saying/shouting it, not the hosts or the guests. This can result in bleeping out parts of a sentence the host was saying that were perfectly fine.
  • 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 into a wildlife documentary on penguins: "When will I ever find a [bleep]king penguin? At last, I found a [bleep]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.
    Ryan: 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 the "Favorite Myths" special, Jamie clearly says "crap", which is a borderline bleepable word in the U.S. (but often considered "optional").
    • The episode "No Pain, No Gain" tested a myth that swearing increased a person's tolerance to pain. To help the editors out (so they wouldn't have to blur people's mouths), Adam built a "curse-proof tool", a piece of headgear with a "visor" that could be lowered over the mouth. Adam's test of the device resulted in the sound editors spelling out "HELLO" in Morse code. Later, Tory jumped the gun during the control test (where he was supposed to be shouting non-swear words only), and his stream of swearing was censored in much the same way (appropriately, this time the Morse code spelled out the word "HURTS").
  • 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.
  • The Modern Family episode "Little Bo Bleep" has a child actress saying "fudge", which is bleeped out to make it sound like the character is saying "fuck".
  • 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.
  • One episode of The Red Green Show has a Cold Open with Red in front of a car that has "CK OFF" written on its back in duct tape, an article of clothing covering everything before the "CK". He then removes said article, and reveals that the missing letters are BA, and says something about how things aren't always as they seem.
  • In Scrubs, J.D. is seen in a fantasy with an incomplete phrase in a game of hangman that reads, "Your _sswipe boyfriend h_s Gonorrhe_"
    Kylie: Is there an "A"?
    J.D.: Yes there is!
  • In Series 6 of They Think It's All Over, following team captain Gary Lineker's replacement as the face of Walker's Crisps by Michael Owen, presenter Nick Hancock announced in one episode that the word "Walker" would be treated as a swear word and bleeped. Unsurprisingly, the bleeping was done in such a way that it sounded as though they were instead censoring the word "wanker", especially in the final round, "The Name Game", in which Lineker and his teammate Fred MacAulay had to identify a series of athletes all named "____ Walker".
  • In an episode of The IT Crowd, Jen shouts at a Japanese business client after he accidentally injures her. The tirade is bleeped. Shortly after, her boss thanks the employee who was apparently pressing a button to bleep the swearing in the office. He then tells Jen she fucked up, with said employee being too late on the buzzer.
  • Done to incredibly hilarious effect in Drop the Dead Donkey. Due to the show being post-watershed, there was little to no censorship, which made it even worse when Henry went on an epic rant at Gus, calling him a "*bleep*ing, *bleep*ing, *bleep*ing -" Continuing for a good five minutes with reaction shots showing the other characters either horrified, appalled, or in Joy's case, highly amused — only to end with an *extremely* loud and very uncensored scream of "FUCKWIT". Although the actually censored words are easy enough to divine and fairly mild (pissing, shitting, etc.), the bleeping turns the rant up to 11.
  • Infamously used in The X-Files episode "Jose Chung's From Outer Space". Scully is telling a popular writer about a rather absurd case she and Mulder recently had. One of the many problems she encounters is the fact that the detective they worked with on the case had a serious potty mouth, so she has to censor his colorful language. Thus in every flashback sequence, characters literally say "bleep" in place of swears. This gets increasingly hilarious as the episode goes on.
    "Yep, that's a bleeping dead alien body if I've ever bleeping saw one."
  • During the "Money Money, Honey Honey" challenge on The Joe Schmo Show, the men were shirtless and writer/cast member Brian Keith Etheridge's man-boobs were blurred. In an interview following the show, Etheridge stated that he did not even know that the post-production people did this until he watched the show on TV.
  • MADtv (1995): One sketch depicts an edited-for-TV version of The Sopranos, specifically airing on the PAX network (then a family-friendly Christian network). It's less than three minutes long.
    Tune in next week from 9:00 to 9:03 for another PAX presentation of The Sopranos!

