United States
"Shit" was one of the original "Seven Words You Can Never Say On TV", a comedy routine by American Comedian George Carlin. In the United States, although the use of the word is censored on broadcast network television (while its synonym crap is not usually subject to censorship), the FCC permitted some exceptions. The 14 October 1999 episode of Chicago Hope is believed to be the first show (excluding documentaries) on U.S. network television to contain the word shit in uncensored form. The word also is used in a later ER episode "On the Beach" by Dr. Mark Greene, experiencing the final stages of a deadly brain tumor. Although the episode was originally aired uncensored, the "shit" utterance has since been edited out in syndicated reruns.
An episode of South Park, "It Hits the Fan", originally aired on 20 June 2001, was a parody of the hype over the Chicago Hope episode. "Shit" is used 162 times, and a counter in the corner of the screen tallies the repetitions. South Park airs on American cable networks, outside the regulatory jurisdiction of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), where censorship of vulgar dialogue is at the discretion of the cable operators.
American terrestrial radio stations must abide by FCC guidelines on obscenity to avoid punitive fines, unlike satellite radio. These guidelines do not define exactly what constitutes obscenity, but it has been interpreted by some commissioners as including any form of words like shit and fuck, for whatever use.
Despite this, the word has been featured in popular songs that have appeared on broadcast radio in cases where the usage of the word is not audibly clear to the casual listener, or on live television. In the song "Man in the Box" by Alice in Chains, the line "Buried in my shit" was played unedited over most rock radio stations. The 1973 Pink Floyd song "Money" from the album Dark Side of the Moon contains the line "Don't give me that do goody good bullshit," and has frequently been broadcast unedited on US radio. The 1980 hit album Hi Infidelity by REO Speedwagon contained the song "Tough Guys" which had the line "she thinks they're full of shit," which was played on broadcast radio. On 3 December 1994, Green Day performed "Geek Stink Breath", on Saturday Night Live, shit was not edited from tape delay live broadcast. The band did not appear on the show again until 9 April 2005.
Some notable instances of censorship of the word from broadcast television and radio include Steve Miller's "Jet Airliner." Although radio stations have sometimes played an unedited version containing the line "funky shit going down in the city." The songs was also released with a "radio edit" version, replacing the "funky shit" with "funky kicks". Another version of "Jet Airliner" exists in which the word "shit" is faded out. Likewise, the Bob Dylan song "Hurricane" has a line about having no idea "what kind of shit was about to go down," and has a radio edit version without the word. Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl" video had the original album's use of the word censored in its video. The music video title "...On the Radio (Remember the Days)" by Nelly Furtado replaced by the original title "Shit on the Radio (Remember the Days)." This also happened to "That's That Shit" by Snoop Dogg featuring R. Kelly, which became "That's That". In Avril Lavigne's song "My Happy Ending," the Radio Disney edit of the song replaces "all the shit that you do" with "all the stuff that you do." Likewise, in the song "London Bridge" by the Black Eyed Peas member Fergie, the phrase "Oh Shit" is repeatedly used as a background line. A radio edit of this song replaced "Oh Shit" with "Oh Snap."
Read more about this topic: Shit, Usage in Media, Television
Famous quotes related to united states:
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
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“The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. A Galileo could no more be elected President of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of soft illusion.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“... it is probable that in a fit of generosity the men of the United States would have enfranchised its women en masse; and the government now staggering under the ballots of ignorant, irresponsible men, must have gone down under the additional burden of the votes which would have been thrown upon it, by millions of ignorant, irresponsible women.”
—Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884)
“Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody’s image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)
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—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)