ABC Censors Obama Communist Joke‏ 

Must not joke about the messenger of hope

The ABC television network has removed jokes about President Obama and former President Clinton from an upcoming episode of  “Last Man Standing,” according to the show’s star – Tim Allen.   Allen told The New York Post that the Disney-owned network yanked a number of political jokes from an episode that is scheduled to air just before the presidential election.

Allen’s character, a conservative, is trying to persuade his daughter to vote for Mitt Romney.

The ABC standards department ordered the show to remove one joke that had Allen’s character called Obama “a communist.”

“I love communist jokes,” Allen told the Post. “The right sees everything as a communist.”

“We also had this line about the Clintons where I say, ‘They’re like shingles; just when you think they are gone, they pop back up,’” he added.

That line was deleted, too.

“ABC won’t allow certain buttons to be touched,” wrote Tim Graham, director of media analysis at the MRC. “It’s almost funny that the censors would be so lax on sex and violence, but will clamp down like Bonnie Bluehair on Obama jokes. Is this their only Thou Shalt Not?”

Source

The whole episode is rather Soviet.  The banned bit was apparently meant to ridicule conservatives but the total lack of humor at  ABC management meant that they were too dim to see that.  The Soviets were humorless too.  They banned P.G. Wodehouse even though his comic novels could well be seen as excellent propaganda against a class system.  Wodehouse always portrayed the aristocrat as dim and the worker as smart.

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).