    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 every time 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...?. They also have a song entitled "Our Lawyer Made Us Change the Name of This Song So We Wouldn't Get Sued". (actual title: "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'.
  • There's a comedic barbershop song called "Dirty Words", which operates on the conceit that "barbershop music has gotten so dirty lately", and then proceeds to sing the lyrics to popular barbershop songs with some of the words strategically bleeped out with humorous sound effects (horn honks, slide whistles, pop guns, etc.). Ten times funnier if you're actually familiar with the songs in question, so you know what's being bleeped. As an example:
    Casey would waltz with a strawberry blonde, and the band played on...
    Oh, you can bring Pearl, she's a darn nice girl, but don't bring Lulu...
    He'd kiss her now and then, she would tell him when, he'd fool around and fool around and fool around again...
  • Eric Idle's B-side to Always look on the Bright Side of Life was called I Bet You They Won't Play This Song On The Radio (also available on Monty Python's Contractual Obligation Album) and is virtually all unnecessary bleeps for comedic effect. Some of the bleeped words seem like they might be perfectly innocent, while some others are just impossible to guess.
  • The Good Ship Venus is dirty enough to begin with. Selective censoring of the clean words makes it exaggerated.
  • Two recorded comedy instances: "Dirty Old Man" by Jim Backus, and "Obscene Phone Bust" by Hudson and Landry.
  • In the mid-'90s, a popular Marilyn Manson T-shirt had the following quote on it. While it wasn't technically censored, the same principle applied; the words in bold below were all written in much larger print than the rest of the message, making it look as though it was telling people to... well, just read it.
    Warning: the music of Marilyn Manson contains messages that will KILL GOD in your impressionable teenage minds. As a result, you could be convinced to KILL YOUR MOM & DAD and eventually in an act of hopeless "rock and roll" behavior you will KILL YOURSELF. Please burn your records while there's still hope.
  • Comedian Robert Schimmel's song "If You Buy This CD, I Can Get This Car," on his album of the same name. The album has two versions: censored and uncensored. The censored version, for radio play, bleeps out all the "inappropriate" words and, in the end, goes into a Cluster Bleep-Bomb that's totally unnecessary. The song ends with one long sustained bleeeeeeeeep.
  • Tom Lehrer, when performing the song "My Home Town", would always leave out a line in the verse about the Sunday school teacher and the parson brown with something to the effect of "I guess I'd better leave this line out just to be on the safe side" or "We're recording tonight, so I'll have to leave this line out". He later admitted that he never found a satisfactory rhyme and found the idea that he wanted to say something so unspeakably racy that it had to be censored much funnier.
  • Some people regard the car horn version of Adam Sandler's "Ode to my Car" funnier than the uncensored version.
  • The French/Canadian series Les 2 Minutes du Peuple has a skit about a Georges Brassens Expy singing about a man watching a porno, with bleeped out (rhyming) offending words with increasingly ridiculous sound effects. In the second part, the sound guy screws up and censors everything but the dirty words.
  • Negativland's song 'Happy Hero' contains the line, 'Accused of fucking teenage boys'. While there is a bleep inserted, it doesn't actually censor the word at all — it's just put between the two syllables, so the resulting line is heard as 'Accused of fuck-[BEEEEP]-ing teenage boys...' Knowing that this is in a verse making fun of how celebrities can get off scot-free for even the most terrible crimes just because people like them makes this beep placement even funnier.
    • Negativland also have a straighter example: their EP These Guys Are From England And Who Gives A Shit? includes a censored version of their cover of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" in which all the profanities (and there are a lot of them, many of them from a sampled Casey Kasem) have been painstakingly covered up with sound effects.
  • Billy Connolly had a hit record with a parody of Tammy Wynette's D.I.V.O.R.C.E., about the marital breakdown in a Glasgow family. One line reads
    ''She sank her teeth in my B.U.M. and called me a BLEEP!ing BLEEP!
    • This was taken to be necessary censorship for radio broadcast. However, Connolly was actually singing the bowdlerised version "She called me an effing c!" He'd decided these words should be bleeped for release, to get people wondering exactly what profanities had been censored.
  • The music video for "Toe Jam" by The BPA featuring David Byrne has a large group of attractive naked people with censor boxes over their crotches breasts and occasionally middle fingers who get into poses that make humorous images such at a smily face, a game of Pong or a Busby Berkeley-style animated pattern.
  • The Chumbawamba song "Everything You Know is Wrong" features several censor bleeps for comic effect, though the bleeps are designed to appear to conceal secrets, not expletives.
  • The music video for the Sleeping with Sirens song Do it Now, Remember it Later has Kellin Quinn deface a building by writing the word "graffiti" on the wall with spray paint. The news network covering their antics regards the word as an obscenity and blurs out the middle of it.
  • Kid Rock's "Cowboy", towards the end of a song full of sex and drug references that's all about living a Hugh Hefner lifestyle in the Hollywood Hills, has an intentionally jarring example where the beat and Kid Rock's voice cut out and are briefly replaced with a robotic female voice informing the listener that this is the censored version.
    Cuss like a sailor, drink like a mick, my only words of wisdom are to <RADIO EDIT>

    Pinball 
  • In Medieval Madness, one of Lord Howard Hurtz's introductory clips is "I'm Howard Hurtz, who the [BEEP] are you?"

    Podcasts 
  • In an episode of Adeptus Ridiculous, the word "animation" was censored (in reference to Games Workshop's strict copyright policy leading to fan animations being closed down). A pinned comment on the YouTube upload noted that many viewers thought they were actual swear words.

