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The one that still gets me, and mostly because in this day and age of 2026 it still doesn’t get as much homophobic backlash as I feel it clearly deserves is the pejorative: cocksucker.
In my anecdotal experience, 99.55% of the time, it’s leveraged against men and used as a homophobic slur.
But even so, is sucking cock really that terrible of a thing to do? The vast majority of people with a cock enjoy the service. We literally celebrate the people who do it well for us personally, in most cases.
Why is it used as a slur?
Anyway, I’m off to suck some cock, see ya’ll later.
Safe travels, cocksucker!
(Mods, please don’t ban me. Please observe the context. Oh my god please jesus don’t do it)
That was pretty funny…safe travels indeed.
George Carlin (who is idolized and rightly so, mostly) had a line in one of his standup specials where he said “you show me a tropical fruit and I’ll show you a cocksucker from Guatemala”. Homophobia was just so normalized back then (this was the ‘80s). Eddie Murphy had a whole routine (which he has since apologized for, to his credit) imagining Mr. T as a homosexual ("Hey boy you lookin’ mighty cute in them jeans!"). Robin Williams (also idolized here) routinely acted gay for the humor value of it (such as it was).
Yep! And that’s part of the culture I grew up in and came to age in. Media that demonized and mocked gay men (and really all gay people), even otherwise progressive and lighthearted media.
It was damaging to me as a child. More so than a lot of people could ever realize.
Also disheartening is that a lot of my super religious family will use the term cocksucker as a derogatory statement right in front of me, knowing I’m gay. These are the same exact people who literally freak out and act like you’ve shot their mother in front of them if you say the word “fuck” or “god damn”.
Cocksucker is just a good word to say; in my language the word for Cancer (yes we curse with that) is used in the same way and is also very controversial.
George Carlin (who is idolized and rightly so, mostly) had a line in one of his standup specials where he said “you show me a tropical fruit and I’ll show you a cocksucker from Guatemala”. Homophobia was just so normalized back then (this was the ‘80s).
I don’t think this bit was homophobic at all, and that you’ve misinterpreted it, through omission and otherwise. If anything, homophobia is part of what is being laughed at (and a small piece of the overall joke). I’ll explain.
To begin with, you left out key parts of the joke; he wasn’t expressing that as himself. Here’s the full bit:
I remember something my third grade teacher used to say. She used to say “You show me a tropical fruit, and I’ll show you a cocksucker from Guatemala.” No, wait… that wasn’t her. That was a guy I met in the Army.
While the joke uses “fruit” as slang for gay as part of it, that isn’t actually even the punchline, the wordplay is just a vehicle for it. The humor primarily hinges on the notion of a grade school teacher saying something that crass (the second part specifically) to a child, coupled with the implication that it was something she said more than once (“used to say” instead of “said”).
Then he realizes it was some grunt who was in the Army with him (who it’d make more sense to say something crass/uncouth like that), which adds another element of humor in ‘how could he possibly mix those two people up?’. If anything, that hypothetical Army guy is being laughed at in part for the homophobic slur usage.
But it’s the wrong hole! >:V
A mouth is a mouth so you might be onto something
There goes my hero, watch him as he goes.
Motherfucker - Includes (Most) dads of 2 or more kids.
Why two or more?
Do you think people with only one child no longer have sex?
The first time she’s not yet a mother
I’m not excluding them.
It’s that I can’t prove that a 1 child father is a Motherfucker.
2 kids from the same mother? Someone is a Motherfucker.
Hello, 1 child motherfucker here, and I appreciate your reasoning!
Although, since my mind can’t help but wander into the what-ifs and edge cases, I bet there is some tiny number of pairings of people who have 2+ biological children together and yet never had sex.
Oh yes. A whole lot of edge cases. Surrogate mothers, step-dads, lesbian and gay parents etc. Lots of people to offend with an off the cuff joke.
I chose to focus on the motherfucking obvious.
Why is it used as a slur?
Easiest way to push their buttons. One may not care if another sucks cock, but if they’re insecure like these folks, then it is very effective.
