Offending the Morons

This is a true story:

I was working on Murphy’s Law, a light-hearted detective series starring George Segal as an insurance investigator when I got this call from the network censor with notes on our script:

“You’ve got one of your characters calling another character a moron,” the censor said.

“Yeah, so?”

“You can’t do that,” he said. “We’ve approved ‘dolt,’‘dummy’ or ‘dink,’ as acceptable alternatives.”

“What’s wrong with calling somebody a moron?”

“You’ll offend all the morons in the audience,” he said.

I thought he was joking.

He wasn’t.

So I said, “Don’t worry, all the morons in the audience are watching Hunter.”

Three months later, Murphy’s Law was cancelled… and I got a job on Hunter.