Each language in the world contains its own beautiful expressions. Learning them may ingratiate you with the local population, enhance your appreciation for the language’s poetry, and even give you new cultured foreign additions to your everyday speech.

We’re not going to talk about any of that today. Instead, we’ll teach you how people around the world swear.

10Greek
Malakas

This phrase expresses contempt and disgust for a man’s stupid, dishonorable, or otherwise harmful behavior. It is often punctuated with the gesture of the moutza, an extension of the hand, palm out and fingers outstretched. This symbolizes spreading manure on the face of the malaka and seems to come from the ancient Greeks via the Byzantine Empire.

In its original meaning, a malaka meant someone spoiled and weak, used to easy life and scared of hard work or violence. It changed to mean a compulsive masturbator, and it ended up having a current meaning similar to the English terms “wanker” or “tosser.”

In the Philippines, it has a completely different meaning. Malaka was a great hero in Filipino mythology, so the word has come to designate a strong person in the vein of Paul Bunyan.

9Irish
Gobshite

This Hiberno-English (Irish) insult is a doozie. “Gob” means mouth, so a gobshite either eats feces (see comemierda, further down) or only speaks worthless crud. Either way, the person is an unbearable idiot whose behavior harms other people.

It is a typically Irish insult, since the Irish culture has traditionally prized the talent of oratory (the gift of the gab, or “blarney” from the Blarney Stone) and valued the trade of storyteller. The curse is moderately accepted on BBC Northern Irish radio, having acquired a milder character over time.

8 Icelandic
Afatottari

Picture that classic American insult which starts with “mother-” and ends in “-ucker.” Now picture what could be even more sacred to anyone than their mothers. What could be more offensive than stating you commit incest with your own mother? How about suggesting you have sex with your grandpa? That’s right—the Icelandic swear afatottari means “grandfather-sucker.”

Other offensive Icelandic terms include fraendseroir (“uncle-sucker”), rollurioari (sheep-diddler”), hringvoovi (“anal sphincter”), and the awesomely offensive mamma pin faeddi pig meo rassgatinu af pvi ao pikan a henni var upptekin (“your mother didn’t give birth to you; she defecated you because her vagina was busy“). A good variety of foul language comes as no surprise in the land where half-rotten shark reeking of ammonia is considered a good treat to offer to visitors.

7Italian
Non Me Ne Frega Un Cazzo

This ultimate expression of indifference translates as “I don’t care a penis.” It is best reserved for those occasions when you are under pressure and some cornuto (literally “cuckold” but effectively a gobshite) is talking cazzate (“nonsense,” derived from cazzo).

The phrase has spawned a whole philosophy of life. Il menefreghismo is a cool carelessness that has been the signature of players from Dean Martin to Silvio Berlusconi.

6Arabic
Kuss Ummak

Paradoxically enough (or not), the more patriarchal a society is, the more offensive it is to say anything bad about mothers. This Egyptian Arabic expression means “your mother’s vagina,” and uttering it is as offensive as it gets.

Curiously enough, mentioning shoes in a rude manner or comparing someone to a shoe is a close second in offensiveness, which is why throwing your dirty shoes at someone is such an insult. In some places, even sitting with your feet pointing at someone is considered a mark of disrespect. Due to the dusty environment of most Arab lands, shoes are almost guaranteed to be dirty. Combine this with Islam’s heavy emphasis on purity and cleanliness, and shoes and feet gain special symbolism.

5Chinese
Wang Ba Dan

The ancient Chinese attributes of subtlety and harshness give rise to this disparaging term, which roughly means “turtle’s egg.” Why, you might ask, should anyone find that insulting? Turtle eggs hatch when the father is away, so being called one implies you don’t know your father—you’re a bastard. Chinese female turtles also have a certain reputation for promiscuity.

Other Chinese disparaging terms have to do with formal education—or, more specifically, the lack of it. China has a long-running tradition of state-run exams that grant access to higher education. Being unable to pass one obliterates any authority you could have, so being called “uneducated” or “peasant” is much more offensive than in the West.

4Spanish
Me Cago En La Leche Que Mamaste

It’s bad when someone insults your mother. But the nastiness goes full throttle when things go to maternal milk mixed with feces.

This Spanish curse means literally: “I defecate in the milk you suckled.” It was thought that the milk you suckled defined your character. Having a sour character is still called tener mala leche (“having bad milk“) and something awesome is la leche. Some speculate that this expression references semen, making it even fouler and tinged with homophobia.

Spanish profanity also has a knack for the liturgical (more on that later) and on the scatological. Low-quality items are disparagingly called nordos (“turds”). The insult comemierda (“turd gobbler”) gained special prominence through a famous prank call to Fidel Castro.

3German
Du Kannst Diesen Scheiszdreck Hinter Den Ohren Schmieren

This German equivalent to non me ne frega un cazzo recently gained prominence through the Brazil World Cup. Striker Thomas Muller replied with this Bavarian expression when asked about not having earned the Golden Boot (a trophy for the tournament’s top scorer). It literally means “You can smear that crap behind your ears.”

The Golden Boot winner was Colombian, and so was the reporter. So with this phrase, Muller expressed his indifference toward her country’s worthless trophy, since he had already won the Big One—the World Cup.

2French
Sacre Quebecois

This phrase literally means “Quebec Sacred,” but it really means just the opposite. It represents the collection of swear words used in the Quebec French dialect. It is not quite a dialect made of swear words but is still a very colorful collection of obscenities, mixing insults, blasphemy, and plain old taboo concepts. It uses liturgical terms such as calice (“chalice”) and tabarnac (“tabernacle”) because people curse what represses them. In traditionally Catholic Quebec, that repression came from the Church hierarchy.

You can similarly find the use of the sacred for the profane among other Catholic peoples, such as the Spanish, who curse the hostia (the Sacred Host) as much as the Quebecers curse their hostie. After all, what’s the point of cursing something you don’t believe in? You need to believe there is some truth in religion for a curse to be truly transgressive.

1Russian
Mat

Would you like to talk in a dialect made up entirely by offensive words? Russia has one, and it shares its name with the item English speakers put at the front door, perhaps because, like our doormats, it picks up all the filth.

Common Russian is quite expressive, but it tends to avoid certain offensive terms best reserved for mat. No school teaches it, and no mention of many mat words can be found in most Russian dictionaries, but it’s the common way of speaking among blue-collar workers in their jobs.

According to one anecdote, a manager was so appalled with subordinates’ profanity that he banned speaking mat altogether. Next month’s output dropped by half—the workers didn’t know the names of the tools and procedures without referring to them as “the f—kingamajig” or “f—king the s—t out of that c—t.”

Mat has been used by people as cultivated as Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn in the 20th century did much to publicize it. Criminals, meanwhile, use an altogether different variety of language, a thieves’ cant called fenya.

What’s fun for one person can be fundamentally appalling to another. In fact, history is full of leisure activities where the offended parties certainly have a point. Standards change, although the following pastimes might make you wonder if the past even had standards.

