Fox Censors Stepped In On Family Guy When Some Made-Up Profanity Became Real

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Sheridan succinctly summed up the origin of “kleeman,” saying: 

“[‘Family Guy’] has been on long enough that we did a bit once where we had the word ‘vagina’ in an episode. They said, ‘You can’t say vagina on the air.’ So we changed the word and we just came up with our own word and called it ‘cleman.’ We just swapped out ‘vagina’ with ‘cleman,’ and it was like, ‘Oh, we’ll just say that. No problem.'” 

And it wasn’t a problem. Until it was. In a later episode, another writer wanted to make a callback to “kleeman,” once again using it as a replacement word for “vagina.” It sounds rude, of course — that’s the point — but it was fair game, given that the “Family Guy” writers made it up. When Fox censors looked it up, however, they assumed “kleeman” was in popular usage. Sheridan continued: 

“[S]everal years later, we did a joke, and we use the word ‘kleeman,’ and they’re like, ‘Well you can’t say that.’ And we’re like, ‘What do you mean we can’t say it?’ ‘Well no, it means vagina.’ I was like, ‘I know! We made it up.’ But it made its way into the Urban Dictionary, and then we couldn’t say it. I was like, ‘I think that’s completely unfair.’ So when a show is on that long, it’s just insane.” 

It seems that the adoption of kleeman into the Urban Dictionary was something of a prank pulled by an attentive “Family Guy” fan. It’s unlikely that anyone has used kleeman earnestly in reference to any part of human anatomy. Like “dirty Sanchez” or “donkey punch,” it was adopted as a slang term specifically because it doesn’t exist. 

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