Growing up, the worst thing you could be was a guy who liked other dudes. Being called a fag and cocksucker was just like “casual” insults, the way Australians call someone a cunt.
I kind of like when it’s reclaimed. Like someone calling themselves a fag or a whore.
Because usually the bully ends up getting even more mad.
I’m interested in the viewpoints of gay men on this. I’m happy to retire the term (I don’t even know if I’ve ever actually used it), but it would be good to know if folks are actually getting offended by it.
In modern times I take it to be derogatory in an “involuntary submissive” context. One who sucks cock not because they want to, but because they are in some situation where they must.
While the issue you bring up is legit…what sitcom ever used that word? I feel like that would only ever be in an R rated movie
All over Deadwood.
But being called a Cocksucker by a wild West brothel owner may be historically accurate.
Sopranos is pretty funny I guess
99.55%
The specificity of this made me imagine that you had actually taken inventory of every single time you’ve encountered this in your personal life experience and done the math, lol.
The vast majority of people with a cock enjoy the service.
And likely figured out they aren’t as flexible as they’d like.
interestingly, it’s less about flexibility and more about ‘strength.’ There was a how-to guide a while ago that emphasized the method of ‘hands behind thighs’ to pull oneself to that point. Leverage and body mechanics make it pretty difficult, and flexibility isn’t even half of the battle.
Been watching some Bob’s Burgers recently, and there are some weird ones in there. It actually seems to have some wildly different standards for acceptability across episodes.
I am blind to any nuance and humor above a gradeschool level but I expect my opinion to be taken as seriously as anybody else’s.
I present Exhibit A.
Would you believe that this was considered racist at the time too? The play that the movie is based on has tons of reviews from the time that emphasize how racist it is. Walt saw that and said, “Ok, we can fix this by doubling down so hard that people will just assume it’s a silly joke”. The man was pretty racist.
Can’t speak to sitcoms, but I’m watching ER (1994) and it gave two excellent examples
In season one, where it was more prestigious and Michael Crichton was more directly involved, there’s an episode where a trans women comes in and the doctors are uncomfortable treating her - which eventually leads to the patient’s suicide. The moral being that even this person who is strange deserves compassion from us.
In season three, where it has become more of a formulaic tv drama, there’s an episode where a trans woman comes in and it’s played entirely for laughs, including the trans woman insisting that she gets bad PMS when on her period.
Yeesh. As a queer teenager in the 90s, I definitely remember TV reenforcing my fears and reducing me to a punchline. And then Will & Grace happened, and I couldn’t stand the stereotypes, but suddenly people were laughing with us instead of at us. Representation matters so much. Even if it’s not the best, it still matters.
I groan a lot rewatching old shows, or don’t find the jokes funny anymore in 2026, but I think people forget that society progresses.
Take the Seinfeld episode where a reporter thinks George and Jerry are partners and they freak out about it but say “not that theres anything wrong with that.” The joke isn’t them being called gay but their immature reaction.
A lot of younger modern viewers don’t like it, and I get it. The scenes do play on a lot of stereotypes but they fail to realize in the mid 90s homosexuality was almost never mentioned on tv and when it was its was a slur. Just the act of making an episode that featured a discussion on homosexuality and didn’t use it as an insult ever was progress. Yes by todays standards a lot of the sterotypical behavior George and Jerry present throughout the episode is in poor taste but it wasn’t made with todays standards.
The other forgiving thing about Seinfeld is that they are all supposed to be fundamentally broken and bad people. You can reframe it as, yeah, they are being insensitive, but that is how they are about most things. That doesn’t forgive it fully, but the show is full of things like this where they challenge the viewer to not empathize with the cast and even punish the viewers when they do.
My wife hates watching “All in the Family”, because she hates Archie.
I love watching “All in the Family”, because I hate Archie. He consistently gets put in his place and gets taught a lesson. He’s still crass and rude and xenophobic and racist and sexist…and that’s the point.
People like that can’t be fixed, but we can sure enjoy laughing at them and showing them how they are wrong. That’s why I love the show.