From slaughtering animals on a moving train to mocking an entire race in motion pictures, it’s amazing (and more than a bit alarming) what used to pass for entertainment. Highlights—or shall we say lowlights—include a sex-offending skunk, an amusement park mini-city that treated little people like zoo animals, and a chart-topping song extolling the virtues of roofies.

10 Poor Tours: An International Slum-sation

Following the Industrial Revolution, late 19th-century London was among the Western world’s most economically imbalanced cities. In the twilight of the Victorian Era, East London in particular was impoverished and overflowing with working-class natives as well as Irish, Eastern European, and Jewish immigrants.

Across town, fabulously wealthy residents were just a carriage ride away, and they were intrigued by newspaper items describing the desperate state of the slums. And while some were motivated by religious or altruistic reasons, most were mere oglers and cheap thrill-seekers. Many even took voyeuristic vacations, donning disguises and spending a few nights among the poor in squalid tenements.

And then, slumming went international. In 1884, a headline in The New York Times proclaimed: “A Fashionable London Mania Reaches New-York. Slumming Parties to be the Rage This Winter.” For decades to come, well-to-do white New Yorkers spent their ample leisure time touring Harlem, Chinatown, the Lower East Side, and other downtrodden neighborhoods.^[1]

In fact, the practice has endured to this day. Now known by such terms as “poorism” and “poverty porn,” touring impoverished areas has become a cottage industry around the world. Debates continue as to whether these constitute well-intending educational experiences or shameful schadenfreude.

9 The Original Drive-By Shooting

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the United States refocused on westward expansion. And to expand west unimpeded, something needed to be done about the Native Americans. One of the strategies involved destroying what, for many Native American tribes, was an irreplaceable lifeblood: the bison.

In short order, the millions of bison roaming the Great Plains were reduced to near-extinction. Not coincidentally, bison pelts had come into fashion, and by the 1880s, over 5,000 hunters were involved in the wholesale slaughter of whole herds. The picture above easily says 1,000 words about the tragedy that transpired.

But perhaps the most sickening part of the already carnivalesque carnage was when railroads started advertising hunting by rail,^[2] which is a nice way of saying “blowing out bison brains from a moving train.” The ads flooded newspapers back east, and in no time, any “adventurous” gentlemen with a few bucks and a rifle could kill a beautiful beast just for fun—strewing the landscape with rotting, unutilized carcasses whose lives weren’t even worth slowing down for.

The spectacle was particularly macabre in instances where a herd would cross rail tracks. Slowing or stopping the train offered nearly point-blank, fish-in-a-barrel shootings that eliminated any already precarious semblance of sport.

8 Insult To Injury: Wild West Shows

History is typically written by those in power, and to the victors go the spoils. The turn-of-the-20th-century American spectacles of traveling Wild West Shows were among the most perverse examples of both. After driving an entire race of people into desperation and destitution, enterprising entertainers such as the celebrated “Buffalo Bill” Cody made them relive their humiliation in fictionalized accounts of white valor and Native American barbarism.^[3]

By the 1880s, the Wild West had been tamed. Native Americans were herded onto desolate reservations whose landscapes looked nothing like their established homes, meaning their ways of life, and ability to support themselves, had been decimated.

Among the few job prospects was playing themselves—or, rather, whitewashed versions of themselves—in traveling shows romanticizing the closing American frontier. Not surprisingly, indigenous peoples were portrayed as unprovoked murderers and thieves and conquered by blameless white heroes in front of packed houses. To an entertained public, the performances, which ran well into the early 1900s, solidified notions of “Indians” as subhuman savages whose fate was fully deserved.

Sadly, many prominent Native Americans were lured into participating, usually as the only means to escape abject poverty. Cody featured Sitting Bull in his show in 1885, and for a competing show, the legendary Geronimo was advertised as “The Worst Indian That Ever Lived”—a typically sensationalist sentiment. He appeared in Cody’s show, as well.

7 The Little Things That Thrill

Along with Steeplechase and Luna Park, Dreamland was among the original three amusement parks that cemented the carnival legacy of New York City’s Coney Island. And though it only operated from 1904 to 1911, Dreamland established itself among the most ambitious entertainment-driven projects ever, well, dreamed up.

Illuminated by an otherworldly one million light bulbs, Dreamland’s imaginative attractions included a gondola ride through a recreated Venice, a train journey through the Swiss Alps, complete with gusts of frosty air, and a twice-daily six-story tenement building fire fought by scores of actors.

But one spectacle stooped really low: Lilliputia, a pint-sized European village where some 300 little people lived full-time.^[4] Also known as the now-offensive “Midget City,” the tiny town was lined with half-size houses stocked with small-scale furniture and even had stables with miniature horses.

Collected from fairs and carnival sideshows across the country, its inhabitants performed in circuses, plays, and even operas for visitors. And since Coney Island is a beach destination, Lilliputia also had a stretch of sand frequented by small sunbathers and decked out with the littlest of lifeguard chairs.

Suffice to say, treating little people like a zoo exhibit would create more than a small stir today.

6 A Star Is Born: Preemie Voyeurism

Dreamland was so odd that it merits twin billing on this list. A short stroll from Lilliputia brought visitors to an attraction even stranger—and whose stars were even smaller. A special-admission sideshow featured premature babies being kept alive by a brand new invention: incubators.^[5]

The dazzling devices were the brainchild of Dr. Martin Couney, who, upon developing the lifesaving contraption, realized that the clinical operating costs were impossibly prohibitive. Charging goo-goo gaga-ing gawkers an extra 25 cents (about $7 in today’s money) helped fund the facility.

Like its residents, the incubator installation was ahead of its time: When the exhibit opened in 1903, premature babies were considered genetically inferior and, from a medical standpoint, lost causes doomed to die. Couney’s invention disproved this assumption, showing that, with proper care, babies born early could indeed develop into healthy children.

Although the spectacle was shunned by the medical community, Couney’s clinic luckily did not burn to the ground in 1911 with the rest of Dreamland. Instead, it remained open until 1943—and revolutionized pediatric science in the process. In hindsight, it’s one offensive idea worth defending.

5 The Amazing (And Disgusting) Pervasiveness Of Blackface Performances

Given the United States’ troubling racial legacy, the advent of blackface minstrelsy—comedic performances of “blackness” by whites in exaggerated costumes and makeup—is unremarkable. What is surprising is how widespread, enduring, and popular it was as a form of entertainment.

The first minstrel shows date to 1830s New York City, featuring white performers sporting tattered clothing and faces blackened with shoe polish. The actors characterized blacks as lazy, ignorant, sexually promiscuous thieves. Among the most popular recurring characters was Jim Crow, a term now best known for the repressive anti-black laws passed throughout the post-Civil War Southern US.

Something this offensive couldn’t possibly go ultra-mainstream . . . right?

Wrong. Blackface endured through the 19th century and, in the early 20th, made the leap to the big screen.^[6] Movies with abhorrent titles like Wooing and Wedding of a Coon and the feminist gem Coon Town Suffragettes were produced, and toxic characters with names like Stepin Fetchit and Sleep ‘n Eat concocted, well into the first half of the 1900s.

