As creator of Two and a Half Men, the CSI of sitcomland, one might assume Chuck Lorre has his run of the store, especially with his batting average boosted by newbie geek-com The Big Bang Theory.

But PVR users who pressed pause on Lorre’s recent credits-­
concluding “vanity cards” — think of Family Ties’ “sit Ubu sit” kicker — saw that his standard freeze-frame rants on both shows were about being censored by CBS. In fact, the Big Bang card was axed altogether and simply read: “Well, wouldn’t ya know it. Just two episodes back from the strike and I’ve already managed to write a vanity card that is completely unacceptable to the good folks at CBS… Please know that my aim was only to provoke a bit of gaiety through the judicious use of a little thing I like to call ‘the truth.’ Unfortunately, in the television business, the truth rarely sets anyone free. More often than not, it just pisses them off.”

The original card, posted on www.chucklorre.com, explained a throwaway gag about a pedophile priest had to have a salutation changed from “father” to a non-denominational “chaplain” despite the fact that, Lorre argued, “several billion dollars in punitive damage payments established a reasonable link between priests and diddled kids.”

A poke around Lorre’s website found other censorship-related cards decrying “a culture that is more comfortable showing a dead naked body than a live one” and lambasting the US Federal Communications Commissions’s fixation on sex but not violence.

“I suppose you might quibble with [risqué content] if you had an unconscious agenda to use mass media to create a fear-based, blood-thirsty, war-happy culture that is addicted to the adrenaline rush provided by graphic images of violence and death while simultaneously imbedding everyone with feelings of shame and self-­loathing in order to foster obsessive-­
­compulsive consumerism, not to mention brisk drug and alcohol sales,” he snarked. “But thankfully, that’s not the case.”

Of course, Lorre’s gripes are mere potshots from the sidelines compared to Rupert Murdoch’s recent bombshells. Yes, that Rupert Murdoch. In 2003, the FCC slammed Fox with a record-breaking $1.2 million fine because long-forgotten reality show Married By America showed pixilated, whipped cream-covered breasts — and three whole people complained.

Fox lawyers got it reduced to $91,000 but then last week said, “fuck it,” refusing to pay on principle because the fine is “arbitrary and capricious, inconsistent with precedent, and patently unconstitutional.”

Fox is also heading to the Supreme Court to fight the FCC over celebrity swearing. Under the auspices of the hilariously named “Bono Doctrine” (after U2’s singer said winning a Golden Globe was “really fucking brilliant”) the FCC determined “fleeting expletives” uttered by Cher and Nicole Richie at the Billboard Awards were obscene. 

An appeals court disagreed, arguing the FCC’s vague rules create “an undue chilling effect on free speech.” It will now become the Supreme Court’s first look at broadcast “decency” since 1978’s Pacifica case, which initially empowered FCC censors after George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words” routine aired on radio. 

Of course, the FCC isn’t backing down. Just last February, they upheld another $1.2 million morality fine against ABC because a woman’s bare ass was visible in a 2003 episode of NYPD Blue.

But after years of being cowed by increasingly draconian crackdowns post-Janet Jackson’s Superboob scandal in 2004 — which CBS is still appealing — Dubya’s impending departure has emboldened the entertainment industry to fight FCC censorship (even crotchety 60 Minutes commentator Andy Rooney recently dismissed the language controversy as “silly”).

An election year is usually ripe for culture war–stoking, but as McCain and Obama both seem relatively reasonable —Hillary Clinton, however, has long attacked videogames to establish her “family values” bona fides — there’s hope the US government may eventually stop prying into the living rooms of the nation. 

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