    Pro Wrestling 
  • Long before cable television (particularly, the Monday Night Wars) and the advent of the internet, most professional wrestling fans got their dose of the sport through syndicated programs, which were taped several weeks in advance and shipped to affiliates. On February 5, 1988, André the Giant was booked to win the WWE World Heavyweight Championship from Hulk Hogan in a match that was to be aired live on NBC, which aired after production was completed for that weekend's WWF syndicated programs and sent to local stations. To give the illusion that WWF officials were convening in a closed-door meeting to discuss possible action surrounding the Andre-Hogan match and Andre selling the title to Ted DiBiase (and since in a few markets WWF Superstars aired on Friday evenings before the airing of the match), a side storyline was contrived for that weekend's Superstars of Wrestling wherein WWF President Jack Tunney placed a "gag order" on announcers and commentators from discussing the events surrounding the match. Heel color commentator Jesse "the Body" Ventura attempted to bring up the subject several times but was censored each time (with "bleeps" inserted each time he began to talk about the match), upsetting him so much that he left the broadcast booth toward the end of the show.
    • In 1987, portions of a televised "debate" between Ken Patera and Bobby "the Brain" Heenan –- as part of a build-up surrounding Patera's return to the WWF as a babyface, after serving a two-year prison sentence for a real-life vandalism incident –- were "bleeped." Mostly, this was Heenan insulting Patera and calling him a criminal who was unworthy of respect or redemption.
  • Once during Chyna's feud with Jeff Jarrett in September-October 1999, she was interviewed about it being a battle of sexes, and she said, "After tonight we might be the same sex, because the balls are in my court, I might just rip them off and stomp on them," and the words my court were muted out.

    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]note  my [buzz]note  away.")
    • Two songs give a taster of what this round was all about. Panel members would listen to a song hitherto thought cleaner than Whistler's Mother and deliberately insert bleeps to make it sound filthy beyond all belief. Maurice Chevalier's "Thank Heaven for Little Girls", for instance, became
      Every time I zee a leetle girl of five or six, or maybe seven;
      I can't resist a joyous urge to {{BLEEEEEP!}} and say,
      Zank Heaven for leetle girls...."
    and the Everly Brothers' "Dream" now includes the lines
    I can make you mine, taste your lips of wine, any time, night or day;
    only trouble is, gee whiz, I'm {{BLEEEEEEPI!}}ing my life 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 presenter 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!"
  • ESPN Radio's Mike & Mike have made this an occasional segment. They'll take the radio call of an exciting moment, then add in random bleeps between words, claiming that's how it would sound if co-host Mike Greenberg was doing the call.
  • Ask Me Another: The 26 January 2018 show had Mary Wiseman as the week's celebrity guest contestant. Referencing her Star Trek: Discovery character Cadet Sylvia Tilly being the first canon Star Trek character to use the f-word, the game bleeped out a particular word from a quotation and had Wiseman try to guess it.
  • Lo Zoo Di 105 had for a while a recurring sketch called Misunderstanding, where prank calls were at first aired with certain words bleeped in a way that made obvious what they were actually saying... except then the same clip is played without bleeps, revealing that there was no swearing at all.
    Alan Caligiuri: Dear lady, are you interested in a robot co[bleep]note  that also c[bleep]snote  your shirts?

    Recorded Comedy 
  • Jim Backus' "Dirty Old Man" and Hudson & Landry's "Obscene Phone Bust" are perfect examples. The first has a senior gentry making obscene phone calls to women while the second has a man at a police station arrested for making obscene calls (mouthing off at the police during the sketch).
  • During Ray Romano's stand-up comedy special where he performed at Carnegie Hall, his first line expressed how happy he was to be there.
    Ray: Excuse me for one second, alright? Carnegie f[bleep]king Hall! (audience cheers)