Blackface was so mainstream that a lengthy list of Hollywood stars appeared in films either as blackface characters or with them. These include Bing Crosby, Milton Berle, Fred Astaire, Shirley Temple, Judy Garland, and future US president Ronald Reagan.

4 Will Foxtrot For Food: The Great Depression’s Dancing Destitute

Beginning in the mid-1920s as fun-filled endurance competitions, dance marathons were last-couple-standing contests in which the duo who could Charleston, Jitterbug, and Lindy Hop the longest won prizes.

But when the New York stock market crashed in late 1929, ushering in the Great Depression, dance-a-thons took a darker, more desperate turn on the dance floor. Suddenly, those prizes were the only income many dancers had a chance to earn, transforming a lighthearted competition into something more resembling The Hunger Games.

With US unemployment exceeding 25 percent, destitute dancers weren’t difficult to find. Well-to-do patrons paid for the privilege to cackle as demeaned duos did everything in their power to outlast their fellow impoverished competitors. Many took turns napping in their partners’ arms during events that would stretch on for days or even weeks.

As added incentive in a nation ravaged by hunger, the dancers were typically fed so long as they kept dancing.^[7]

All the while, onlookers watched and waited for dancers to quit, collapse, or have sleep-deprived nervous breakdowns. The schadenfreude-driven spectacles became so morbid that many states eventually banned them.

3 #MePew: The Sex Offender Skunk

Plenty of cartoons have featured questionable behavior at best: Elmer Fudd trying to murder an anthropomorphized bunny. Homer Simpson choking his son, Bart. Pretty much everything on South Park.

But the all-time award for “Worst Behavior in an Animated Program” undoubtedly goes to everyone’s favorite forced fornicator: Pepe Le Pew.

Granted, Fudd deserves an honorable mention for his armed pursuit of Bugs Bunny. But at least hunting wabbits is legal. Ol’ Pepe is consumed by the compulsion to commit interspecies rape.

His perpetual would-be victim is Penelope the Pussycat.^[8] And ever since Pepe laid his skunk eyes on her, she’s been fleeing her odiferous, amorous assailant. Since Pepe’s debut in 1945, children have witnessed the attempted sexual subjugation of a female feline . . . and apparently found it amusing enough to make Pepe a Merrie Melodies regular.

It’s unfair to judge cartoonists in the first half of the 20th century by 2018 standards, but was attempted rape acceptable enough in the postwar West that it was fodder for children’s entertainment? New episodes were made until 1962 and reran for decades afterward. Sacrebleu!

2 Flipper: Not Really Smiling

Long before the controversial orca show in Sea World, there was America’s favorite dolphin, right in everyone’s living rooms.

Purportedly faster than lightning and smarter than his fellow seafarers, Flipper was a hit TV show from 1964 to 1967. The marine mammal saved would-be drowning victims, caught criminals, and even (for some reason) once flew in a helicopter before diving down into the ocean depths to save the day.

Only in reality, that wasn’t Flipper. A dead, frozen dolphin was tossed from the helicopter. Granted, entertainment was tricky in the days before CGI allowed filmmakers to create pretty much any visual they wanted. But the show has an even darker story.

Flipper was portrayed by a handful of dolphins. A few years after the show’s cancellation, one of them committed suicide.^[9] Yes, apparently dolphins can do that.

One day in 1970, after years in captivity, Kathy the dolphin swam into the arms of her longtime trainer, Ric O’Barry. She then ceased breathing, sinking to the bottom of her tank. Unlike humans, dolphins can choose to stop breathing (we can’t—try it). O’Barry, who soon after described Kathy as “really depressed,” went on to be a marine mammal rights activist, even authoring a 1988 memoir called Behind the Dolphin Smile.

Programs and films with animal stars are often met with questions about their humane treatment. In Flipper ’s case, those worries were warranted.

1 Funky Cold Rohypnol

Examples abound of songs that, either by being dated or just plain degrading, disrespect women. From the old-fashioned, no-means-no-noncompliant holiday classic “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”^[10] to rappers perched on giant female posteriors, the music industry has had the objectification of women down to a science for generations.

Few songs, however, are disturbing on the level of 1989’s “Funky Cold Medina.” It’s basically a song about roofie-ing women.

The story unfolds as follows: Like any red-blooded gent, Tone Loc—the same artist who brought us the similarly racy (but refreshingly rape-free) “Wild Thing”—was out on the town, an eligible bachelor in the market to meet some bachelorettes. Upon entering a local watering hole, however, our hero is puzzled by the number of attractive, seemingly amorous young ladies keeping the company of a less conventionally appealing chap.

Naturally, Tone couldn’t help but query the pub’s most popular bloke as to his secret. Per the lyrics:

This brother told me a secret on how to get more chicks,
Put a little Medina in your glass, and the girls will come real quick.
It’s better than any alcohol or aphrodisiac,
A couple of sips of this love potion, and she’ll be on your lap.

Undeterred by the prospect of committing felony sexual assault, Mr. Loc decided to employ the somehow novel strategy of spiking someone’s drink to get them in the bedroom. Unluckily for him, it backfired. Per the lyrics:

I took her to my crib, and everything went well as planned,
But when she got undressed, it was a big old mess, Sheena was a man!

Now that’s cold.

Christopher Dale frequently writes on society, politics, and sobriety-based issues. He’s been published in Salon, The Daily Beast, NY Daily News, and Parents.com, among other outlets. Follow him on Twitter at @ChrisDaleWriter.

“Saturday Night Live” is an institution. Not just in comedy, but in all of entertainment. The show is now nearer to fifty than not, and over those many years has showcased wave after wave of comedy’s best, from Bill Murray through Will Ferrell to Kate McKinnon. Altogether, the prodigious cast has produced thousands of original characters, many of them, cultural icons. But among those, a few are a bit iffy in terms of taste.

Decades of constantly evolving culture have rendered some of “SNL”‘s most famous characters dated, obsolete, or even downright offensive. That’s not to say that they aren’t funny or that they shouldn’t have been on the air, just that it can be eye-opening looking back on our changing etiquette. To that end, here are ten of the most borderline—and actually offensive—characters to appear on “Saturday Night Live.”

10 The Samurai

Comedy was easier in the 70s. One racist caricature, and you’ve got a recurring hit sketch. No late nights for that writing team, just a quick assemblage of phony Japanese-sounding mumble-screams, and the whole crew is home by four. The ticket to Easy Street in question is John Belushi’s character, the Samurai.

The Samurai would appear with a new occupation every time—sometimes a hitman, hotel owner, or disco dancer—but always the lowest common denominator in humor. The entire premise was that a medieval-era samurai was somehow in the current era and had found a new occupation. That’s it. Belushi gave his all to the role physically, as usual, but he had virtually no dialogue to work with. Everything he ‘said’ was just racist phonetic aping of Japanese. Eventually, every sketch would fizzle out until it ended, with no structure or thought, just five minutes of a funny accent and indignity.

9 The Continental

Christopher Walken has hosted “SNL” seven times, enough to have developed his own recurring character. That character, a vaguely ethnic, hapless dilettante named the Continental, is also an endless fountain of #metoo fuel.

