Longtime band director Thomas G. Everett said that at last year’s meeting, the band also decided to focus on ensuring member involvement in writing the scripts to ensure that a broad audience would be comfortable with the jokes.

“The sensitive period we’re going through, I think, isn’t just with people in leadership positions or adults,” Everett said. “Students are seeing that what they say does have influence and consequences, and what one individual may sense does not represent Harvard University or the band as a whole.”

“At one time people didn’t offer much of their concern when they had that gut feeling of ‘Hmm, I don’t feel comfortable with that,’ but I think this is changing.”

Everett said Harvard administrators had frequently chastised band members for their program choices in the 1970s and 80s. After a 1983 football game in which the band joked about the deaths of Marines in Lebanon and the shooting down of Korean Airlines Flight 007, then-Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III began requiring members to submit their scripts ahead of time for approval.

Now, Associate Dean of the College David P. Illingworth ’71 reviews each script with Roberts on Friday mornings but, by that point, students have already cut most of the potentially offensive jokes.

In writing for the Brown show, which was based on spin-offs of the popular television show “American Idol,” for example, the band chose to discard one proposed spoof because members wanted to be more sensitive in the wake of the Columbia incident.

In the joke, which did not mention the sex scandal, the Church had decided to sponsor “Catholic Idol: the Search for Piety.”

“We decided that in that particular week, with tensions as high as they were, that the risks of a joke that mentioned Catholicism outweighed its comedic value,” Roberts said.

Krych said he thought that while a “couple people are disappointed,” few are angry when a joke doesn’t get past the student or administration reviewers.

And members said the annual Yale game will be a notable exception to the policy of fewer attacks on other schools.

“We’re still going to make fun of Yale. We’re still going to have plenty of anti-Yale hate,” Krych said. “But we’re not necessarily every year going to pound the same traditional stereotypes about rednecks from Ithaca going to Cornell.”

—Staff writer Elisabeth S. Theodore can be reached at theodore@fas.harvard.edu.