    Video Games 
  • In the Sam and Max: Beyond Time and Space finale, 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. And yes, this includes their theme song.
    • The whole point in this exercise is to get a vital piece of information out of Tiny Timmy, whose Hollywood Tourette's 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.
    • Also, in Situation: Comedy, you can bring Specs in as a guest on Myra Stump's show. If you do, he will complain about how he should have *bleep*'d his brother. He's referring to the "American Idol" parody earlier in the episode where he was ultimately convinced to vote for Sam rather than Peepers. He doesn't seem to realize that he's being censored, and gets confused when Myra responds with disgust.
  • The visual novel Tsukihime uses it interestingly by (actual spoiler) blanking out the word 'kill' to make the line "I want to ████ her."
  • Starcraft II 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" segment says she would use the rocket punch extension on his GIGANTIC TAGER!! She does this again in Rachael's Gag Reel with Ragna the Bloodedge's attack names, as seen here.
    Kokonoe: Well, no reason not to tell you. First, I intended to take his *INFERNO DIVIDER!* and put it in a *CARNAGE SCISSORS!*, maybe a little *GAUNTLET HADES!* too? Heh! My goodness, I can only imagine what his *HELL'S FANG!* will *DEAD SPIKE!*.
    • The Japanese version of "Slacker 0, Good Guy 1" in the "Teach Me, Miss Litchi!" section does this rather interestingly. When Litchi's slip of the tongue nearly leads to a mention of Chipp Zanuff, she is cut off by a "GANTORETTO HĀDESU", courtesy of Tomokazu Sugita. And in the next segment which features Iron Tager, there's also the usage of this trope when describing Kokonoe trying to put a Rocket Punch-esque technology to Tager's certain vital part. Which is covered by either Kenji Nomura giving his own version of "GAUNTLET HADES!" or an existing voice clip of "GIGANTIC TAGER!!". The latter caused the joke to become even funnier.
    • This is also done in the "Spring Raid" special of "Blueradio". Tetsuya Kakihara is sometimes referred to as "the German guy" by other members of the cast. "Deddo Supaiku" becomes a convenient censor for the nickname during the broadcast.
    • In various incidents, Noel's cooking has a censor mosaic over it to convey that whatever she made is not to be consumed. At least one person compared it to a metaphysical phenomenon in his own world.
  • In Meet the Demoman, the statement, "They've got more fecking sea monsters in the great Lochett Ness than they've got the likes of me" is mostly bleeped out, making it sound much more vulgar than it is.
  • At the beginning of Brütal Legend, immediately before the first swear word is uttered, the player is asked if they would like to censor the swearing, with the "yes" option being "It's funnier if you bleep it out."
    Eddie: I told you not to climb on that, you stupid mother—
  • Anti-Idle: The Game's Battle Arena:
    • There is a secret area accessed through th e Pirate Ship, called the Censor Ship. On the Censor Ship, the background clouds and the regular enemies are censored out, and one of the enemies is the "Censor Sheep". Enemies here have a chance to drop Censor equipment, which take on the appearance of black rectangles of varying proportions.
    • One of the status effects conceals some of the Battle Arena interface elements with "CENSORED" bars.
    • One skill you can learn is called "potion [PROFANITY] 1/5".
  • Borderlands:
    • Every CL4P-TP model has a self-censorship program installed that automatically bleeps swear words if they try to speak them. This is most commonly displayed by Claptrap whenever he's having a manic episode.
    • Borderlands 2: Mr. Torgue apparently had a censorship device implanted in his voice box by his company's shareholders, because swearing is, in his words, "half my f**kin' vocabulary."
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, cooking with incompatible ingredients results in a dish called "Dubious Food", which is displayed as a plate of heavily pixelated green and purple...stuff with a bone sticking out, described in the Flavor Text as "too gross to look at".
  • The Chat Filter in Town of Salem replaces swear words with Gosh Dang It to Heck! swears. Most of the community keeps it on because the swears do get funny. ("This tarnation child born out of wedlock jailor is flummery")
  • Splatoon 2: In the Octo Expansion DLC, the aptly-named song "#$@%* Dudes Be #$@%* Sleepin" features a long censor-bleep in the middle of it, heavily implying that Pearl started singing whatever the Inkling version of swearing is.
  • In Bug Fables, cooking a Mistake (the result of cooking incompatible ingredients) results in a dish called "Big Mistake", resembling a heavily pixellated bowl of purple stuff.
  • In Final Fantasy VIII, when using Devour, the screen will be cut to a random picture with the words "Censored...please stand by" scrolling.
  • Out of all the detailed violence and blatant sexual implications in Slay the Princess, the one thing that gets censored is the middle fingers in a shot where the Player and the Adversary form of the Princess give each other the finger.