Every Continental sketch starts with the character fumbling his way through a date at his luxurious suite until that woman decides to escape. Apparently, his constant allusions to stalking her, drugging her, and even chloroforming her somehow sours her grapes. But when she moves to leave, the Continental inevitably blocks her exit, forcing her to stay, even going so far as to lock her in and try to swallow the key. Worst of all, the camera acts as the woman’s eyes, putting us all in the action as a sleazy old pervert tries to molest us.

8 The D-ck in a Box Dudes

Speaking of creepy grown men, there’s “D-ck in a Box.” One of Lonely Island’s biggest hits, the song “D-ck in A Box” featuring Justin Timberlake, is still a popular rewatch and singalong. But in addition to being catchy and fun, it’s also rapey and gross.

The concept behind “D-ck in a Box” is a simple question: How do you trick a woman into seeing your penis? It has been asked before, often answered with a flung-open trench coat. But it was always hindered by those pesky labels like ‘flashing’ and ‘indecent exposure’ and ‘non-consensual.’ Finally our brave heroes found the solution: hide your penis in a box and give it to a woman who is expecting a nice gift. That way she can be doubly disappointed.

7 Stefon

Bill Hader’s Stefon was probably the best recurring “SNL” character of the last couple of decades. The pop that Seth Meyers would elicit upon cueing up the guest character was unparalleled. But as funny as the character was, it was just as problematic in many ways.

For one, like so many other “SNL” characters over the years, his stereotypical homosexuality made him a constant punchline. For another, Stefon used the term midget in almost every appearance, despite the facts that 1.) that hadn’t been the appropriate term for a decade before he first used it, and 2.) even within the narrative, Meyers repeatedly told Stefon that the word was offensive, which Stefon ignored. At one point, Stefon heeded Meyers’s advice, correcting midget to ‘fun-sized.’ Stefon also had a running storyline in which he tried to seduce Meyers, built entirely on the premise that “no” means “yes.” 

6 Stuart Smalley

Unlike Stefon, whose homosexuality was just one piece of the bit, Stuart Smalley was gay—and that was really the whole joke. Well, that and the fact that Smalley’s father was an alcoholic (haha?). But he only drank because his son was gay, so we’re back to comedic square one.

Smalley, played by future (and now past) senator Al Franken, spoke in a stereotypical lisp, wore Malibu Ken outfits, and was in touch with his feelings. In the 90s, that was enough to make him an evergreen gag. In one sketch, he talks about his father beating him and his mother, and because Smalley was too effeminate to stop the assault, it’s (theoretically) funny.

5 Pat

When people see an old sketch and react with, “man, that wouldn’t fly today!” there is a solid 50% chance it was a Pat sketch. Played by the criminally underrated Julia Sweeney, Pat’s whole deal was—nay, every aspect of their entire existence was—based around the fact that Pat presented as equal-parts man and woman.

Pat had an androgynous name, dated others with androgynous names, wore androgynous clothes, had androgynous habits, etc. The joke was predicated on the outdated notion that only two genders were unwaveringly defined and completely immiscible. In the real world, even in the 90s, people aren’t split 50/50 between football-lumberjacks and ballerina-princesses, but no one in Pat’s world seemed to know that. At least the sketch had a fun game built in where the supporting cast slyly tried to coax information out of Pat that would confirm their gender. That at least beats the Samurai, who just kind of… samurai-ed.

4 Governor David Paterson

There are a few characters on this list whose entire bits are one-dimensional and offensive—the Samurai, Stuart Smalley, Pat, and as we’ll get to, the Ambiguously Gay Duo. But there’s only one character who can boast the hat-trick of being one-dimensional, offensive, and an actual person. That’s Governor David Paterson, as played by Fred Armisen.

Paterson was the actual governor of New York State in the late aughts and was legally blind. For “SNL,” this was a goldmine and they routinely dug into that mine for sweet, sweet disability jokes. Paterson would bump into furniture, use binoculars to read, and stumble in front of the camera, unawares. At least Armisen got to flex his superb space-work.

3 The Word Association Guy

This sketch aired in “SNL”‘s first season and starred Chevy Chase as a man conducting a job interview for potential hire Richard Pryor. Chase and Pryor begin a word association game as a test, which escalates quickly.

The pair exchange racial slurs until Chase throws out a full, uncensored n-word on primetime, network television. The sketch is quick, simple, funny, and feels punk rock and dangerous in the spirit of those early years. It has become a historic television moment, despite—or rather because—it went farther than any sketch has dared before or after.

2 The Ambiguously Gay Duo

After Stefon and Smalley, we round out the ‘gay people are funny’ trilogy with one the most offensive recurring “SNL” sketch ever: The Ambiguously Gay duo. The sketch was an all-star exhibition, created by Robert Smigel and voiced by Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell as the titular duo, a pair of muscular male superheroes who seemed completely unaware of their homoerotic behavior.

In an obvious parody of early Batman and Robin, the pair spouted endless catchphrases that were equal parts enthusiastic and inane. The twist was that the phrases and all the superhero moves they accompanied were clearly gay.

The duo drove a penis-shaped car, flew by mounting each other, dodged bullets by doing ballet, and defeated evil by putting any number of penis-shaped objects in an equal number of butt-shaped objects. The joke was that they had no idea how it all looked, and as offensive as it all is, the jokes still hold up today.

1 Canteen Boy

Even after all that, there is a clear winner: Canteen Boy. Though most Canteen Boy appearances were offensive due to their consistent mocking of the mentally challenged (despite what the disclaimer claimed), one sketch went a whole lot further. It is offensive enough to not exist on YouTube at all, save for mentions by third parties. The sketch in question is when Alec Baldwin led Canteen Boy’s scout troop and naturally… tried to molest him.

Baldwin spends a night in the woods with Canteen Boy and tries his damndest to seduce him, mental disability or no. He takes his own shirt off, tries to get Canteen Boy drunk, forces the scout into his own sleeping bag, nuzzles him, and even sucks his finger. The sketch was topical, as accusations about scout leader sexual assaults were common at the time. That made the sketch even more offensive to victims and their families. And no matter when it airs, jokes about molesting the mentally challenged are justifiably bound to raise a few hackles.

What’s considered offensive is as elusive as attempting to hit a ripple in the water with a bow and arrow. What is funny for one person raises the hackles in another. Few other areas in our culture better illustrates this than in the games we play. We’ve explored the subject of offensive board games before, but the subject is far from exhausted. What’s more, this ignored other table-top contests such as card games. Here are 10 games that might bring a smile to some and ire to lots and lots and lots of others.

Related: Top 10 Deadliest Children’s Games

10 Is The Pope Catholic!?!

Advertised as a game of nostalgia for Catholics and non-Catholics who remember Catholicism before Vatican II (1962-1965) reshaped the church, Is the Pope Catholic!?! “takes a tongue-in-cheek look at the church when it was very rigid and contained a lot of do’s and dont’s,” said co-developer Richard Crowley. “We think it contributes to healing some painful memories of those days for Catholics.” Richard – along with his brother John – are Roman Catholic and they spent $50,000 and four years developing this game before its release in the mid-1980’s. Despite their efforts, they couldn’t help put fall into stereotypes that raised eyebrows in the older Catholic community.

