At times, even the lack of subtlety provided by the ugly Censor Boxes is just not enough. Why not put something amusing in the place of some aesthetically repulsive black bars and boxes? Why not, say, a picture of a squirrel?
Or anything, really. Gag Censors are when faces, amusing pictures, logos, or any image is used to obscure certain parts deemed not suitable for public consumption.
This method ranks the lowest in the sliding scale of censorship subtleties—it doesn't attempt to shoehorn elements in to somehow obscure the sight like the Censor Steam, Censor Shadow, or Censor Suds; nor does it try to cover these parts with meta visual elements like Censor Boxes or Pixellations. It, instead, puts an image over it.
It should go without saying that this is almost always Played for Laughs, and particularly common in anime. In many cases, one can expect these things to disappear when the DVD version comes out. See also: Scenery Censor, Relax-o-Vision. Sound-Effect Bleep can also be used for similar comedic effect.
Not to be confused with Censored for Comedy, which is a type of joke involving censors.
Examples:
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Advertising
- A series of Ekosport ads has a nude woman out on a mountain. Whatever isn't covered by her hands is covered by the company logo.
Anime & Manga
- The famous Laughing Man from the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex series. In-universe it is actually far from a gag and relates to a terrorist incident, but it's frequently used this way by the fandom.
- Rosario + Vampire uses censor bats and bears if there is more than one censor to be covered. He even chats with the audience!
- B Gata H Kei uses a Demon symbol for this on the TV release over the EroGami that normally covers things.
- To Love Ru uses these as well as censor flashlight-like beams.
- Negima! Magister Negi Magi uses large "Forbidden" stamps whenever Nodoka is reading her own mind.
- I Don’t Like You at All, Big Brother!! uses these everywhere, constantly.
- The Pet Girl of Sakurasou: In the anime, an upskirt shot of Sorata's little sister is censored with a cat face.
- Softenni uses these as well in about 50% of the scenes.
- Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei uses the face of one of the manga's assistants for this.
- Here
◊ we go: A completely pointless gag censor. You couldn't see anything even if it wasn't there.
- Here
- Hayate the Combat Butler uses a guy holding a sign literally saying "can not show."
- The Shonen Jump pirate flag gets used as a censor (much to its embarrassment) in Hell Teacher Nube.
- Cat Planet Cuties uses several different censorship methods, including this one — generally, it's the Assisdroids jumping into the scene to cover things with their signs.
- Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga: Phallic vegetables are used in place of male genitals. Trope subverted as the rather... fleshy looking vegetables actually do little to lessen the raunchiness of the pictures.
- Air Gear has Koo, Ikki's pet crow cover the naughty bits when necessary.
- Hajime no Ippo uses starbursts early on, but eventually moves beyond this. Ippo's starburst is really long.
- The manga series Switch Girl often uses an image of a cat to censor nudity (mostly the main character Nika). This was kept in the live-action TV adaptation.
- While Gintama usually resorts to a standard Censor Box or Pixellation for censorship, one instance had Mutsu punch someone so hard that a sign with a slashed-out 18 on it was imposed onto his face in the aftermath.
- The Hunter × Hunter manga positions speech bubbles in front of any exposed private parts. One particular case had Hisoka completely naked with thought bubbles between his legs about his sexual cravings, forcing the reader to look down there and think about how he likes his sex.
- The trailer for Discotek Media's re-release of Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie hilariously uses this to emphasize that their re-release of the movie will be completely uncut. How? By showing off the infamous Chun-Li shower scene with two Eastern Star logos covering Chun-Li's breasts.
- The works of Kazuhiko "Monkey Punch" Katō (best known for Lupin III) frequently have an erotic bent, so in order to draw detailed sex scenes, he replaces genitalia with the Mars (♂) and Venus (♀) symbols.
- Hinata's crotch gets censored by a vertical Venus fly trap in Naruto's Road To Sakura special. Subtle.
- The Unpopular Mangaka and the Helpful Onryo-san: In Chapter 12, Senai's penis is covered by an emoji of his editor's head, complete with Funny Afro.
- In the censored version of the Interspecies Reviewers anime, genitals and nipples are (barely) covered by icons of the main characters' faces.
