Inappropriate Jokes That Were Cut From Movies

The Santa Clause is one of the most beloved and perennially popular holiday comedies of the last 30 years, in part because it tries really hard to have something for everyone. Yes, at heart it's a family comedy with lots of magic and screwball comedy thrown in for the kids, but it's also got a handful of somewhat mature gags thrown in for the adults in the room. Over the course of the film viewers will find fat jokes, sex jokes, and all manner of other adult-oriented humor that kids won't get until they're a little older. That said, one such joke was apparently just too much for the whole family to handle.

One of the recurring gags in the film is Scott Calvin's intense dislike of his ex-wife's new husband Neal. He never lets up on the Neal jokes, or the jokes about Neal's family. In the theatrical version of the film, this included a moment in which Scott's ex Laura hands him a piece of paper with Neal's mother's phone number on it. Scott quips that the number is "1-800-SPANK-ME," which led to some kids actually dialing it up when they saw the film at home. It turns out that was actually a real sex line, so Disney cut the joke from future releases.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is an animated superhero adventure that takes advantage of a multiversal concept to introduce a tremendous ensemble of characters that all carry the Spider-Man mantle in some form. Each of these characters gained their own following when the film was released, but perhaps its biggest scene stealer turned out to be Spider-Ham, a cartoon pig version of Spider-Man voiced by John Mulaney. Spider-Ham, real name Peter Porker, won over audiences everywhere thanks to his frequent quips and cartoon mannerisms, but at least one of his rapid-fire jokes had to be cut even though everyone agreed it was funny.

Near the end of the film, as Miles Morales is suffering a crisis of confidence, Spider-Ham has a rare serious moment in which he explains to the young hero that all of the Spider-Verse heroes have lost someone. According to Sony Pictures executive Tom Rotham, though, Spider-Ham originally broke the seriousness with a joke, quipping that his Uncle Frankfurter was "electrocuted, and it smelled so good."

According to Rothman, the joke absolutely worked in test runs of the film, but the filmmakers ultimately decided the quip was "throwing off the energy" of the moment, and cut it.

Blazing Saddles is one of the greatest comedies of all time in part because of the sense it creates that just about anything could happen within its runtime. Writer/director Mel Brooks seemed to take every possible opportunity for a joke, and he didn't shy away from gags about sex or race or even farting, which was a bit of a novelty at the time the film was made. Even Brooks has his limits, though, and that meant one particularly racy joke ended up on the cutting room floor despite the director having final cut in his contract.

As Brooks recounted, the scene involved Sheriff Bart and Lili von Shtupp sharing a romantic moment in her dressing room in which she blows out the candles, casting the scene into darkness. With the screen still dark, Lili asks "Is it true what they say about your people?" while moaning suggestively. Bart then replies, "I hate to disillusion you, ma'am, but you're sucking on my arm."

"That's a bit further than I should go," Brooks later said of the scene.

It's common practice for a film's marketing team to use footage in trailers that doesn't actually end up in the final cut, or at least to alter the footage in such a way that spoilers are reduced. We've seen it happen so often at this point that we've come to understand that sometimes even the funniest moments from movie trailers won't make it into the final product.

Zombieland: Double Tap became part of this long tradition of cutting jokes featured in trailers from the final film when viewers noticed that a particular quip from the film's promotional materials was absent in the theatrical release. The joke in question is dropped in the middle of the gang's visit to the White House, when Tallahassee picks up a cigar, and the others tease him that the cigars have probably been in the House since "the Clinton administration." The joke is a reference to Clinton's infamous affair while in office, which included some... let's say creative uses for cigars. Whether the joke was deemed not funny enough, too political, or both, it ended up on the cutting room floor.

Disney's live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast features a number of expansions on the mythology of the original film. It's still the story of a beautiful young woman who falls in love with a Beast cursed to live in a castle with his many servants transformed into household objects, but this time around we learn a little bit more about how the curse works. This means the film gets to answer some lingering questions, including the matter of whether or not every single object in the castle is actually a living thing. The answer to that question is no, but the film almost made one particular object all too alive in a way that might have made people uncomfortable.

In one scene deleted from the finished film, Josh Gad's character LeFou escapes into a bathroom of the castle, only to find a talking toilet waiting for him. In a later deleted scene, after the curse is broken and all the possessed objects in the castle have become human again, LeFou complains that he smells something horrible. He then finds "Monsieur Toilette," now human but still reeking from all those years as a literal toilet, who then hurries away to brush his teeth. It might be something a lot of Beauty and the Beast fans have thought about, but it's not necessarily something we needed to see onscreen.