Players roll die to progress along a route shaped like a rosary, acquiring chips that elevate the player from altar boy to priest to monsignor to bishop to cardinal and finally to pope. If they land on a sin rosary bead, they draw a card and lose a turn in the “box” or the confessional. For example, one card informs you that while returning from Holy Communion, the Host is stuck on the roof of your mouth. When no one is looking, you finger it free. God, however, is looking and you’re sent to the confessional. Other sins include using church money for candy or getting drunk on sacramental wine.

“Grace” beads – such as attending mass on minor holidays—provide an extra turn. If the player lands on a “Baltimore Bonus” bead, you must answer a question straight from the Baltimore Catechism before you can proceed. And if you land on a “Meet Me After School” bead, you draw a card with a surly nun holding a ruler, and you lose a turn as punishment for some school infraction. As a bonus, these cards also feature the names of real nuns who taught and tortured the Crowley brothers at St. Clement’s Grammar and High School in Boston.

9 12-21-12 (2013)

In 2013, a small game developer from St. Louis called Fishagon LLC published a card game named “12/21/12,” the date the Mayans supposedly predicted the world would end. Fishagon was launched – according to their Facebook page—by three friends who loved games in October 2012 just over two months before the Mayan apocalypse. And crude and offensive “jokes” appear to be the game’s selling point.

The game’s premise was to ask how the player would like to spend their “last day on Earth.” But instead of encouraging nobler, less-interesting final pursuits such as helping others or spending time with loved ones, points are given or taken from other players by describing how they’d tell off their boss, steal and joyride a car or explore pedophilia. “They say to live like it’s your last day alive… but you don’t. You know if you did you’d go to prison the following day,” says the product description. It adds: “Today, however, there is no tomorrow….Drink, Play Games, Murder, Masturbate, Hell you could even rape someone or give in to those temptations and go find a nice child to touch!”

8 BabeQuest (2003)

The table-top game “BabeQuest (2003)” – yes, adding the year is essential because it will not surprise anyone that a Goggle search will reveal some pretty lewd links – was published by the Danish developer Mads L. Brynnum and two of his friends. “It was a result of us not scoring enough, so instead of just drinking beers and complaining about our apparent lack of success with the opposite sex, we decided to make a card game about getting laid,” Brynnum posted.

The premise is not surprising: the player who “scores” the most babes wins the game. There are 14 cards representing “hunting grounds” and 28 cards representing potential prey. The players (in both senses of the name) roll dice to see if their approaches to a woman are successful and they can increase their odds with cards that ply them with alcohol, or catch their attention with a nice car or leisure suit. The other players can utilize cards that can sabotage the approach with things like a lame pick up line. One example of a babe card is that of The Blonde: “She is found everywhere and has an IQ that is inversely proportional to her breast size. She falls for the oldest tricks in the book.” It even adds an “actual blonde quote” which reads: “The sound barrier? I’ve heard of it—isn’t it the one in China?”

7 Twinkies and Trolls (1983)

Along similar lines as BabeQuest, Twinkies and Trolls was published in 1983 by the owners of the gay bar “Buddies” in Boston. The inventors described the game as a “lighthearted reflection of gay life and the gay lifestyle.” Inspired by Hasbro’s The Game of Life, players start from a closet and visit their first gay bar, and “baths” in New York, San Francisco, Provincetown and Ft. Lauderdale, collecting trolls (gay slang for old, ugly men) and twinkies (young, attractive men). The player with most of the latter wins.

The game is famous for its stereotypical and offensive situations it portrays both on the board spaces and on the situation cards, most of which cannot be repeated here. One of the tamer cards reads: wealthy sugar daddy takes you to Puerto Rico for a month, collect $10,000 spending money but lose one turn. Another reads: caught with a cute hustler by your lover, receive three troll cards. One space on the board reads: your favorite “glory hole” is nailed shut, lose 15 points. Another reads that after a lonely, depressing night at home, you eat your chocolate dildo and lose 15 points.

6 The Jolly Darkie Target Game (1890)

In September of 1881, a carnival promoter in Indiana came up with the idea of chaining a monkey to a table and allowing people to throw balls at it for a couple of pennies. The universal outrage that followed forced the promotor to close down his game. Undeterred, he painted a jungle scene on a bed sheet stretched between two poles with a hole in the center. He hired a black man to stick his head through the hole and anyone who paid could throw baseballs at his head. The game, known as “The African Dodger” and later as “Hit the Coon” or “N— in the Hole,” became a nationwide sensation. Carnivals and fairs all over the country had their own versions and not just in the South.

An August 30, 1888, Nebraska State Journal article described the game at a local fair, the barker shouting: “Here you are gentlemen; three balls for five cents or six for ten cents. Come now, kill the coon; kill him I say! Hit his head once and you get one cigar, twice and you get two cigars, three times and you get a half dollar.” The anonymous writer then described how two youths broke the rules and threw their first baseballs at the same time: “one ball caught the darky on the ear, the other on the top of the head… [the African-American] became so confused that he didn’t know enough to take his head out of the hole. Each threw their remaining five balls in rapid succession, and while some of them missed,… enough of them hit him to give him a swelled eye and the [blood] began to flow. You should have heard the crowd shout. How they did cheer!”

Worse injuries incurred when an amateur or pro baseball player tried their hand at the game. In South Dakota in 1908 a pro knocked a man’s teeth out. In 1898 several Chicago pros took turns throwing at William Kelley’s head, sending him to the hospital, “his face was like a puff ball and that his eyes were badly swollen.” Inevitably there were deaths. There were two within a week of each other in 1924 in New Jersey, one in Hackensack, the other in Elizabeth.

It’s not hard to see similarities between the violence of “African Dodger” to other violence perpetrated against African-Americans. Even at the time, people noticed. In a 1913 Indiana Evening News editorial, one writer equated the excitement generated by hurting the dodger to lynch mob mentality. “The impulse to hit the darky is akin to that which creates the blood lust in the mob.” Historians claim that between 1882 and 1968 there were more than 3,440 lynchings in America were recorded, the approximate time “The African Dodger” was popular.

Eventually “The African Dodger” was made into a table-top game for home use, complete with the head of an African American that rang a bell every time it was struck with the ball. It was one of many target games published in this era. Parker Brothers produced “The Game of Sambo” in the early 20th century which featured African-American caricatures to be targeted. “Bean-em” was a beanbag target game with black figures. Then there’s The Jolly Darkie Target Game. Published in 1890 by McLoughlin Brothers (later merged with Milton Bradley Company), the Jolly Darkie is played on one end of the table, with the players on the other end. Players get a point if their ball lands in the darkie’s grinning mouth, and the ball will roll out one of three holes at the bottom, giving the player extra points assigned to each hole.

5 Kill the Hippies (2007)

Published in 2007 by Golden Laurel Entertainment, participants, according to the product description, are “members of the fanatical right” or “fundies” (fundamentalist Christians) “in their Holy Crusade to rid the world of those dirty hippies.” Billed as a satirical card game that is “fun for the whole church group,” players decide from the outset the winning number of points, deriving them from either killing a hippie or converting them.