No wonder Reiner died due to “complications of TDS”, as our wonderful President put it. That asshole (the president) is practically a modern reflection of Archie Bunker, just also sundowning.
most of these shows are unwatchable, better left in the past
It works because everybody hates Ross.
Why does Ross, the largest friend, not simply eat the other five?
Yes, but for different reasons. These are usually just poor shows or didn’t age well.
I wish I could get people to care about health care and wages as much as they care about mean words. So many seemingly don’t mind being robbed blind as long as our ruling parties using the correct terminology.
Those topics are simple and easy to understand.
Understanding the long arc of the oppression of the labor class and the systemic design failures of US Healthcare is hard and the explanation won’t fit in a TikTok.
Yeah, all the word policing kinda feels like a psyop because it’s stirring up a lot of conflict without any real benefit. Controlling what words are ok doesn’t make people respect the ones hurt by the words, and ultimately it’s the disrespect that causes the hurt, the words are just the manifestation of that.
Like with disabled people, pretty much every word used to describe them has become an insult and any new word will just suffer the same fate pretty much the same day it gets popularized.
But the argument itself is polarizing, though in a way that makes the other side shut up about it until they can find like minded people. And might end up joining MAGA because they think it’s about trolling people policing language and words like “woke” end up having very different meanings to the different groups (one side sees it as a respect for all regardless of background or capabilities, the other sees it as a drive for censorship) to the point where people supporting the other side seem “evil”, which then means that as MAGAs wake up and see it is about more than just policing words, their opponents are more likely to tell them to fuck off than.
And that’s not even mentioning the people who take the stance “my racism/sexism is ok because it’s against the race/gender with more power”, and the people who treat non-malicious acknowledgement of differences between genders/races/cultures the same as malicious ones and no fucking wonder there’s strong opposition.
Do they still call this thread-jacking?
Don’t be the vegan at the party, dude.
Nah, this is why it’s important to make sure “vegans” are at your parties.
What, and give up purity testing? That would eliminate 90% of our recreational outrage and give us time and energy to actually do something. Can’t have that.
Without my sexual identity and virtue signaling I wouldn’t have any personality at all.
What’s funny is it’s literally a shared behavior across the entire political spectrum in America but each side pretends it’s only the other side doing it.
As Talleyrand once said: “An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public.”
Were the “mean words” ever used against you?
Bzzzt. Rhetoric.
Pretty sure you’ve described neoliberalism in a nutshell.
You make a good point. I don’t give them enough credit for their performative politics.
God, this is cringe. Like, it’s embarrassing to be on the same team as them.
It’s because we aren’t on the same team
Yeah, yeah.
Did they all just do a superhero landing? That shit is hard on the knees.
I thought they were Teebowing
Honestly a little impressed they were all able to kneel and get back up at all.
White American liberals in a nutshell
It’s like we’re living in Victorian England now
Monkeys bare their teeth to express aggression. The kids get it.
Comedies are supposed to be edgy. Things age differently. There would be no comedy if you weren’t allowed to make edgy jokes.
If you were offended by Ross making up a rumor about Rachel, then wow I can’t imagine how you’d feel about Archie Bunker. Or Eric Cartman. Or literally any comedy ever?
I feel like every time I tried watching Big Bang Theory, I got this vibe.
“haha that guy is such a fucking nerd!” was virtually every laugh-track riddled joke.
He said hello hahahahhahahaa…hahahahahaha omg omg bro omg he said- he said hahaha he said HELLO hahahaha
Hey that’s not fair to BBT, half of those jokes were “Sheldon is neurodiverse”
No! Stop! He’s not! - The showrunner for some reason
Because if you acknowledge that he’s autistic, then a LOT of the series becomes “laugh at a nasty charicature of a disabled person.”
That’s how the representation should be handled.
This guy is awkward but has all these friends, they laugh and sometimes don’t understand him but they’re still friends.
If the show could be that progressive about neurodivergence then it might actually be good.
I read your comment with a laugh track!
