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David Mamet -- and his bleeped obscenities -- on ‘The Simpsons’

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David Mamet -- our country’s playwright laureate of profane macho talk -- put in a brief vocal performance on ‘The Simpsons’ on Sunday, playing himself as a television sitcom writer. Mamet’s screen time amounted to less than a minute and consisted of exactly two lines, but he still managed to poke fun of himself and his own affinity for four-letter words.

In Sunday’s episode, Homer Simpson becomes obsessed with the ‘80s sitcom ‘Thicker Than Waters,’ a ‘Growing Pains’-ish family show that has been resurrected on basic cable. During an ‘E! True Hollywood Story’ segment about making the show, Mamet appears as a writer who has to bear the wrath of the show’s arrogant leading man, Digby Sheridan.

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‘Crap! Total crap,’ shouts Sheridan while reading a script. ‘You, writer, what’s your name?’

‘Umm... David Mamet.’

‘Well, Mr. Mamet, why don’t you #@!@# learn how to #@#$@ write a @!@#! script?’

‘#@!#@... I could use that,’ replies the playwright to the actor’s tirade. Mamet then scribbles the opening to ‘Glengarry Glen Ross,’ his obscenity-laden drama about desperate real estate agents that won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for drama.

Though his claim to fame is his plays, Mamet has put in considerable time as a film and television writer in Hollywood, most recently on the CBS series ‘The Unit.’

In Sunday’s episode of ‘The Simpsons,’ all of the obscenities have been bleeped out. But if you lip-read the characters, you can see that they are saying a certain word that begins with the letter F.

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-- David Ng

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