Apparently not everyone was laughing at Dave Chappelle's skits on Saturday Night Live last night. In fact, some people barely got to see them at all. Somewhere in North Carolina, a lot of people are missing out on the references after local station WRAL reportedly censored a majority of the comedian's episode.
The station, which is an affiliate of NBC, censored nine different parts of last night's episode, citing inappropriate language, according to Variety. WRAL did not outline which words or comments were inappropriate, but during Chappelle's opening skit, the comedian openly used a number of curse words as well as the 'n-word.' The station issued a statement shortly after reports began popping up, deflecting the blame on FCC guidelines. "WRAL-TV has a station obscenity, decency and profanity policy that outlines 10 specific words that will not be broadcast on our air. This policy is based on our own standards in combination with FCC guidelines," the statement read. "Our broadcast operators have a 10-second delay button they can choose to use. During Saturday Night Live on NBC, guest host Dave Chappelle used 2 of those words on 9 different occasions and they were silenced."
The statement also noted that the decision was not made in collaboration with NBC. "Obviously, SNL is a live show so we had no prior indication about what would be said during the broadcast," it continued. "We understand this caused disruption during the program. We wanted our audience to know this was a station decision, not the network’s, and why we made that choice."
Although the station only wanted to censor the comedian's offensive language, they managed to silence large portions that were perfectly clean. According to local viewers, instead of the station cutting the audio on the part where Chappelle mentioned staying in a Trump-owned hotel, they cut out everything beyond that point. The station also bleeped out the spoof on the AMC series The Walking Dead that featured Chappelle, Leslie Jones, and Kyle Mooney.
There seems to be a lot of mixed reactions to SNL censorship in North Carolina. Some blame the act on the recent election and Donald Trump victory, while others just blasted WRAL for the mishap.
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