The Cucumber Doctrine
How to slip offensive jokes past the censors
Comedy writing, when done properly, is domestic terrorism in a cardigan. The mission is simple: sneak a filthy, possibly career-ending joke through a network of gatekeepers trained to spot fun at 100 paces. We’re not crafting dialogue, we’re building bombs. And we want those bombs to go off in the middle of prime time.
Now, you’ve got to understand: New Zealand, despite all the PR about being “forward-thinking,” runs one of the most sexually and intellectually repressed TV cultures this side of Pyongyang. Iran may flog you for blasphemy. Here, we disappear it under a mound of committee minutes and risk assessments.
I recall, many years back, an actor friend of mine shooting a pilot for a show called Flatmates, I believe – in which the late, great Kevin Smith burst into a room, Kramer-styles, and started raving about meeting the most beautiful woman alive.
“She wore this uniform (possibly an air hostess?) and even wore a badge that said Perfect.”
A cast member corrects him: “I think you’ll find that said Prefect.”
OK, we’re not talking Bill Burr. But it’s tidy. Network-solid, I would’ve thought. Well, it was axed. And the commissioner laughed as they axed it. They thought it was funny, and yet still took it around the back of the building and shot it. This is like rendering your racehorse glue ‘cause the damn thing runs too fast.
But, this was New Zealand, where the most vanilla gag gets waterboarded by a focus group until it confesses to being offensive.
But there’s a way around this. A proven method. I call it: The Cucumber Doctrine.
Here’s how it works. If you want to get a risqué joke past the guardians of joy, you give them something so grotesque, so seismically inappropriate, that they go full DEFCON 1. While they’re busy freaking out over that, your real joke - your sleeper agent - slides right under the radar. A fart to the left hand, a punchline to the right. Classic misdirection. Think Three-card Monte, but with butt-plugs.
I’ll explain.
I put this into practice while writing Find Me a Māori Bride. I had written a line where a female character reported that she’d just inserted a cucumber into the male lead’s backside. Yes. A cucumber. And yes, it was absolutely going to be flagged. That was the plan. The real joke was a subtler beast just off to the side.
Cut to the meeting. The commissioner sits me down, visibly distressed. “We have a problem,” they say.
I nod, preparing to throw myself on the sword.
“The cucumber… It’s food,” they explain solemnly. “And mixing food and sex is culturally icky for Māori. Can we replace the cucumber with… something inedible?”
At this point, I’m struggling not to high-five myself in the face. Not only was the bit not cut, they wanted to workshop it. We began pitching alternative objects. A spatula? A car key? A cat? The whiteboard looked like a CIA profile on a sexually deviant magician. But the result? Both jokes made it in. The decoy and the real one.
Mission accomplished.
Whakaata Māori back in 2017 was admittedly awesome. Māori are some of the funniest people alive. Taika Waititi is a Māori and a Jew. That’s just plain not fair when it comes to comedy. He’s a genetic freak.
But the problem was never the people. It’s the suits. It’s always the suits. The ones who think “edgy” means showing a bare ankle after 9:30 pm.
So, what do we do?
We distract. We deceive. We make art like jewel thieves in a gallery full of lasers. We slip cucumbers into asses, metaphorically (and sometimes literally), for the greater comedic good.