- Ayakashi Triangle:
- The magazine version of the manga usually censors via Barbie Doll Anatomy, but occasionally uses a sticker of Shirogane's head, playing on his role as a prudish Straight Man. The first and most extensive was during a makeout contest between Suzu and Shadow Mei as they start to tongue each other. Note that other kisses weren't obscured at all (even when they showed tongue) and the sticker covers practically nothing. In some panels, it's squashed like a physical object, making it look far dirtier.
- The TV version of the anime has a wide variety of Shirogane stickers over most nudity, only using Barbie Doll Anatomy if the scene is more serious.
- The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, REALLY Love You: When Rentarou's towel slips off while attempting to help Shizuka out of the bath, his groin is censored by an elephant face, trunk arranged very deliberately. Later, Shizuka thinks to herself that while she likes giraffes, she likes elephants even more.
Comic Books
- Firefly: The Sting: One of Kaylee's diary photos is of Jayne shooting while flipping off the camera, his hand covered in a smiley sun sticker.
- Hawkeye: In Hawkeye (2012) #3, as Hawkeye dives naked across a bed, his naughty bits are covered by... a picture of his face with his traditional purple mask.
- Nightwing: In issue #96, the Electrocutioner gives his employer the bird with both hands while announcing, in the strongest possible terms, that he's quitting. His hands, and most of the words in his speech bubbles, are covered by little stamps which resemble the seal that used to appear on comics that had been approved by the Comics Code Authority as having no offensive content.
Films — Live-Action
- The basic cable TV edit for Howard Stern's Private Parts has Howard himself pop up on screen covering naughty parts or blocking the whole screen and explaining what's being censored... then at one point says screw it and tell the audience to just go rent it.
- Borat did this in the scene where Borat and Azamat get into a fight in the hotel while they're both naked. The censor bar covering Borat's penis reaches almost to his knees, so as to imply that he has a very big dick, while Azamat doesn't even get a censor bar over his crotch, implying that he has a very small one.
- In a trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), Peter, who is in a Police Lineup, flips the bird, which is covered up with a blur and an "Obscene Gesture Alert". The actual film has the gesture uncensored.
- Austin Powers censors male private parts with increasingly phallic imagery and female parts with voluptuous objects, up to and including a framed painting of bare breasts.
Literature
- The cover of Go the Fuck to Sleep has the moon covering the 'u' and 'c' in "Fuck", not that it really conceals what the word is.
Live-Action TV
- Mancow Muller's eponymous TV show: they had illustrations of Mancow's face over any and all naughty bits.
- On MythBusters, many dangerous substances such as explosives or thermite are made by mixing "blur with blur".
- Alternatively, they use animal sounds, such as "mixing moo with meow". (Or "Add donkey to rooster.")
- They also built a real-life Gag Censor in the form of a mouth shield covered in Symbol Swearing, when testing whether swearing was better at taking your mind off your pain than other Angrish. Since "Blurs are expensive, bleeps are cheap" the shield enabled them to swear as much as they needed to while relieving them of the cost of blurs.
- During the "Soda Cup Killer" myth, Jamie promised the audience that one way or another, they would put a hole in Buster's windshield... Cue the mute crash test dummy getting a censor bleep in addition to the classic graphic censors.
- Mystery Science Theater 3000:
- In the City Limits episode, Joel stands up to show off his new umbrella, which covers up a brief scene of nudity (from the audience and the bots).
- In the Devil Fish episode, the MST3K planet logo is used to cover up an accidental nut shot.
- In the Avalanche episode, the bots at one point play with remote control flying saucers which cover nudity.
- On VH-1, whenever someone says "pussy", they have a cat meowing. They also cover up a woman's pussy with a cat...
- The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson bleeped out its innumerable expletives by playing voiceovers of Craig saying "Ooh-la-la", or some other silly-sounding quasi-foreign phrase, and covering the offender's mouth (if he isn't a puppet) with an appropriate national flag.
- Whenever Gaki no Tsukai's cast get naked, their privates are covered either with photos of their faces or the first kanji of their names.
- Australian sketch show Full Frontal managed to take this to new heights in a sketch as a French movie (translated into English as "The Woman Who Talked Too Much") whose subtitles were used to cover up nudity.
- In Glee, Brody shows up naked for breakfast one day. He was covered by Kurt's box of Rooster-Os.