You’re just not the target audience, as shown in this handy diagram:
I think Breaking Bad belongs in the middle one with Futurama because I don’t think it required intelligence to be entertained.
My first watch through was purely a “watch Hal do some crazy shit” where the action entertained and everything else was just an annoyance. I just didn’t care about the moral implications or whatever message the show was trying to make, I was happy watching an “outsider enters dangerous world he knows little about and fucks shit up”.
Second watch through I stopped seeing him as Hal and disliked him before the end of the first episode. If anything, he was more like Malcolm (book smart but otherwise dumb and entitled).
Though maybe that’s more just about BB being entertaining even if you aren’t the target audience.
I will always defend BBT as 6 seasons of a great show dragged out and dumbed down for prime time. I think if someone went through it and discarded the filler jokes, arcs that go nowhere and excessive laugh track it could have been really good.
My wife likes the show as background noise and I’ve studied it. Theres some real relationship writing and some genuinely good character growth, some of the non “Ha! Nerds!” Jokes are actually pretty funny.
I had a hardcover book sitting on my shelf. Got it at a yard sale a while back. “The 13 Crimes of Science Fiction,” it was published in 1979 and most of the stories are much older.
The level of racism was pretty amazing. One story referred to a mugger as a ‘black buck’ Another was set centuries in the future and had an anthropologist keeping some ‘primitive’ people in high tech chains and cages.
What’s wrong with the last one? Seems like a pretty standard critique of “science” as evil destroying humanity. In Brave New World they had reservations for the savages who still had religious beliefs, and it was a touristic attraction.
Agatha Christie is probably one of the most popular writers of the 20th Century, and one of her classics is now published under the title “And Then, There Were None.”
If you’ve ever seen a movie, play, or game where a group of people are invited to a house only to be killed off one by one, you’ve seen something influenced by “And Then, There Were None”.
Generally the victims are symbolized by figurines on the mantelpiece which get gradually destroyed one by one as the murders progress, eventually leaving “none”.
The previously published title was the incredibly culturally insensitive “Ten Little Indians”, and the figurines were just that.
The original published title, in the UK, in 1939 - an era when we DID IN FACT KNOW BETTER was “Ten Little removeds”.
They did not change the title in the UK until 1985(!)
It’s even worse in French: I read it in the early 2000s in high school and the title was “10 petits n*gres”. It seems they only changed it in 2020 😬
That book was translated to Finnish in 1940 with name “eikä yksikään pelastunut” (and no one survived), and it was renamed to literal translation to the ten little nwords in 1968!!! Until in 2003 they changed it back to the original
Worth noting that the original n-word version is the title was taken from a popular song at the time the book was published.
I point this out to demonstrate that this book title wasn’t a weird cultural aberration, it was plugging directly into popular culture of its era.
Is quoting Wikipedia now banned on Lemmy? I was under impression arsehole censoring mods here were mostly focused on removing mentions of Israeli genocide of Palestinians.
“Ten Little removeds”.
so for anyone else confused…
“Content not viewable in your region”?
Now I’m more confused.
10 little subsets of the the human species with really high level of melanin in their skin.
the screenshot is hosted on imgur.com, do you generally have problems with that one? it was just a screenshot of mentioned wiki article.
Got you. Imgur is now completely blocked in the UK after the “Online Safety Act”, “to protect the children”, because maybe one of the pictures hosted on it is some boobs or something?
I had no idea. Time to search for replacement.
There you go. This censorship is getting ridiculous. Next time people born in Fucking, Austria won’t be able to explain where they are from.
Chuds not being able to post the N word for a day — challenge level: impossible.
Like, we all knew what the book was, but it was still SO important for you to post this. It was life or death for you. Not saying slurs physically makes your skin crawl. You cannot help but be a racist sack of shit.
I would personally send you to the gulag.
As an Australian who has never studied Agatha Christie in any context, I literally had no clue what the censored word was. I was, and am, appreciative of the context that was provided by other commenters. Be careful when you make blanket statements like “we all knew what the book was”, because you’ll almost always be confidently incorrect.
