Profanity is not a single construct. Plotting each host's rate of fuck against his rate of bathroom vocabulary (shit, piss, poo, fart, toilet, butt and relatives) reveals two orthogonal axes of disgust. Three hosts cluster along a conventional American diagonal. One does not.

Longitudinal data suggest the dialects are not stable. Indexed to each host's first full year on the show, Gavin's F-bomb rate has nearly tripled, while Andrew's has fallen by more than half. Whether this is a direct transfer of profanity from one man to another remains the subject of ongoing research.

In episode 13 Andrew agreed, or did not agree, to eat a pencil. The matter has been litigated (episodes 17–18, a kangaroo court with Eric presiding), read aloud as a closing sting for the better part of a hundred episodes (“once again, Andrew does not eat the pencil”), escalated to a guest, and carried across a complete rebrand. Figure 3 tracks the cumulative on-air pressure.

Following the Arrested Development convention, each running bit is drawn as a row and each mention as a mark. Some bits die young. The Tuxedo refused to. Gurpler went from a made-up colour in episode 22 to a drinking vessel to plush merchandise, and is now the show's most-mentioned invented word (569 mentions and counting).

How long can four men hold it? Measuring from 90 seconds in (to skip the cold open), I recorded the moment each episode first reached for bathroom vocabulary. The answer, in the median case, is under five minutes. In 42 episodes it took less than two.

I counted how often each host says each other host's name. Normalised for how much each man talks, one name dominates every row it's allowed into. Qualitative review suggests the name is most often delivered with a rising intonation, as in “Gavin, what?”, or as a complete sentence on its own. Even Nick, who is barely on the mic, spends his name-drops mostly on Gavin.

Each host has a verbal fingerprint distinctive enough to identify him in the dark. Eric, who runs the drafts, says “hang on” at a rate the rest of the panel cannot approach. Gavin proposes hypotheticals. Geoff says “anyway” when he has lost the thread, which is often. Nick, with the least airtime on record, apologises the most.

Before the rebrand, hot dogs came up at a respectable 1.2 mentions per episode. Afterwards: 4.4. The Regulation era introduced a hot dog registry, a race, a lifetime hot dog counter and the air cannon question. I do not believe the trend is reversible.

Normalising bathroom vocabulary by runtime identifies the dirtiest episodes on record. Four of the top six come from the first 25 episodes, when the show was still called F**kface and felt it had something to prove. The record holder is episode 3, which was titled, with admirable honesty, Set Sail For Ass.

Andrew defines himself by declaration. The following is a complete catalogue of what he has, on the record, claimed to be a guy of. Two identities (sauce, relaxation) were declared three times each. The collection includes an accountability guy, an honorable guy and a trustworthy guy, none of whom has eaten the pencil.

Career statistics for each subject, collected in a format I believe is familiar to the study population.