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cut the bit entirely from its cable recycling of the roast. But in the more than three years
since, I have often reflected upon Mr. Gottfried's mesmerizing performance. At a terrible
time it was an incongruous but welcome gift. He was inviting us to once again let loose.

I bring up that night now because I've seen "The Aristocrats," a new documentary inspired
in part by Mr. Gottfried's strange triumph. Unveiled in January at Sundance, it's coming to
a theater near some of you this summer. (It could be the first movie to get an NC-17
rating for sex and nudity not depicted on screen.) But I also bring up that night for the
shadow it casts on a culture that is now caught in the vise of the government war against
"indecency." The chill cast by that war is taking new casualties each day, and with each
one, the commissars of censorship are emboldened to extend their reach. When even the
expletives of our soldiers in Iraq are censored on a public television documentary, Mr.
Gottfried's unchecked indecency seems to belong to another age.

The latest scheme for broadening that censorship arrived the week after the Oscar show
was reduced to colorless piffle on network television. Ted Stevens, the powerful chairman
of the Senate Commerce Committee, pronounced himself sick of "four-letter words with
participles" on cable and satellite television. "I think we have the same power to deal with
cable as over the air," he said, promising to carry the fight all the way to the Supreme
Court. Never mind that anyone can keep pay TV at bay by not purchasing it, and that any
parent who does subscribe can click on foolproof blocking devices to censor any channel.
Senator Stevens's point is to intimidate MTV, Comedy Central, the satellite radio
purveyors of Howard Stern and countless others from this moment on, whether he
ultimately succeeds in exerting seemingly unconstitutional power over them or not.

If you can see only one of the shows that he wants to banish or launder, let me
recommend the series that probably has more four-letter words, with or without
participles, than any in TV history. That would be "Deadwood" on HBO. Its linguistic gait
befits its chapter of American history, the story of a gold-rush mining camp in the Dakota
Territory of the late 1870's. "Deadwood" is the back story of a joke like "The Aristocrats"
and of everything else that is joyously vulgar in American culture and that our new
Puritans want to stamp out. It's the ur-text of Vegas and hip-hop and pulp fiction. It
captures with Boschian relish what freedom, by turns cruel and comic and exhilarating,
looked and sounded like at full throttle in frontier America before anyone got around to
building churches or a government.

Its creator is David Milch, a former Yale fraternity brother of George W. Bush and the
onetime protégé of Robert Penn Warren, whose 1946 novel "All the King's Men" upends
bowdlerized fairy tales about American politics just as "Deadwood" dismantles
Hollywood's old sanitized Westerns. As Mr. Milch says in an interview on the DVD of the
first "Deadwood" season: "It's very well documented that the obscenity of the West was
striking, and that the obscenity of mining camps was unbelievable." There was "a
tremendous energy to the language," he adds, but the reason this language never surfaced
in movie Westerns during the genre's heyday was the Hays production code. For some 30
years starting in 1934, Hollywood's self-censorship strictures kept even married couples in
separate beds on screen.

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