    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.
  • It's popular to take Robin's dialogue from Superfriends ("Holy -something-, Batman!") to make him a walking Cluster F-Bomb.
  • The opening theme to Yu Yu Hakusho Abridged. For a time the series used an uncensored version of Tenacious D's Karate. After a while though, they started using a funnier censored version of the song
    With karate I'll kick your ass!
    Here to Tiananmen Square!
    Oh yeah mother-NAUGHTY WORD-, I'm gonna kick your -Bad word- derriere, yeah yeah.
    You broke the rules!
    Now I'll pull out all of your pubic hair.
    You mother-Another bad word-, you mother-You should be ashamed of yourself-.''
  • 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 billy goats realize that I'm twenty years old, and I'm gonna say whatever comes to my mind? Fungus! Tingly! Duck! Sheets! 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.
  • hololive: In the Hololive Shuffle Medley music video, Haachama's segment has her covering Marine's "I'm Your Treasure Box", a song rife with innuendo with Marine at her lewdest. Haachama's dance has her start off in Marine's costume, and ends with her stripped down to her bathing suit which is pixelated for comedic effect.
  • The premise of the Rooster Teeth short Blur.
  • This Youtube video of Sesame Street's The Count singing his signature song has been subjected to this in the most simplistic but devastating way possible.note 
    I count the spiders on the wall,
    I count the cobwebs in the hall,
    I count the candles on the shelf,
    When I'm alone I count myself! (Oh yeah ...)
    I count slowly, slowly, slowly getting faster,
    Once I've started counting it's very hard to stop.
    Faster, faster, it is so exciting,
    I could count forever, count until I drop!
  • Due to a 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 Z Abridged has a sequence where Vegeta drops a Cluster Bleep-Bomb in response to the Ginyu Force showing up. Jeice happens to pick that time to fiddle with his scouter, perfectly censoring Vegeta's tirade. The Post-Credits Scene plays the audio unbleeped, revealing that it's all innocuous stuff like "Son of a gum-chewing funk monster!" and "Find me in the Alps!" (the latter an homage to the TV edit of The Big Lebowski).
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic with censor bleeps.
  • Though the original videos are only rarely bleeped (most often in the case of Precision F-Strike), this edit manages to take the soft-spoken and eloquent Engie of Team Fortress 2 and manages to make him sound much crasser than he actually is. And then there's the bit at 0:54 in the edit which takes a bit of the game's innate abuse of Ludicrous Gibs and turns it into positively hilarious black comedy...
  • The Micro-Episodes of The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes got this treatment here.
    Ant-Man: There's a couple of mercenaries out on the beach; I shrank them down. Could you just make sure the ants don't eat them? Thanks.
    The Wasp: Eat them? Eww!
  • An odd example in JonTron's video about quicktime events: the show gets the temporary title "Sh*t that F*cks Games Up"; when Jon says the title out loud, every word EXCEPT "shit" and "fucks" is censored.
    • Two moments in his look at Are You Afraid of the Dark?. In Part 1, when the old man says the two brothers can provide a "specimen", he holds up a pixellated jar of a hand that makes them scream and run away.
      Buzz: [after running away] Was...was that somebody's hand?
    • In Part 2, when Andy is trying to show his mom the haunted voice that came from the basement closet:
      Andy: It was in there, it talked to me! It said "come in and I'll suck your soul" or something like that.
      Jon: Kid, you're gonna have to be more specific when you make these kinds of accusations.
    • In his episodes about Goosebumps (1995), he points out the Accidental Innuendo with some of the dialogue (e.g. "Are you growing hair in weird places?" between two teenagers), culminating in the main character checking his stomach to find more. Naturally, Jon blurred it out to make it look a bit further south, which cues the FBI to stop the video entirely.
    • And of course, this gem from Food Fight:
      Daredevil Dan: What the fudge?!
  • On Bad Call TV, the usual attempt to threaten the audience into subscribing is replaced with this. Lampshaded by the narrator:
    "What the fuck did he just say?"
  • "Do you wanna build a snowman?"
  • Several examples in RedLetterMedia 's series Best of the Worst:
    • Taking advantage of it being in German, they bleep Rich Evans at random times while phonetically reading the back of the box of Mad Foxes.
      • The intro of the same episode opens with "In light of recent world events, the opening of this episode has been heavily censored out of respect for all involved", followed by 90% of Rich and Josh's dialogue getting bleeped out.
    • In Home Alone 4: Taking Back the House, when Kevin is lip-syncing and dancing, they blur him entirely when he takes off his robe.
  • Episode 4 of the abridged series None Piece contains this gem:
    "I dragged his ass two miles and you had the *** key the whole *** fucking time!?"
  • A Sen, Momo and Ai Channel video about Zootopia uses this trope towards the end when Momoko talks about the movie, and all spoilers concerning it are censored with a Sound-Effect Bleep. The same clip is then shown at the end, but with the spoilers uncensored.
  • Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft player FireBat used this in his video, F***n Interactive.
  • Not even Undertale the Musical is safe from this, as shown here.
  • Hellsing Ultimate Abridged uses this in its version of the finale, censoring Seras to imply she was Going Commando and wondering if she could put panties on (in the original story, she was wearing them).
  • Helluva Boss features Stolas. When he swears (sometimes profusely), he is usually (but not always) censored. No one else in the show is censored. In "Loo Loo Land", he even calls out Blitzo and his daughter for "language", after they swore in response to his own crude language.
  • SCP Foundation commonly censors out things to make articles scarier (or to remove names and dates). Thus, multiple joke articles will use the same tactic for the opposite effect. For example, SCP-1960-J states that testing is to be suspended for a censored reason, but anyone familiar with the Apollo program will realize that nothing spooky happened, NASA's budget was just cut and they couldn't afford any more lunar missions.
  • In his review of 3, 2, 1, Smurf!, Caddicarus randomly bleeps out some of the Smurfing to make the sentences sound dirty.

    Web Video 
  • Highcraft: In "HIGHLIGHT FOREST", Cooper censors Hypixel, and subtitles on screen read "pay me Simon"note .
  • True Facts: In "Carnivorous Plants," the word "clock" is semi-bleeped over, which annoys the narrator, since it makes him sound like he's saying "cock." When he points this out, "cock" is not bleeped.
  • The Unlucky Tug: After talking about Mavis in his Thomas & Friends season 3 retrospective, he plays several clips of her dialogue with words beeped out to make it sound like she's swearing. The last one ends with Percy staring in silence.

