News of Maine’s crackdown on vanity plates deemed inappropriate by the state reached national headlines this week, including in a Thursday night segment on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.”
For several years, people had been able to put nearly any combination of letters and numbers on their Maine license plates after a 2015 law relaxed rules on what a plate could display. But the state is now enforcing new rules to eliminate obscenities on vanity plates, and this year it recalled 274 plates it deemed inappropriate, according to the Associated Press.
On a “Daily Show” segment, guest host Marlon Wayans played a clip from a Fox 23 news broadcast about a Maine man who lost an appeal to the state to keep his “LUVTOFU” license plate. Peter Starostecki, a vegan, said the plate is a protest against eating meat and animal products, but it could also be read as referencing a sexual act.
In the segment, which begins at the 4:10 mark, Wayans asks correspondent Michael Kosta for his reaction to Maine’s crackdown.
“As you’d expect, I summer in Maine and just take a look at some of my plates that were rejected for no reason,” Kosta said, before displaying several fake Maine license plates that were “rejected” by the state, including a plate that could be declaring his love for chicken or for male genitalia.
“I’m not a vegan, so I’m not about to have LUVTOFU, but that’s why I went with this,” he said. “I’m a chicken guy. White meat, dark meat, I love it all.”