There are two decks of cards, the smaller deck containing 15 hippie cards from which five or more are drawn. Examples of the hippies portrayed on these cards are the Faerie Wicca Girl, the Shaman Tree Hugger, the Spirit Guide Channeler, and the Flower Child. One hippie card shows an amputee in a wheelchair, titled “Disabled Vietnam Vet,” with instructions at the bottom saying they can be “converted instantly” if the fundie uses alcohol. At the bottom of each card is a quote that may or may not be relevant to the hippie. For instance, the Faerie Wicca Girl’s card has an unattributed quote: “Girls are like parking spaces… The good ones are taken and the rest are handicapped.” At the bottom of the Folkie card is a quote from John Lennon: “We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first – rock and roll or Christianity.”

The other deck has “Deeds,” “Relics,” and “Events” cards in them. An example of a Deed card is one titled “Favorite Televangelist on TV” and shows a man in a chair watching television with a woman performing a sex act on him while he balances a beer can on her head. The Fundie loses their turn if they draw that card. The Deed card “Accusation of Sexual Deviance” shows a naked man putting lipstick on, a radio playing music in the background with a pack of cigarettes on the chair. The player who receives this card can take a kill and a convert from another player.

Relics cards are used to either convert or kill the hippie. One example has a woman with her clothes ripped and her panties lying beside her and kneeling before a baptismal dubbed the “Font of Revirginization.” Three points can be used to convert a hippie, 1 point for killing them. Other relics include the “Lighter of Purification” (a cigarette lighter with a cross on its side used on a hippie drenched in gasoline); the “Rosary of Saint Garrotte (sic)” (rosary used as a garrote); the “Hymn Book Holster” (pistol and silencer in hymnal with fitted slots); and a “Hillbilly Exorcism” (two hillbillies restraining a hippie, one unbuckling his pants, an overt reference to the movie Deliverance) Another card, titled “Compound Bow,” shows Jesus with said weapon, standing atop a pile of corpses with arrows protruding from them. At the bottom is a quote of Jesus (out of context) from Matthew 10:34: “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

Event cards change the rules temporarily or through out the game. For instance, one card called “Suburban Upbringing,” remains in play one entire round, adding one point for every conversion or killing of a hippie. The illustration on the card shows a house with a couple sitting on a porch swing, an abandoned car in the yard and their kids with Ku Klux Klan hoods.

The creators of the game seem a bit sensitive to criticism, because they devoted space in their instructions to the following: “If you do not see the humour (sic) in this game, watch South Park, Family Guy, or The Colbert Report – this is called satire, this is called irony. Read Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal; read some Oscar Wilde, pick-up a f-ing book. Get educated.” Their admonishment is actually an example of irony since there are misspellings in their product (or at least alternate, archaic spellings), misleading quotes and they equate irony with satire. Not the same.

4 Pain Doctors: The Game of Recreational Surgery (1996)

Based on his book The Pain Doctors of Suture Self General, Alan M. Clark collaborated on the artwork for this game. Clark is famous in the horror community for his dark, twisted illustrations, winning the World Fantasy Award, and his work has won multiple Chelsey Awards and Locus and International Horror Guild nominations. Many purchased the game to collect Clark’s artwork.

In “Pain Doctors,” the players are surgeons operating in “The Facility,” attempting to perform procedures on patients who are not even healthy enough to survive surgery. While each crazy surgeon does everything they can to increase the health of their patient, opponents do the opposite, going so far as to kill the patient. Each player is dealt three patients, already grotesquely deformed by previous recreational surgeries. For instance, one patient is named John Austentatous who looks more like a store mannequin than a human with a brief caption that reads: “John used to surf the net. Now he does well to roll on a gurney.” And Martha Ewing, “a federal agent” who came to the Facility to investigate fraud, but was “convinced” to stay, is shown as a patient with goo running out of her eye sockets.

Each patient starts with 5 life points and is assigned to a ward, either “addicts,” “geeks,” or “Batty.” Each player also received 4 treatment cards. These cards lift or lower the health of patients. For instance one card delivers a letter from Mom, raising the patient’s life points by 5. Another card reads that a nurse forgot to wash their hands, spreading a staph infection. The illustration is of a pair hands with grotesque, green spores growing on them. Problems with cannibalistic orderlies, nurses who use IV bottles as ashtrays , and staff who steal drugs are also hazards. Some treatment cards are not really treatments at all. One of these cards has a limp hand, the index finger extended with a pistol hanging from it via the trigger guard. The caption says “who left the pistol in the ward? Unfortunately your patient choses the easy way out.” That patient is removed completely from play, resulting in all their points lost.

Once a patient has reached 10 or more life points, he or she is moved to pre-op. But even there, they are not safe. If an opponent draws the “kidnap” card, it reads: “seeing an opportunity, you grab a [another player’s] pre-op patient and run into surgery! You weren’t seen, so you can do what you want.” Once the player feels his patient has sufficient life points, the patient can move into the operating suite and the player draws surgery cards that can throw a wrench in the procedure. One card says “the patient has been awake for the entire operation so far! You can thank the anesthesiologist for hoarding the ether.” Another says that a baboon’s arm is the only limb replacement available. Another proclaims that a staff member, “preparing for the faculty talent show,” jumps onto the patient’s chest and begins dancing. Once the patient reaches zero life points, they die on the table.

3 Who’s Your Daddy? (2001)

Not to be mistaken for the video game of the same name released by Evil Tortilla Games in 2016, this 2001 table-top game is reminiscent of the Maury Povich or Jerry Springer shows. Participants play both as a man and a woman in this game. As the woman, the player tries to have as many children with as many of the other player’s men as possible, and successfully sue those men for paternity payment or payments. As the man, the player denies paternity and does everything they can to avoid paying. The player who still has money wins the game.

Each player starts the game by creating the physical attributes of both their man and woman (hair color, eye color, etc.) in order to compare DNA attributes. Each player’s woman has a child, gives them a name and rolls a die to see what physical attributes the child has. They also roll the die to determine if the child has a “special trait” which is to say “special needs.” Those “special traits” of course elevates the amount of money the woman can ask the daddy. At the beginning of each round, the players collect paternity payments, then either get pregnant, give birth or accuse another player of paternity. The woman, when she accuses paternity, also demands compensation. There are no limits to what she can ask for (with the exception that she cannot give the child to the accused). Payment can be a lump sum or a payment with each round. The accused can accept the demanded payment, can make a counter-offer, or deny paternity. If paternity is denied, the accused can accuse another player’s male character of paternity or take a paternity test (the results determined by the roll of a die). The mother pays for the paternity test and if she loses, and she must wait until the next round to make another accusation.

