Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! HTDE: The Breakfast Rule
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Mar 4, 2026 
Keith Houston, author and punctuation expert, explains how new marks are proposed and how the Unicode Consortium decides what becomes standard. The conversation also covers the origin of a newsroom’s “Breakfast Rule” for gross jokes and a heated debate over a colonoscopy bit. Short, witty takes on editing, punctuation design, and broadcast boundaries.
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The Breakfast Rule For Broadcast Editing
- The Breakfast Rule is a simple editorial test: if a joke would gross you out while eating breakfast, cut it.
- Wait Wait uses it to judge vivid bodily imagery, like the rejected line about “salad coming out of your butt.”
Cutting A Colonoscopy Joke For Being Too Visual
- A taped segment about colonoscopies ran, but a final joke about “salad coming out of your butt” was cut for being too visual.
- Lorna White said the image was too vivid; Peter Sagal and editors debated then removed it.
Removing Content Can Amplify Its Presence
- Censoring a phrase can paradoxically add it to the permanent archive because of re-edits and repeats.
- The hosts joked that removing one mention led to ten more archived instances of the phrase.