William G. Clotworthy, “SNL” censor, dies at 95
William G. 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 in Salt Lake City. He was 95.
His son Robert confirmed his death.
Clotworthy, who described himself as “a professional square,” had not 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. 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.”
“After I laugh, then I go to work with the scissors and blue pencil, screaming or begging.”
Clotworthy, by then in his mid50s, 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 Clotworthy. But he 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 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.”
Clotworthy said no, they could not say “bastard” on network TV. But instead of shutting down the skit, he and Kelton negotiated. Eventually they came up with a compromise: The word would appear on the board, but 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,” 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. 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 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, 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; another son, Donald; daughters Lynne and Amy; 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 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.
First in New York and later in Los Angeles, he worked as an agency representative: In the early days of television, many shows were owned by corporations, some of them BBDO clients, and it was Clotworthy’s task to see that their interests were protected. On “General Electric Theater,” for example, he made sure there were no gas ranges on kitchen sets.
He became especially close friends with the host of “General Electric Theater,” Ronald Reagan, and was among those encouraging him to move into politics in the 1950s. When Clotworthy told Reagan he should run for mayor of Los Angeles, he recalled, Reagan replied, “Nah, it’s president or nothin’!”
Clotworthy returned to New York in 1974, and five years later he went back to NBC, this time as the head of standards and practices for the East Coast.
The job had him overseeing several programs, including soap operas, movies and, later, “Late Night with David Letterman,” where he would visit comics in their dressing rooms and ask them to run through their acts just minutes before going on air.
“He was not a jovial, yuck-aminute guy,” said Carol Leifer, a former writer for “Saturday Night Live” who often appeared as a stand-up comic on “Letterman.” “I would always be more relaxed when I went on because I knew my routine couldn’t go over as badly as it did with Bill.”
But the bulk of his time was spent on “Saturday Night Live.” He would sit in on the first script read-through, on Wednesday, raising flags and suggesting edits. He would remain in and around the studio up through the broadcast, watching nervously from the control room to make sure no one let slip an obscenity.
That’s just what happened in February 1981, when one of the show’s cast members, Charlie Rocket, uttered a forbidden fourletter word toward the end of a skit.
“The control room went absolutely silent, then, as on swivels, every head turned to look at me,” Clotworthy wrote in his memoir. “I saw this through my fingers, mind you, as my hands were covering my face, just before I beat my head against the console.”
The word was deleted from the tape before it aired on the West Coast. With the show’s ratings sinking, Rocket was let go a month later, along with two other cast members, four writers and the producer.
Clotworthy retired in 1990, after which he became an amateur historian and wrote several books, including one in which he recounted visiting every site that claimed “George Washington slept here.”
Clotworthy rarely socialized with the cast or writing staff, and he kept his personal and political opinions to himself, especially when the show poked fun at his old friend Reagan. It was, he later wrote, all about the delicate balance between enforcement and negotiation.