- The first episode of Angie Tribeca, Angie goes undercover as a nude model. One of the art students is seen working on a pixelated pencil sketch of her — as in, he actually went to the trouble of drawing the censor pixels.
- Penn & Teller: Fool Us featured a magician who stripped naked as part of his act. He spent most of the time behind a screen, but for the times he was not, the show's logo was used to cover his nudity.
- The same goes for America's Got Talent. Britain's Got Talent would use the Union Jack instead.
- X-Play: For a brief period they would cover up extremely gory game scenes with pictures of kittens.
- Monty Python's Flying Circus: In one of Terry Gilliam's animations, a fig leaf covering a statue's genitals was snatched away, and underneath was a man's head that said "We're not about to allow this sort of smut to be shown on screen!"
- The Twilight Zone (1959): In "Once Upon a Time", after Officer Flannagan tells him to watch his step, Woodrow Mulligan mutters in irritation. The intertitle reads "Censored!" Immediately afterwards, Woodrow is knocked into a pig trough by a man on a penny-farthing and shouts something after him. This time, the intertitle is "Also Censored."
- M*A*S*H: Hawkeye bets that he could walk to the mess tent stark naked and nobody would notice. As he does so, his midsection is conspicuously covered by objects carried around in the foreground.
Music
- German punk band Die Ärzte's music video for "Junge" has the musicians defend themselves against a horde of zombies in all its gory glory. Anticipating Germany's harsh laws against showing violence on TV, they produced another "censored" version with the bloodiest details covered by cartoon character's heads or have the entire screen blocked by phrases like "This scene is unacceptable. We'd like to apologize for that." or "At least the video is now over. I wonder if these sounds will be on the single?".
- Siiva Gunner: A video featuring the "Dongcopter Pirate," a man wearing nothing but a vest and a pirate hat, uses Tito Dick's head to cover his penis.
- The cover art for "In The Zone" by Ken Ashcorp features ZONE-tan drawing lewd fanart of Kenny, whose crotch is, thankfully, covered with a picture of a burger. Made funnier by the fact that his next song, "Burgz", released several months later, actually is about burgers, and its cover art features Kenny eating said burger.
- The 24-Hour Party People soundtrack has a case sticker, noting New Order's latest release on the album, conveniently placed over the rude word labelling Tony Wilson on the cover.
- In Neil Cicierega's song "Rollercloser", he censors the usage of "fuck" from "Closer" with funk vocals.
- In "Alternative Polka", "Weird Al" Yankovic replaces each instance of "fuck" in "Closer" with cartoony sound effects.
- Specifically, they are a poking noise and a banging noise.
Podcasts
- Anime Slushie: The YouTube upload of the Vividred Operation review, by its nature, contains many screenshots from the show. As these contain lots of butts, particularly skeevy shots are censored by the application of Feen's avatar.
- Random Assault:
- Funny sound effects are used to cover up the few things the podcast DOES censor.
- In articles on the show's website, Slabflapper's face is used to cover up naughty bits in pictures.
Video Games
- Among the many myths revolving around Final Fantasy IX, one particular legend involves a risqué scene involving Cloud's head as a censorship method.
- Rosalina in her Super Smash Bros. appearances has an image of the cosmos under her gown, which doubles as both censorship and giving her a more mythical "space"-like characteristic.
- During Lambda's gag reel in BlazBlue: Chronophantasma EXTEND, Bullet's pelvic region is covered in its entirety by the game logo, as her hottopantsu have been stolen. Don't ask.
- In Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon, on the garbage scow, Roger can fall into a garbage grinder at one point, causing a censor box reading "NOT A PRETTY SIGHT" to appear in front of the carnage.
- In The Spellcasting Series, the hero, Ernie Eaglebeak, can woo several women during the course of the plot and have sex with them. When playing on censored mode, the game replaces the sex scenes with Ernie just doing perfectly innocent activities with the women he charm, such as "playing chess" and "washing dishes".
- Playing HuniePop censored will result in the girls' naughty bits covered up with "Whoops! Can't show that in a Christian manga!" text boxes.
- In Senran Kagura, if a girl loses the top of her swimsuit, her breasts are covered with chibi images of her own head.