2 Ghettopoly (2003)

Developed by David T. Chang in 2003, this parody game has so many obvious similarities to Monopoly, it was inevitable Hasbro would sue. Designed in a square, the properties have names like “Trailer Trash Court,” and “Cheap Tricks Ave.” (with an illustration of prostitutes showing off their wares). If a “playa” runs out of money, they don’t go bankrupt or to jail, but a loan shark puts them in the hospital. Instead of 4 railroads, there are 4 liquor stores. Instead of paying when a player lands on the “Taxes” spaces, they pay when they land on “Car Jacked” and “Police shake-down” spaces. In lieu of the Water and Electric Companies, there are crack house and pawn shop spaces where players pay a “protection fee.” In place of “Chance” and “Community Chest” cards, there are “Ghetto Stash” and “Hustle” cards. Instead of building houses and hotels, you build crack houses and projects.

There are some obvious racial and ethnic slurs. For instance, the massage parlor is owned by “Ling Ling,” the chop shop by Hernando, and the pawn shop by Weinstein. On one of the Ghetto Stash cards, it reads “you robbed a stupid Japanese tourist, collect $200” with an illustration of said victim saying “Are you lobbing me?” In response to the criticism, Chang said the game “draws on stereotypes not as a means to degrade, but as a medium to bring [people] together in laughter. If we can’t laugh at ourselves… we’ll continue to live in blame and bitterness.” The NAACP and a number black clergy were particularly outraged by properties such as “Martin Luthor King Jr. Boulevard” and “Malcum X Avenue” (deliberately misspelled) with caricatures of both men. “This is beyond making fun, to use the caricature of Dr. King in this regard,” responded Rev. Glenn Wilson, a Philadelphia Baptist minister. “There’s no way that game could be taken in any way other than that this man had racist intent in marketing it.”

A short time after its release, Urban Outfitters pulled the game from its shelves and Yahoo! and eBay halted on-line sales. In October 2003, Hasbro sued Chang for violating its trademarks and copyrights and caused “irreparable injury” to Hasbro’s reputation. Chang lost the case by default.

1 Capital Punishment (1981)

In 1980, friends Bob Johnson and Ron Pramschufer developed and published a controversial board game called Public Assistance. In the game, a working person is pitted against a welfare recipient, the former receiving a $150 monthly paycheck with tiny pay raises while the latter receiving $500 monthly benefits that increase with each child they have. They may “hit a sub shop” and collect $50, perform a sexual favor for a cop and collect $300, or loot stores during a snow storm and receive $2,000. Some 135,000 copies of the game flew off store shelves until the NAACP, the National Organization for Women, and state and city human resource departments stopped the sale of the game. When asked about the popularity of his game, Johnson said “The public is frustrated over the government spending and spending.” He added “People ask, ‘How did you invent the games?’ I say, ‘We didn’t. Government liberals did. We just put it in a box.’ “.

A year later, Johnson and Pramschufer published Capital Punishment, this time taking aim at the American legal system. Each player is given 4 criminals – a murderer, rapist, arsonist, and kidnapper – and the object of the game is to get all 4 either life imprisonment, placed on death row or executed. Each criminal can only be apprehended if they roll a 7, 11 or doubles. Each player also gets 2 liberals who start the game in their ivory tower and are sent to spring opposing criminals from the judicial system and those criminals have to start anew. Each player is also given 15 innocent civilians and when criminals are put back on the street, their civilians are also killed and sent to heaven. Any player who loses all their civilians automatically loses the game. If however a player wants to continue, they may sacrifice one or both their liberals changing them to civilians and ultimately to victims. Clearly the creators had an axe to grind which may explain why Capital Punishment, too, was allegedly banned.

Obviously, we’ve come a long way since then and there are literally thousands of hours of programming that you could try to watch every single day if you were so inclined. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that in our haste to make newer, better, and different shows that sometimes a terribly offensive idea sneaks through the cracks and makes it to air.

10. Homeboys in Outer Space

If you missed Homeboys in Outer Space don’t be too upset, many people did. The show aired on UPN between 1996 and 1997 and starred Flex and Darryl Bell. The plot of the show was pretty much what you’d expect from the title. Two friends who were astronauts flew through space in a car that was called a space hoopty. The hoopty had an A.I. named Loquatia. They got into various adventures that neither critics nor audiences particularly enjoyed.

The special effects were lackluster even for a show made in the 1990s, and the plot lines were the sorts of cringe-worthy things that were the hallmarks of some of UPN’s less inspired endeavors back in the day. One of the characters was perpetually horny, the computer had a sassy attitude, and it can’t be stated enough that they drove through space in something called a space hoopty. Basically, it exploited all the stereotypes you might expect without any clever twists or subversion to justify them in any way.

9. Black.White

The show Black.White was praised by a number of viewers while thoroughly derided by others for being one of the most offensive ideas to hit TV in years. Presented as a kind of serious experiment in race relations, other people saw the show as a bizarre exercise in black face and white face. The reality show followed two families, one white, and one black. The families share a house together and don’t particularly get along. Neither family, although the show mostly focuses on the fathers of each, are exactly racist, but they have some questionable views about race in America. To confront this, each of the families is made up with the help of some Hollywood makeup artists to look like a member of the opposite race. 

Once they have their racial makeover, the families go out into the world with hidden cameras to learn what life is like for members of the opposite race. To get an idea of how everyone handled it, the father of the white family at one point says he’s waiting for someone to refer to him by the N-word. Except he doesn’t say ‘N-word,’ he says the actual word.

Some critics pointed out that it seemed to be less of a learning experience and more of a confrontation for some people involved. The father of the white family, for instance, clearly wants to prove that there is no racism in white America. The end result was a show that lacked depth and didn’t really impart a message other than you can’t learn much about another race just by pretending to be one for a couple of days.

8. Fear Factor

Fear Factor was a popular reality game show that aired on NBC for a number of years and was hosted by Joe Rogan. Every episode of the show involves six people — three men and three women — being forced to confront three extreme stunts. If a contestant was too afraid they would be eliminated, and if they couldn’t finish it, they would also be eliminated. The winner at the end would get $50,000. 

The first and final stunts were often a physical challenge of some kind, but the middle stunt was the real kicker of the show. The middle stunt was always something extremely gross. Contestants either had to be covered in some kind of creature like snakes or rats, or in the worst cases they had to eat something terrible. That could be anything from live insects to pig anus.

One episode of Fear Factor proved to be so offensive that they didn’t actually let it get to air. The 2012 episode that NBC opted to remove before it was actually seen by audiences featured contestants being forced to drink a glass of donkey semen followed by a glass of urine.

The episode was going to air; however, rumors of the contents hit the internet before the show did and drummed up so much disgust that the network responded by canceling it and replacing it with a rerun. They also went so far as to prohibit the episode’s contestants from speaking about it in the media.

7. South Park

South Park has been on TV for nearly a quarter of a century at this point. If you haven’t heard of it, you probably don’t own a TV.  It’s also no secret that South Park is offensive, because the show is pretty much predicated on the principle of being offensive. Showrunners Matt Stone and Trey Parker have gone out of their way for years to push the envelope and make some of the most offensive jokes they possibly can on a regular basis. That’s what audiences loved about it, and that’s part of why it’s endured for as long as it has.

