Monday, May 07, 2007

"You have the attention span of a crackbaby"

The commentary to Bad Girls says that they cut a line of Buffy's dialogue, because it went too far. She was originally going to tell Faith: "You have the attention span of a crackbaby". Or something very similiar.

Good line, shame to lose it to the censors, I thought.

But then again, if Buffy had more of that kind of gags, it might lose its light, springy humanity. The show makes jokes about dark, nasty things, but it tends to stick to fantastical and exaggerated sick humour. So, jokes about people getting killed by giant snot monsters from space, or "extreme dead guy(s)" stuffed into lockers after being killed by vampires. Real, personalised death doesn't tend to be mocked in the same way - no one cracks jokes about Joyce's dead body. Buffy's deaths are only funny when she's undead again - "Over my dead body. The kind that doesn't come back."

Hmm...I'm now hunting for examples of jokes like the crack baby one that did make it through, and what effect they had on the tone of the show...