In-house censor for ‘Saturday Night Live’
William Clotworthy, who as the in-house censor for “Saturday Night Live” from 1979 to 1990 decided whether Eddie Murphy could say “bastard,” whether Joe Piscopo could make fart jokes and whether inebriated Romans could vomit on network television, died Aug. 19 at a hospice facility in Salt Lake City. He was 95.
His son Robert confirmed his death.
Mr. Clotworthy, who described himself as “a professional square,” had never seen an episode of “Saturday Night Live” when he arrived in 1979, coming off a career of nearly 30 years in advertising and looking for a midlife career change.
His predecessors had struggled with the late-night sketch show’s limits-pushing humor, and often rejected entire skits. Mr. Clotworthy was different. A trained actor, he fell in love with the show and its brand of satire, and he worked with its writers to tweak questionable material.
“A writer once asked me what was the first thing I did when I read a script, and I said, ‘I laugh,’” he wrote in his memoir, “Saturday Night Live: Equal Opportunity Offender” (2001). “After I laugh, then I go to work with the scissors and blue
pencil, screaming or begging.”
Mr. Clotworthy, by then in his mid-50s, was liked and respected by the show’s anti-authoritarian young cast and writing staff. He chuckled along when they called him “Dr. No” and guffawed when one cast member, Tim Kazurinsky, took to interrupting skits as the prudish censor “Worthington Clotman.”
“He was an ally,” said former U.S. Sen. Al Franken, who as a longtime “Saturday Night Live” writer and performer often clashed with Mr. Clotworthy — but also considered him a friend. “Sometimes I’d lose, sometimes I’d win, but he was always sophisticated in his understanding of what we were doing.”
Another writer, Kevin Kelton, recalled one of his earliest skits, in which Mr. Murphy, playing his recurring character Mister Robinson — a riff on Mister Rogers — finds a baby outside his apartment door. Like Mister Rogers, Mister Robinson often had a “word of the day” written on a board for his purported juvenile audience. The word for that episode was “bastard.”
Mr. Clotworthy said no, they could not say “bastard” on network TV. But instead of shutting down the skit, he and Mr. Kelton negotiated. Eventually they came up with a compromise: The word would appear on the board, but Mr. Murphy would be pulled away by a visitor before he could say it.
“He had as tough a job as anyone had there, but he was very friendly,” Mr. Kelton said in an interview. “Even though he was the censor, he understood his job wasn’t to impede the show.”
By his own admission, he wasn’t perfect. Mr. Clotworthy regretted killing a sketch in which several fraternity brothers, in the middle of lighting their farts, are interrupted by a parody of Smokey Bear, played by Mr. Piscopo, and he equally regretted giving approval to “Vomitorium,” in which Roman men drink and eat too much and then throw up.
“I wish I had the script so I could recall why the heck we ever let that one in,” he wrote in his memoir.
William Griffith Clotworthy was born Jan. 13, 1926, in Westfield, N.J.. His father,
William Rice Clotworthy, worked for AT&T, and his mother, Annabelle (Griffith) Clotworthy, was a homemaker. He later traced his family line to 11th-century England and his U.S. roots to Jamestown, the first English settlement in North America.
His first two marriages ended with the death of his wives. Along with his son Robert, he is survived by his third wife, Jo Ann Clotworthy; another son, Donald; his daughters, Lynne and Amy Clotworthy; his stepsons, Peter Bailey and Bradford Jenkins; and a grandson.
He entered the Navy after graduating from high school and later attended Yale and Wesleyan before graduating in 1948 from Syracuse University, where he studied theater.
He headed to New York City intent on an acting career and arrived at the dawn of the television era, something he got to watch firsthand after being hired as an NBC page. The premier program at the time was “Texaco Star Theater,” hosted by Milton Berle, and among Mr. Clotworthy’s tasks was escorting Berle’s mother up to Studio 8H before every performance.
He left NBC after eight months and, after a brief, unsuccessful stab at acting, took a job with the advertising agency BBDO.