What you may not be aware of, even if you are a fan of the show, is just how much offense the show has caused over the years. In fact, South Park is so offensive that it has its own Wikipedia page just for the controversies that the show has stirred up. And… it’s a long page.

Aside from facing the odd lawsuit, South Park has been protested and criticized pretty much since it first premiered back in 1997. Back then, elementary schools were banning kids from wearing South Park t-shirts. At least one person has literally called South Park ‘dangerous to the democracy.’ Numerous Christian activist groups have protested the show many times, in particular over the way it portrays Christianity and organized religion.

At various points in the show’s run it has been either criticized or protested not just for us to fiction of Christianity but Islam, Scientology, Mormonism, race and racism, its use of profanity, and even the way the show depicted the crocodile hunter Steve Irwin. 

So even though it’s true that many people love South Park, and it’s proving to be one of the most popular animated shows ever produced, it’s also impossible to deny that it has definitely offended a wide segment of other viewers as well.

6. Heil Honey, I’m Home

Some ideas are so clearly bad that it’s amazing when you think of just how many people had to okay it before it came to life in the first place. A TV show is not made in a vacuum. There’s a creator, producers, directors, actors, and a network itself that’s going to put it on TV. Literally hundreds of people, at a minimum, have to all be on the same page to get a TV show on the air. Yet somehow, back in 1990, that’s exactly what happened with the sitcom about Hitler entitled Heil Honey, I’m Home.

Even knowing nothing else about the show beyond the title and the fact that it’s about Hitler, do you need to know anything else about the show besides the title and the fact that it’s about Hitler? 

The first episode of the show, and the only one that ever aired, opens with a disclaimer that the tape of the show was found hidden away on a back lot in California. A fictional backstory was created for the show that this was made by some unsung comedic genius of television who was never heard from again and that the show is actually an American sitcom. All the actors have American accents, and the filming style is reflective of an early ’80s television show rather than one that was actually made in 1990. There’s a very ’80s-esque opening song, and when the actors first appear on screen, the audience burst into applause for no reason each time as though they were excited to see these people, in much the way that you would have seen in something like The Dick Van Dyke Show.

You can find the full episode on YouTube and if you can stomach the idea of a show that’s trying to get laughs out of one of history’s greatest monsters, it’s still not very entertaining or funny. The Hitler character is insufferable in a weird Ralph Kramden-sitcom kind of way. The entire thing was clearly in bad taste, and it’s not hard to imagine why the idea went over so poorly. Eight episodes were filmed in total, but only that first one saw the light of day.

5. Generation KKK

If the name of the show doesn’t convince you that it was a bad idea, then the back story certainly will.  Generation KKK was supposed to be a docuseries focussing on the Ku Klux Klan and people getting away from it. The name of the series was actually changed to Escaping the KKK to make it sound a little more appealing and less like it was in some ways supportive of the infamous hate group.

Theoretically, a documentary series about people escaping the Ku Klux Klan would probably be interesting and informative to viewers. The problem with the series was that it soon came to light that A&E, the network producing the show, had been paying participants. And not just those who reportedly left the Klan, but actual Klan members.

Typically, a documentary it’s not going to pay subjects to participate in it, and certainly it casts a suspicious light on the show that is paying active members of a recognized hate group to participate. That is, in the most basic terms, supporting the Ku Klux Klan.

A&E distanced itself from the controversy by laying the blame on a third-party production company for making the cash payments to members of the KKK. The result of the controversy was them dropping the show altogether.

4. Man vs. Beast

In 2003 Fox took reality shows to a brand new level when it aired the first of two specials called Man vs. Beast. The name of the show wasn’t coy or deceptive in any way. It was a show in which human beings went toe-to-toe with animals in a series of competitions. It was almost like a joke program straight off of The Simpsons, except it was very real.

The competitions presented on the show included an Olympic sprinter racing a giraffe and a zebra, a competitive eater trying to devour more hot dogs than a 1,000-pound bear, and a Navy SEAL going head-to-head against a chimpanzee in an obstacle course.

Critics absolutely tore the show to pieces. This wasn’t offensive on a moral level, it was offensive on an intellectual one. The phrase ‘moron television’ popped up in a review from Slate. Ratings were pretty abysmal and the network still brought it back for a second instalment, which featured a gymnast versus an orangutan hanging from rings and a relay race featuring a camel and four little people. This time, the Ottawa Citizen called the show a sign of the impending apocalypse.

3. All My Babies’ Mamas

Whether or not you’re familiar with the work of rapper Shawty Lo, one thing you’re definitely not going to be familiar with was his would-be TV series called All My Babies’ Mamas. The show was pulled even before the first episode aired.

The show was to be a reality series following Lo and the mothers of his children. He had 11 children by 10 different women. That simple premise, combined with the name, was enough to drum up some public outcry toward the Oxygen Network, which was going to air the show. Many people felt that it was exploiting negative stereotypes about Black people. One group in particular known as Color of Change started a petition in which they accused the network of trying to profit from ‘ inaccurate, dehumanizing, and harmful perceptions of Black families.’

The network responded to criticisms by dumping the show before it even aired, although Lo was said to be extremely upset by this and fought to keep it on the air.

2. The Melting Pot

Another British sitcom, The Melting Pot, aired one single episode in 1975 and was never seen again. An entire season of the show was filmed, but never saw the light of day. The reason for this is pretty clear once you know what the show is about. It featured British actor and comedian Spike Milligan playing an illegal Asian immigrant named Mr. Van Gogh. He was in brown face at the time. Other characters in the show include cockney Chinese man and a Scottish Arab. 

The show was canned very quickly and while Milligan himself was perplexed as to the reason why, suggesting that maybe it just wasn’t funny enough, most people agreed the problem was that it was horribly, horribly racist.

Weirdly enough, this was neither the first nor the last time that Milligan would go in brown face for a role. As an actor, he was apparently infatuated with the idea of pretending to be a Pakistani character and actually went in brown face in two other attempted series as well.

1. Kid Nation

We have settled into the idea of reality shows these days, and there are not a lot of surprises left in how the shows are produced. But through the early and mid-2000s when reality shows were really exploding, networks tried some pretty bizarre ideas to see what might work. One of those was Kid Nation.

The plot of the show involved sending 40 children between the ages of 8 and 15 to an abandoned town in New Mexico where they could start their own society. There are no adults around, no phones, no rules at all really — just some cameras to watch what happened.

Before the show even aired, it was controversial. Because these kids had to fend for themselves, they were working up to 14 hours a day to get things done. This skirted around legal concerns because of statutes that protected film productions from child labor laws.

Critics were also quick to question the ethics of the show. Since the winner got $20,000, but that money was legally going to go to the parents, wasn’t this just exploitation? Parents were required to sign massive waivers that let CBS off the hook for any medical issues or harm that their children might face. Hot cooking grease splashed into the face of one contestant, an 11-year-old girl, when she was making a meal. Another child accidentally drank some bleach.

There was also some criticism from parents involved that scenes were re-shot and their children were fed lines to say to the camera to make the show more interesting, the kind of stuff we sort of expect from so-called reality shows today. In the end, the idea was deemed offensive across the board for its exploitative treatment of the kids involved.