    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: You were close, dad!
    Peter: Yeah, but I still can't believe I missed the phrase: "My Hairy Aunt."
    • A different variation of this gag appeared in "PTV", where the FCC censors everything, including real life. They blare an airhorn to bleep out Peter, including a prolonged description of something that Lois does for him that includes toothpaste, extension cords, and Episcopalians.
  • Another Wheel of Fortune gag turns up in the South Park episode "With Apologies to Jesse Jackson." Randy is a contestant on the show, having reached the bonus round, 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 (you probably know what)... after which the correct answer is revealed as "NAGGERS".
    • The episode "Preschool" bleeped out words like "dummies" to make it appear the preschool-age characters were swearing as much then as they did in fourth grade. All preschool and kindergarten-aged characters on the show are voiced by small kids in the studio, so Matt and Trey made those kids say nice words when recording this episode's dialogue, but bleeped them to make it sound like swearing.
    • Similarly, "It Hits the Fan" combined N-Word Privileges with Leaning on the Fourth Wall to make it so only homosexuals were physically capable of saying "fag" or "faggot": anyone else attempting to say it would simply BLEEP instead. Then Jimbo says it's unfair that only homosexuals can say "fag"... which isn't bleeped:
      Mr. Garrison: Well, I guess we learned something new about you, Jimbo, you freaking fag. You want to go make out or something?
    • In the original standard definition version of the episode "Clubhouses", in the scene where Randy says "bitch" and his wife reacts as if he said "the C-word", the word "bitch" was bleeped out. In the remastered high definition version, the bleep was removed.
  • The Simpsons tends to do this, particularly around instances that wouldn’t warrant it. One particular episode has a man saying “what the fudge”, with the last word censored just sufficiently that it’s still quite obvious which word was ‘bleeped’.
  • In the American Dad! season 13 episode "(You Gotta) Strike For Your Right", Roger and Steve plan to watch Breaking Bad backwards, which will be the shit. Francine decides to join them, saying it sounds like the shit. Klaus also decides to join them, saying that it'll be the [bleep].
    Klaus: Hey, what's with the bleep? He said it and she said it, but I can't? I'll give you something to bleep! [bleep] you, you mother[bleep]er! You can suck my fat, fishy wiener! ...Oh, you can say "wiener"? Guys, we can say "wiener"!
  • MAD pulled this off once, when Scott Pilgrim said he wasn't going to fight a bunch of [BEEP]. One of the dwarves was shocked that he would use "the M word", only to have Scott reply that he said "old men" and he didn't even know why they bleeped it.
  • The Sealab 2021 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.
  • Animaniacs' Beauty and the Beast parody involves Hilarious Outtakes of Dot repeatedly messing up her tongue-twister of an Overly Long Name gag. She eventually gets so frustrated that she devolves into a flurry of Angrish punctuated by bleeps.
    Yakko: That's my cute little sister who said that!
  • Robot Chicken, being the kind of show it is, censors all the time. Then in one sketch, a death-row convict is asked what he wants for his last meal and he says, "Your wife's *bleep*." The prison guard sighs and calls his wife, telling her to bring her famous lasagna to the prison again, and then points out that they need to replace the battery in a smoke detector that made the actual bleep sound.
  • Sponge Bob Squarepants: In the Dutch dub of "Krusty Love", Spongebob's Angrish rant is made even more profane-sounding with the addition of bleep sounds.
    • Also invoked at the end of "Sailor Mouth", where "swearing" by Mr. Krabs' mom ends up actually being Old Man Jenkins' car (also seemingly implicating that the dolphin noises used to censor dialogue earlier actually were the swears).
  • Harley Quinn (2019) has a strange version of this trope. Within the show itself, the swearing is uncensored (except for Country Matters), but the promos will both bleep out the swears while still focusing on them to show just how "Mature" the cartoon is. However, the promos go a tad overboard and will bleep out dialogue even if the character wasn't actually swearing, just to make it sound like they are.
  • Star Trek: Lower Decks: In "Veritas", a non-profane version is used when Tendi is forced to talk about a classified mission that she was involved in, but insists on leaving out some details. The result is the equivalent of *Bleep*-dammit!, where most characters randomly have censor bars over their eyes and bleeps are uselessly inserted in the middle of words ("Rom[BEEP]ulans").
  • The Smiling Friends episode "Mr. Frog" has a scene where the title character says something extremely offensive on live TV. Michael Cusack, who voices the character, just made letter "S" sounds that were meant to be almost entirely bleeped out so that the viewers can imagine whatever offends them the most.