It’s automated. Instances can setup a list of words that will automatically get removed. Has nothing to do where it comes from.
Also, jordanlund is a mod himself, so…
jordanlund is a mod himself
I know 😁
Bots will automatically remove certain words regardless of context.
I used to see this all the time in the old Sega game “Phantasy Star Online” where objectionable chat was replaced with “*”.
So “Nice shoes!” became “Nice s****!”
You couldn’t arrange to play a game on “Sa****ay”.
And god help you if you lived in a “ba*****t”.
Dark Souls would do something similar with names in PvP. For the most part it wasn’t a huge deal but being a medieval fantasy game, a lot of players you’d face would be called “___ K***ht”.
Or if your name was Nasser…
Same problem but when I migrated from Black Ops 1 to Modern Warfare 2 or something similar - couldn’t name my class containing assault rifles “assault”
I love how your experience with regex censoring comes down to Phantasy Star Online. It’s so on the money for you to use as a reference.
Truly king of the neckbeards.
What did Ross say?
I’m wondering too. I saw an article saying that he said Rachel was a hermaphrodite but I dunno if that’s it
It was Brad Pitt’s character in a Thanksgiving episode, but Ross, as member of the “I hate Rachel” club help spread the rumour in high school to stop jocks dating her.
I’d argue their intent was malicious, but not outside the norms for 80’s high school kids.
Is that an offensive term now?
Any term is offensive if it’s used with malicious intent.
But people forget about the malicious intent part a lot.
But does that “malicious intent” apply to staged comedy?
I would think the term used is offensive, not the contrived intent.
I 100% disagree. If I say “go back to your station, you cogswallow” that could be offensive. You should be offended by that. If I say “haha, you cogswallow, that’s an amazing painting” its no longer offensive. I am showing appreciation of your painting.
What does cogswallow mean? I have no idea, I just made it up.
I don’t know any other languages but if someone is insulting me in French or praising me in French I could tell the difference based on context and body language. Did they just catch me stealing an apple? Did they just watch a presentation I did with a smile on their face?
Words are used to express an emotion. The emotion is what matters. Back decades ago retard wasn’t an offensive term, it was used to describe people with a specific condition. It was used because “imbecile” and “invalid” were seen as offensive. Yes, some people have severely limited mental capabilities. Sometimes combined with limited physical capabilities. We need a word to express I mean them. That could be “flogtrough”. I could offend you with that word or I could praise you. I just made it up.
I will say in text communication like commonly used on the internet it’s hard to express context so people rely on previous context of usage of that word. If a person has been exposed to cogswallow or flogtrough previously, first get out of my brain, but seriously that impacts their interpretation of the word relative to given context.
No, that’s what I was meaning. People ignoring intent is an issue.
When offensive viewpoints are used in comedy it’s almost always with the intent that you laugh at the person with the offensive viewpoint.
Nothing, it’s just a title based on the iconic friends episode naming format.
Currently rewatching Gilmore Girls with my fiancée and we have the same reaction when there’s a hint of homophobia or fat jokes in some of the jokes. We usually just give each other a look and roll our eyes but yea, it was just a different time
Now you can laugh about politically correct jokes, like if you have a lamp why do you need shade?
The world is my safe space.
“What’s the deal with lampshades? If you have a lamp, why do you need a shade?”
Meanwhile, Kramer backstage yelling out hard-N-word.
Then a half-assed apology on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee
It was a simpler time… 2006.
The whole Futurama episode where bender medically transitions to win in the robot Olympics. Huge yikes
In fairness, everyone else thinks it’s a terrible idea and hates it.
Also i think the overall moral of the episode is that transitioning is a lot more complicated and difficult than Bender originally thought and he also was always planning on returning to his original identity so it’s assuming every trans athlete has malicious intent
That’s the whole joke. Bender isn’t demonstrating some common evil. Bender is an uncommon evil. That’s the point. He’s doing a preposterous thing with psychopathic comfort.
Oh you are so transphobic.
