Skirt TV Censorship Rules

We sure do sleep easy at night here in the US of A, secure in the knowledge that the ever vigilant Federal Communications Commission keeps evil words like "fuck" and "tits" from intruding into our homes via our television sets (unless you have basic cable). Yes, we may have the right to free speech here, but even that has its limits — you can't threaten to kill someone with impunity, you can't shout "fire" in a crowded theater, and you certainly can't use radio waves to broadcast the word "shit" (excepting satellite communications, naturally). Standard operating procedure is to replace any profanity occurring in films that are broadcast on TV with less harsh profanity, or even — in extreme cases — utter nonsense. It's for this reason that we get to enjoy, for example, watching John Goodman demonstrate to a nonplussed high school student exactly what happens when you "find a stranger in the Alps".

However, due to a quirk in the language processing center of the human brain, what we hear is not always exactly what was said. It turns out that if you play a spoken "b" sound over a silent movie of someone making an "f" sound, the brain will usually interpret the sound as an "f" (surprisingly, this works even if you're aware what's happening). This phenomenon is known as the McGurk effect, and it applies to all sorts of phonemes, not just those two sounds. The idea, then, would be to record a perfectly innocent line of dialogue, such as "Buck, you!" and then play it over a closeup of an actor saying, well, something else.

Since the line itself isn't obscene, there's no need to dub over it for the TV version. And played back without picture, nobody could argue that any profanity was used at all. It'd be a sneaky way to get one over on those dowdlerizing dastards.