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.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • 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 into 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, it might have caused audiences to think that the Creature murdered her instead of an innocent mistake or something accidental.
    • 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 
  • Wheel of Fortune: While incomplete puzzles with blanks that could lead to extreme profanity have been fodder for several animated program gags, the situation has arisen several times on the real-life game show.
    • One episode from the mid-1980s used the puzzle DAVID HASSELHOFF. At one point, the H's and E's had not been revealed, but the A's and S's were… and Pat Sajak was sure to point things out.
    • Another episode featured the puzzle BARBECUE SPIT, with the P not yet revealed. At one point, a contestant guesses "H" ... and then a buzzer sounds. Pat: "Happily, no" (to audience laughter).
    • One game had everything but the I revealed in the second word of PIANO RECITAL.
    • Yet another was ASSEMBLY & THE DOTTED LINE (a "Same Name" puzzle). S and A were the first two letters called.
    • Another example: MARCO POLO SHIRT (Before & After). At one point, everything but the R was showing on the bottom word. When R finally was called, Sajak said, "Thank you!"
    • There's a fake video floating around featuring the puzzle CLAM DIGGER. With only the D not revealed... only that the contestant guesses "N".
  • The game show Catchphrase is played by guessing the phrase associated with an animated scene. Correct guesses earn a chance to guess the round's main puzzle — which is uncovered 1/9th at a time. In one famous incident, the contestants and host Roy Walker struggled to contain themselves when the uncovered squares made it appear that the show's mascot, Mr. Chips, was pleasuring himself. The answer was "Snake Charmer".
  • 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 a 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?
    • One "Party Quirks" game had Colin pretend to be a trained seal, dragging himself in on his hands and making weird barking noises. Brad's hilarious but extremely inappropriate guess of "Stephen Hawking" was promptly bleeped.
    • Averted in a game of "If You Know What I Mean" with a gym theme. It ended in hilarity when Brad mentioned a "200-pound snatch," a genuine weightlifting move rendered completely filthy by the context of the game. Ryan predicted, "I don't think that will make it to air if you know what I mean." Rather impressively, the segment not only made it to air, but the censors apparently agreed enough with Brad's logic for it to remain uncut in the original airing! Subsequent reruns, however, played the trope straight and bleeped the offending bit.
    • One bit where Ryan and Colin were doing everything like a film noir, the setting was a pizzeria. Ryan's aside was bleeped out.
      "Like that pizza, I wanted him in me.
  • 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 given reasoning was that camo 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.
  • Dave and BBC America both censor the use of the word "cock" as an exclamation. As a result, Top Gear's James May, the most even-tempered of the bunch, suddenly becomes the most foul-mouthed among them.
  • GMC (The Gospel Music Channel, now Uplifting Television) censored words like "stupid" and "jerk" from its reruns of Sister, Sister.
  • On the TV show Nevermind 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".
  • The Robertsons of Duck Dynasty do not curse, but are often bleeped in order to make it appear that they do as part of a production policy that they ought to appear rougher in order to be better characters. Their exercise of their religion is also often cut for similar reasons. Later seasons stopped the fake bleeping, as their general good-natured ribbing toward each other is considered part of the show's charm.
  • When the cast of The Simpsons appeared on Inside the Actors Studio, Nancy Cartwright noted how great her job is because she gets paid to "burp and fart". For some reason, the word "fart", which is frequently uttered on Nickelodeon uncensored, is bleeped out.
  • To Say The Least was an NBC game show from 1978 where teams had to identify objects from statement clues in as few words as possible with each team member on stage (the guessers were sequestered off stage) removing one word at a time in turn until one team is challenged. One such statement was "The cracked ding dong in Philadelphia," with the correct answer being "The Liberty Bell." The words "cracked," "dong" and "Philadelphia" were left on the board as the audience's laughter was slowly building. Host Tom Kennedy then cracked, "If [celebrity guest Jamie Farr] takes out 'Philadelphia,' I'm leaving!"
  • The December 5, 1986 telecast of The $25,000 Pyramid has Dick Clark playfully pressuring celebrity player Vicki Lawrence to pick the category with the Mystery 7 as it offered a car to the contestant as a bonus prize. Vicki just glared at Clark and said: "You're just really being a (bleeped) today, aren't you?" The audience howled with laughter and Clark was looking for a place to hide. Vicki eventually picked the category "Loosen Up," and we have a good idea of what word was bleeped as the audience went into sustained laughter when Clark read what the category was about: "Things that are stiff."
  • The broadcast of the 2016 summer Olympics had a score ticker running near the bottom of the screen. This led to unintentional hilarity during the men's swimming and diving competition — if the athletes were standing in the right position, they appeared to be nude and "censored" by the scores, rather than wearing speedos.
  • On one broadcast of Donkey Hodie on MPT Kids, the beeping of the Emergency Alert System came on in the middle of the line "Bands always have hee-hawesome names, like, uh, Screaming Aunt Mimi or, uh, Applesauce Boss".

