Great Moments in Standards and Practices

While catching up on past episodes of The Daily Show I’d backlogged on TiVo, I ran across this classic moment:

I can imagine two different scenarios for how this happened:

1. The American Idol hippie dude’s move was more subtle, and Comedy Central’s blur-meister missed it
2. Comedy Central’s censors have some magic formula or rule that says, “it’s okay for someone to give someone else the finger, but if they break the fourth wall with the third metacarpal, that’s bad.”

In either case, I just have to laugh.