Rumors surfaced Thursday that show staff were madly editing the pilot of Brickleberry, an animated series about park rangers on which Tosh is an executive producer and voice actor, so that it would be free of rape jokes by Friday's premier at Comic-Con. But the finished pilot did in fact feature such a joke: Tosh's character, a young talking bear named Molloy, is in fact raped by a man who lures him into his trailer with the promise of junk food. In one scene, the other characters actually catch the man in the act of raping Molloy — it's presented pretty graphically, for a cartoon.
Tosh didn't appear at the screening, and Brickleberry co-creator Waco O'Guin wouldn't comment on whether the pilot had been edited. He did tell BuzzFeed Shift that his team wasn't concerned about the recent controversy surrounding Tosh.
The audience at the premier — relatively mixed in gender, with some children as well as adults — didn't seem concerned either. A pre-recorded video of Tosh was met with cheers, and questions asked by audience members were generally adoring. Asked one, "is Tosh as funny in real life as he is on the show?"
Despite what clearly happens to Molloy, the word "rape" isn't uttered in the show. When Molloy meets his attacker, he asks, suspiciously, "You aren't going to fuck me, are you?" (the word "fuck" was bleeped out at the screening). And his attacker is referred to as a "bearfucker," not a "bear-raper." Without more knowledge of the editing process, it's hard to know if this was the original dialogue or a change.
In other ways, the pilot seemed to strive for maximum offensiveness. It included jokes about the Ku Klux Klan, post-traumatic stress disorder, blackface, gender non-conformity (see clip below), and an amputee child. Still, Tosh's base may be unperturbed by all this. Told that Tosh had been under fire for making offensive jokes recently, one longtime fan responded, "That's what he does."