- Whenever a character's genitals would be exposed in Live A Live's Prehistory chapter, it's covered by a yellow smiley face. This applies to Gori farting and Zaki sending out his crotch lizard to attack someone.
- Bayonetta 3, which is part of an M-rated game series, introduces the optional "Naive Angels" mode which tones down the adult content. While some of the censorship works (Bayonetta no longer strips naked when summoning her demons), others are clearly made for the sake of comedy (for example: In some parts of the game you see a human heart on display, but with Naive Angels mode on, this heart is replaced with a tomato)
- Fiend Folio: One of the pill effects in this mod is called "Holy $#!&," which spawns a holy poop. The voiceover line that plays for this starts saying "Holy sh—" before being cut off with a fart noise. The horse pill version, which normally makes the narrator louder and hammier, also changes the fart noises to a much louder, echoing one.
Visual Novels
- In ATOM GRRRL!!, you can't see the police officer's corpse being dissolved even in the 18+ version. Instead, you see a bright red box reading "R18" and the horrified/fascinated expressions of the characters around it.
- At one point in Sickness, Misa's head is blocking the reader from seeing a rectal exam. Suoh is covering her eyes, and a "?" speech bubble is above her.
- Ladykiller in a Bind has an optional censored mode. If activated, any sex and nude scenes will feature the involved characters wearing tacky Christmas pullovers instead of being naked.
- The censored version of Plumbers Don't Wear Ties covers John and Jane's butts in their Shower Scenes with gray faces that have Gag Noses and slashed-out circles through them.
Web Animation
- Helluva Boss: In-universe, the ad for C.H.E.R.U.B shows various humans dying. The deaths are censored by clouds with text like "Oopsie!" and "Oh no!," while the blood is pixellated. This is in contrast to their foil I.M.P's ad in the Pilot showing far more murder with none of it being censored.
- The So This Is Basically... episode for Fire Emblem concludes with the antagonist having a Wardrobe Malfunction and commenting "Oh, my tit fell out" as an actual tit bird blocks said slip.
Webcomics
- The Adventures of Dr. McNinja covers up "naughty" things (usually profanity) with black boxes saying things like "Filth!" or "Goodness!" instead. These are also used to cover up a middle finger...and nothing else, leaving the shape of what's being censored perfectly obvious.
- According to Black Adventures, Black's penis looks like Reggie Fils-aime, N's looks like Junichi Masuda, and Cheren's is just a question mark.
- In Unintentionally Pretentious, the Censor Box gets more insistent.
- The previews for adult-themed donation incentives for Heartcore use a creature called a Meefu to block out the more titillating parts of the picture.
- Walter in Knights of Buena Vista has a Swear Jar, so whenever someone swears, "(swear jar)" is written instead.
- Schlock Mercenary has the censor box bubble block view of a head injury, which also prevented Doyt and Haban from taking a good look at the wound until they pushed the body off-panel. Doyt then got an eyeful of the gory wound.
- El Goonish Shive introduced the Angelic Tweeting Bird here, whose job was to hover between Grace and the camera during the MV5 storyline.
- My Childhood Friend Who Keeps Transforming into Monsters: When Ayari turns into a giant cyclops, the webmanga "shows" her nipples without actually drawing nipples by portraying them as clothing buttons.
- Whomp!: At the end of an extra-long arc, M Dude calls it "the funniest [fucking] thing [Ronnie] ever wrote", which is partially obscured by the former's head.
- Grrl Power: When Super Hiro is rendered naked by an energy blast, Sydney's thought balloon covers his crotch with an image of an elephant whose trunk symbolically represents his manhood.
Web Original
- Video game blog Kotaku used to insert a vector pink fish for this purpose, but now they just tag the article with "NSFW" and call it a day.
- The NSCL uses a deck of cards to censor clips with bare breasts in his High School D×D review.
- Channel Awesome:
- In The Nostalgia Critic's review of The Room (2003) he puts the head of a jackass over Tommy Wiseau's ass.
- The Nostalgia Chick's review of Showgirls used two photos of Blue Footed Boobies (and a bird honk) to cover any exposed breasts.