    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"). The radio version also cuts out an entire verse that deals most explicitly with the negative effects of this behavior, leaving many listeners unaware that the song is about someone having a breakdown.
  • 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" which, given the mention of girls in the previous line, makes the line sound far worse than it actually is.
  • 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. 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.
      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
    • 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"
    • MTV also had a habit of censoring corporate logos and lyrics that sounded like Product Placement... so in Digital Underground's "The Humpty Dance", when it got to the line "I once got busy in a Burger King bathroom", the "Burger King" part got bleeped out, making the line sound nastier than it actually was.
    • 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. 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 were 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 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 word "dick" not being censored (and "ass" not being censored two lines later) make it sound even worse.
  • 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...
  • One radio edit of the Sublime song Santeria bleeped "barrel" (as in gun barrel) from the line "And I won't think twice to stick that barrel straight down Sancho's throat." It rather changes the impression left by that line.
  • 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 isn't fun."
  • One radio edit of the Jason Derulo song "Take Dirty To Me" censors 2 Chainz' line "You can suck my penis", but not the line "International oral sex", which comes just three lines later and essentially means the same thing.
  • 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.
  • Some radio edits of The Doors' Break on Through to the Other Side censor "high" in the "She gets high" part, which makes it end up sounding like this: "She gets ______/She gets ______/She gets ______/She gets ______"
  • Some edits of Cirrus' "Back on a Mission" take 'shotgun' out of the line "Boom like a bolt of lightning goes my shotgun," instead making it "Boom like a bolt of lightning-a-what." Guess what word that seems to create...
  • John Cale's EP Chickenshit was originally advertised as Chicken***, which led at least some fans to ask record store clerks if they had the record Chickenfucker.
  • Lil' Jon's "Get Low" includes the line "skeet skeet, motherfucker!" during the chorus. The radio edit naturally cuts the "motherfucker", but replaces it with "skeet skeet skeet skeet skeet skeet". Dave Chappelle joked that the only reason why "skeet skeet" wasn't censored was because white people didn't know what it meant, and that they'd have a My God, What Have I Done? reaction if they figured out what they were playing on the radio.If you're curious...

    Video Games 

    Western Animation 
  • Nickelodeon decided to censor the phrase "Shut up" in The Angry Beavers, leading to people sending angry letters to the studio regarding what they thought was a swear word in a show for kids.
  • Nickelodeon also bleeped out the surname of George Liquor (American!) in Ren & Stimpy, letting active imaginations come up with dirty words for it.
  • Treehouse TV's broadcast of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic censors out every instance of the word "loser" from "Boast Busters", "Call of the Cutie", and "Party of One" (though not from "Sonic Rainboom", "The Return of Harmony Part 2", or "Hearth's Warming Eve"). This only makes anything the character said to 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.
    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!
  • The South Park episode "201" (the second part to "200") censored all mentionings of Muhammad, and Kyle's speech at the end is entirely censored, even though it's been said that there wasn't anything vulgar or obscene about it. Comedy Central ordered all of this to happen because of the Muslim controversy that stirred shortly after the airing of "200".
    • Predating this is another two-parter centering around Muhammad, "Cartoon Wars". Even though a lot of people took the note in Part 2 that says that Comedy Central had to censor the Muhammad scene as a joke, that note was actually true.
  • Comcast does this with Disney Channel once a week during the morning hours as part of a weekly signal test for the provider. Here are just a few examples:
    • On an airing of Meet the Small Potatoes on Disney Junior, a TV movie about the Small Potatoes (a group of anthropomorphic potatoes), they accidentally bleeped when a character said the word "dares".
    • During the premiere of Doc McStuffins: School of Medicine, This time, the line censored was "Something must be wrong!", with the word "wrong" bleeped.
    • On a re-run of the Sofia the First episode "Let The Good Times Troll", the word "pudding" was bleeped in a phrase about jiggly wiggly pudding.
    • A premiere of a Miles from Tomorrowland episode accidentally bleeped out part of the theme song.
    • It's not just the regular-length shows — an airing of the Nina Needs to Go! "Wedding" short bleeped out the last word in the sentence "Speak now, or forever hold your peace", and an early airing of the Big Block Sing Song short "Happy" bleeped out "sunshine" in the line "With all this sunshine, it's a beautiful scene".

    Real Life 
  • 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. It's especially funny if it happens during the national anthem. "Oh, Canada! Our home and [BLEEP] land!"
  • Ever heard someone called an ass[BLEEP]? Doesn't that sound like they got... rather creative, in their insults? The censored word is just the innocuous "hole," since asshole is deemed to be more offensive than ass. And no, ass[blank] doesn't work much better.
  • Jeremy Renner was presenting Zero Dark Thirty at the Golden Globes. He noted that "Kathryn Bigelow is a great director who likes to film great movies in shitty locations."note  A jumpy censor started bleeping out as soon as they heard the word "shitty" and cut to the audience so you couldn't read his lips, so that with the seven-second delay the version that played on broadcast was, "Kathryn Bigelow is a great director who likes to film..." which incidentally made it seem like he said something far, far worse.

Alternative Title(s): Censorship Makes It Dirty, Unnecessary Censorship, This Trope Is Bleep

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Hermey Censored

A radio announcer has some fun by censoring Hermey's introduction.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (6 votes)

Example of:

Main / CensoredForComedy

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