June 26th, 2009

So I was watching a Martin Short comedy special (Let Freedom Hum) on TBS with my mom - who is deaf, and I noticed something in the closed captioning: TBS was cleaning up the language of their performers. At first, I thought the person typing the captioning was just a slow, bad typist (and they were) - but I did notice that, consistently, the captions would replace "unclean" words.

Although I wouldn't be ok with it in any case - it's especially dumb to do so in a comedy special, as sometimes the pun or story doesn't make sense without the right words in place. Here are some examples of the replacements I caught:

"What a jackass" = "What a weirdo"
"He would be drinking" = "He would be bringing"
"I got hair above my ass" = "I got hair above my butt"
"What the hell kind of trade off is that?" = "What kind of strayed off is that?"
"Good thing I have the hair above my ass" = -omitted-
"My ass looked good in those pants" = "My butt looked good in those pants"
"He comes waddling out" = "He came out"
"Men and women, how did we get together" = "How did we get together?"
"You could not handle testicles" = "You could not handle Tess"
"Are you with a whore?" - "Are you with a --"
"I could fart in that store" = "I could fall in that store"

Just plain funny:
"Our next comic" = "Our next economic"
"Tufts of hair" = "Toughs of hair"
"Everyone dreams of being a successful stand up" = "Everyone dreams of being a suck es"
"I thank god every day for the gluten in my life" = "I thank god every day for the flu gluten in my life"
"Warranty" = "Warrentee"

First off... is it that hard to find a typist that can type captions without falling behind (and just skips material to catch up) or who doesn't type so fast that the captions go off screen before any normal human being has time to read it? I noticed about halfway through that the first typist must have gone off duty, because the second typist was much faster.

Second... what is TBS trying to do by censoring the captions? Not only does it exclude the deaf community from what is actually being said - the entire purpose of captions, but it doesn't protect anyone. Anyone who needs to be shielded from the offensive remarks (which were few and far between) would have been under the television rating (TV14) anyway - and even then, hearing children watching the program would have heard the remarks.

So, then, why is TBS censoring the captions? It makes no sense to me, but perhaps the higher ups at TBS would care to explain it to me (and my mom) sometime.