America's First Network TV Censor: The Work of NBC's Stockton Helffrich

5. Gagging the Gags

99 5. Gagging the Gags In the 1950s, television was one of America’s favorite objects of ridicule. An orthodontist in California claimed television was the source of crooked teeth in youngsters, caused by hand cradling the jaw while watching—he called it “Television Malocclusion.”1 The American Osteopathic Association cautioned, “TV can make children more susceptible to diseases . . . [and contribute to] ‘bad body mechanics.’”2 A group of dermatologists warned that excessive viewing of television Westerns brought about dandruff due to increased emotional stress.3 In Chicago, a prison chaplain hyperbolized that television shows “cause a fever of the mind, tuberculosis of the heart and soul, [and] are more dangerous to youth than the atomic bomb.”4 Doubtlessly, the questionable images that television brought into American homes—some thought too often and with little restraint—provoked these wild accusations and overstatements. But aberrant TV images were just half the story. Offensive language in the postwar era was also cause for alarm. Deleting or substituting utterances considered invidious was central to the NBC-TV Continuity Acceptance (CA) Department’s mission led by chief censor Stockton Helffrich. Profanity Profanity—the use of words or oaths that show contempt, irreverence, or disrespect to ideas or things considered sacred—was a productive area for nascent television censorship. As early as 1948, Helffrich wrote, “We continue to delete . . . quite regularly, expletive[s] such as ‘My God’ and ‘God’ from assorted . . . scripts. . . . Television writers seem to think violently of God a lot more than the radio writers do. . . . [since] we seem to be getting a rash of expressive uses of the word . . . and are quite consistently working against the same.”5 As a basis for his actions, Helffrich was quick to quote the section in Responsibility, the NBC-TV censorship handbook: “‘Reverence marks any mention of God, His attributes or powers.’”6 3RQGLOOR&KLQGG $0 100 G A G G I N G T H E G A G S The Continuity Acceptance Radio/Television (CART) reports also show that words and phrases like “jeez,” “God,” “in God’s name,” “my God,” “by God,” “good God,” “thank God,” “she’s God’s gift,” and the like were consistently deleted from NBC-TV programming and replaced with “by golly,” “gosh,” and “gee whiz” or variations thereof.7 Also, expressions of “what/where the hell” were changed to “what/where the Hades” or “what/where the heck,” “I’ll be damned” was bowdlerized to “I’ll be darned,” and “I’ll be Goddamned” purified to “I’ll be doggoned.”8 Such concessions left the religious taboo intact while permitting the rhythm of a profane oath.9 Helffrich explains these cuts were “in accord with past and continuing audience resentment against a too-easy use of the word ‘God.’”10 Yet, the historian John Burnham argues that during the twentieth century, profane speech became nearly “inoperative among most population groups,” suggesting that swearing came more to encompass words dealing with sexual and bodily functions.11 While this observation is accurate and seems certainly the case in television, profane oaths clearly did not become “inoperative.” While one can find fewer examples of profane deletions than sexual and scatological ones in the CART memos , irreverent cursing still had currency in common parlance and was consistently removed from scripts of programs airing on the network. Why the apparent discrepancy, then? It appears Burnham may have not allowed for the phenomenal religious revival that informed social behavior at mid-twentieth century. The postwar religious renaissance somewhat fueled concerns about television moral effrontery. A poll conducted in 1948 found that 95 percent of respondents said they believed in God, and as many said they prayed to Him.12 In 1950, church membership expanded to nearly 115 million people, an increase of 63 percent from a decade earlier.13 (However, those numbers may also indicate that many young people took up church going in part because they were starting new families; they were not necessarily more religious than their parents.) Both Time and Life magazines labeled America’s “return to religion” as a significant phenomenon of the postwar.14 Also, the notion of an “American way of life [as] the antithesis of godless communism,” writes religious historian Robert S. Ellwood, “was to be preserved at all cost.”15 But NBC-TV’s censorship was not prompted because the novice churchgoer consti3RQGLOOR &KLQGG $0 101...