- Bennett the Sage's standard censor bar started out as a static image of KaiserNeko's head called "Censor Kaiser". During the review of Urotsukidoji, where the image is used liberally, Kaiser spouts off some Gratuitous Japanese and flies off. Censor Kaiser went into a Heroic BSoD during the Apocalypse Zero review and exploded, but reformed as an animated parody of the Laughing Man logo.
- Quoth Oancitizen, who also uses and abuses this:
You have no idea how long it took me to find a good image for a "footjob".
- A common gag in Forget About It would place Welshy's face over most genitals. (Aside from photoshopping it onto random and embarrassing places.)
- From Allison Pregler's review of Witchcraft 666: "You got two guesses as to what's on screen next: boobs, or delicious chocolate cake." Naturally, it's boobs censored by pictures of delicious chocolate cake.
- StephenPlays: In his Let's Play of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, upon entering a certain room in the morgue, he encounters a corpse which apparently has visible male... parts. Either YouTube's policies, his own morals, or both prevent him from leaving the parts exposed, so throughout any screentime said corpse receives, the Gag Censor he uses is an image of his own face in a goofy expression. However, in later episodes where nude corpses appear, he instead merely blurs out the offending area.
- Immersion uses, among other things, two melons for censorship in the episode Fighting Girl Clothes.
- Zero Punctuation goes for the standard black boxes, but usually decorates them with sayings like "IMAGE VERY CENSORED," "THANKS DEVIANTART!", or "NOPE, NOTHING TO SEE HERE."
- This YTP uses this, with the most amusing being Haruhi shaking her finger captioned "No fanservice for you!"
- Ebony Devil shows up in Vaguely Recalling Jojo to censor any scene too severe for the viewers. One time, Polnareff's hair was used to cover up the scene where Rubber Soul is devouring some beetles.
- CinemaSins used an Easter Bunny in their Showgirls video, having it cover two sex scenes plus the notorious rape scene in the "licks" bonus round.
- Chris Evans censors Hayley Atwell Flipping the Bird with Captain America's shield.
- KPopp uses a picture of a teddy bear nicknamed "Teddy Ass" to censor in-game nudity.
- Retsupurae uses the text "Unregistered Hypercam 2", as an "homage" to the fact that many Let's Players would use the unregistered version of that product to record their videos. And thus would have that watermark on them.
- In The Mysterious Mr. Enter's review of Seth Mac Farlanes Cavalcade Of Cartoon Comedy, Mr. Enter censors the Mountain Climber's lower regions with the poster for Norm of the North in the "Mountain Climber" sketch. In the same sketch, he later censors the feces that land on the bride and groom with the Burger King logo and Jigglypuff, respectively, and in the "Name that Animal Penis!" sketch, he censors the animal penis with a picture of Oscar from Shark Tale.
- In Felix Recenserar, an image of Bamse is used to cover up any nudity in the movies being reviewed.
- Whenever RevScarecrow of Vinesauce speedruns the Sakura visual novel series, he uses pictures of kittens to cover anything that could be suggestive.
- The "Vergil Status" meme is based entirely around cutting off suggestive or outright Rule 34 animations with gameplay footage of Vergil from Devil May Cry 5, complete with "Bury the Light".
Western Animation
- Adventure Time: Logs over crotches at the end of "Wizard." Originally, it was going to be beavers, but the censors wouldn't allow it.
- Bob's Birthday: When shown on Cartoon Network's O Canada program in the late '90s, Bob's penis was censored with a maple leaf.
- Audio version: Perfect Hair Forever censors the word "fuck" with a sound effect of Coiffio saying "EFF." Other swears are bleeped "normally."
- The Simpsons:
- On the TV version of The Simpsons Movie, Bart's lower nudity when he skates through a bare spot in a hedge is covered by a Censor Box that reads, "EUROPEAN VERSION ONLY!" (Which on the DVD commentary the directors state was going to be alternate theater image if the MPAA couldn't give them a PG-13 on the first viewing.)
- "Steal This Episode" censors various scenes (particularly those dealing with how one actually pirates movies) with, of all things, scenes of a NASCAR race (which makes sense cause they're also on Fox).
- Mentioned but not shown in "Homer Simpson, This is Your Wife." When Homer and Bart moon the cameras and the cameraman complains that there aren't enough pixels in the world to censor them, the producer suggests covering them with Ryan Seacrest's head.