And it’s all thanks to Inside Amy Schumer! Huzzah!
As most avid television watchers know, there’s a lot of things you can’t say on the air, and while much of these standards and practices are pretty arbitrary, one thing is for certain: if it involves a part of the body generally associated with women, it’s right out.
Case in point This @Midnight episode from back in January where Chris Hardwick shows the audience a rather disturbing cat pregnancy illustration, and then gleefully points out that while using the word for a cat is fair game, using the word for the vagina that the cat is coming out of gets bleeped. (And don’t even get us started on the fact that they have to blur the illustration’s bare nipples, too.)
But rejoice, for Comedy Central has seen the light, thanks to an executive producer of Inside Amy Schumer. The cast and crew of the show recounted the story at a Paley Center Q+A session over the weekend, and according to the write-up over at Vulture, the final nail in the coffin was gender-based double standards.
Executive producer Dan [Powell] “decided that it wasn’t fair that they bleep the word pussy,” said Amy Schumer. “Because you are allowed to say the word dick on Comedy Central,” added [Jessi] Klein. At the time, Comedy Central’s standards arm would okay certain anatomical references like dick if they weren’t used in reference to sex, but Powell cried gender inequality.
“Halfway through the first season, we started to realize that a lot of the show was addressing women’s issues and gender politics,” said Powell. “I’d written a letter, sort of like write I’d write to my congressman, and I guess it struck a chord.”
Eventually the network relented, and this past season Amy Schumer was allowed to say the word “pussy” unbleeped for the first time in what she now calls one of her favorite sketches—where she plays an animated meerkat with an “exposed vagina.”
How’d they double-down on the anatomy jokes? Because they remembered that one of Daniel Tosh’s Comedy Central Show also had an uncensored vulva on one of its episodes, too. Wow, who knew some good for feminism would come out of that guy’s career?
(via Uproxx)
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