The late Orson Bean was a great teller of jokes. One night, he told one on Johnny Carson's show about a horny parrot..a joke that absolutely killed. I, of course, helped myself to it and told it many, many times to many, many friends. I don't know if any video exists of that appearance but many years later when he returned to Johnny's guest chair, he told it again. That's the clip below.
I'm about 95% certain that in the first telling, he repeatedly used the word "horny," which was one of those words that was sometimes on the forbidden list of the Standards and Practices people and sometimes was not. I think what happened was that Saturday Night Live used it a few times on the air and then Carson used it and it was bleeped and he threw a fit over the double standard for shows in the same time slot. So they let him say it for a while.
If someone wrote a good, in-depth book about NBC in those years, it would include some stories about how wet-your-pants terrified most of the executives there were at the prospect of getting Johnny mad. If he got really pissed-off, that could be the end of your career in broadcasting and you might spend the rest of your days polishing hub caps at the Burbank Car Wash. After Johnny left — and maybe even before — much of that terror was redirected to the notion of angering Lorne Michaels.
So for a while there, Johnny and his guests could say "horny" and a few other words that couldn't be used later on The Tonight Show. I believe the clip we're about to see is from a period when they'd dialed the randy vocabulary back. Mr. Bean had certainly been cautioned by someone not to use the "h" word and its absence diminishes the joke by about 50%. You can see Johnny, well aware Orson can't use the word, trying to help him work around it.
Today, you could probably say "horny" on any late night show but they might delete the rest of this joke as sexist…
