Steve Martin Cut This Oscar Joke About His Penis
In Oscar lore, according to long-time Academy Awards show writer Bruce Vilanch, it’s referred to as “the cock joke.” “People always ask, ‘What couldn't you do on the Oscar show? What did you have to drop?’” Vilanch told Steve Kmetko on his Still Here Hollywood podcast. The cock joke stuck in Vilanch’s memory for somehow passing muster with the censors, but missing the live show just the same.“It was Steve Martin's first show,” Vilanch recalled. His hosting responsibilities included a monologue full of one-liners, then a series of jokes throughout the show to introduce more presenters and awards. Vilanch, a credited writer on 25 Oscar shows and a contributor to a dozen more, wrote a joke for Martin that went like this: “I have good news and bad news. The bad news is my fly was open throughout the monologue. The good news is the camera puts on 10 pounds.”All the writers loved the joke. Even the censor gave the thumbs up: “Go with it! It’s funny!” But as Martin was about to step on stage, he got cold feet. “I can’t do the cock joke.”Vilanch couldn’t argue with Martin because “it was 100 million people, you know. He felt that it would just be the wrong mood.” (Understandable, but come on — Martin was the comic who performed his Great Flydini routine at the White House.)Martin’s decision set off a flurry of announcements throughout the production team. Vilanch got word to the stage manager, “We're cutting the cock joke!” The stage manager barked the order into the headset: “The cock joke has been cut!” The announcement turned people’s heads backstage. Vilanch remembers a bewildered Dame Judi Dench going, “Cock joke?”Earlier this year, Vilanch told The Hollywood Reporter about another favorite Oscar joke that didn’t make air thanks to a host’s sense of propriety. The gag was about “the whole Richard Gere whisper campaign,” he said. “So the joke that Billy Crystal was going to say was, ‘Richard Gere is going to present later on. He was originally going to present with Fievel, the mouse from An American Tail, but Fievel backed out.” The joke made it through rehearsals, and during the show, one of the camera operators moved near Gere’s seat for a reaction shot. “And when that happens, you know that you are somehow going to be referred to,” Vilanch said. “You could see the panic on Richard’s face.” The actor’s look of impending doom played on Crystal’s conscience. “We have to cut the joke,” he decided. “Look at him. He’s going to have a heart attack.”
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