“I'd save that one from being killed by the censor by giving up the ones that were Trojan horses. … We understood entirely this joke is never going to see the light of day. It's never going to be on American television. But if we put it in the script, they'll be so relieved we cut it that they'll give us the one we actually want.”
Breaking Bread with Tom Papa · Food & Beverage · October 2026
Lorre describing how his writers dealt with the network's broadcast standards notes. They wrote first-draft jokes they knew could never air, then traded them away so the censor would let through the joke they actually wanted.
Transcript
…script book, 22 pages dog-eared with notes. You can't do this, you can't do this, you can't do that. And I took to we would write jokes in the first drafts that were impossible. They would never air on CBS. You know, bestiality jokes and just, you know, all kinds of just necklace, awful stuff.
Yeah.
And we knew that it was dead. But what we do is when we'd sit down with the sensor and she'd say, well, you can't do the bestiality joke and you can't do the oral sex joke. And I'd go, I'll tell you what, I'll cut those if you give me this one over here, which is the one I want, which is the one that I, you know, it's a big, it's a big laugh. And I'd save that one from being killed by the censor by giving up the ones that were Trojan horses. There's nothing. No, we understood entirely this joke is never going to see the light of day. It's never going to be on American television. But if we put it in the script, they'll be so relieved we cut it that they'll give us the one we actually want.
Brilliant.
So it got to be that was a game we played every week. Poor lady, I forget her name. She was such a sweet woman. And she'd hold the script and she'd say, You can't do that. But that was the voice of the show. The show was kind of like, you know, bad boy show.
Yeah. Yeah. And that's why what's cool about this book is that you are a bad boy. There is everything of your life is like it kind of coalesces in this in this moment. Like it's you're irreverent and playful, but there's also heart. There's like, there's, there's some depth to it. Well,
More from Breaking Bread with Tom Papa
