Changing standards of decency, perhaps driven downward by the Internet, mean that I can report something here that I couldn’t have written in the newspaper a few years ago: The Jonas Brothers next film project is called “Walter the Farting Dog.”

The comedy about a family that inherits a flatulent canine, set to begin production next spring, is based on a bestselling series of kids book by William Kotzwinkle and Glenn Murray.

It’s no surprise that the producers are Bobby and Peter Farrelly, who gave the world such lowbrow entertainment as “Dumb & Dumber”; but it’s remarkable that the wholesome Jonases (Kevin, Joe, Nick and non-singing sibling Frankie) would embrace a project with the word “farting” in the title.

Maybe it’s the legacy of Bart Simpson. Words that were once considered indecent now are not only used on broadcast television, they have crept into titles. My colleague, Post-Dispatch TV critic Gail Pennington, expected to hear a lot of complaints that a new network show is titled “Dance Your Ass Off,” but the protest letters never materialized.

Maybe with explicit content so readily available on cable and the Internet, most people aren’t bothered by words that are merely cheeky or euphemistic.  It turns out that the heavy fines the FCC has recently levied for ”obscene” broadcasts stemmed from coordinated protest campaigns that represented a miniscule percentage of viewers.

Execpt for hateful name-calling, I think that the growing tolerance for the way ordinary people speak is generally a good thing. Many “swear words” are just lower-class versions of biological terms, and when the FCC allows the technical terms but penalizes the vernacular, it’s a sly kind of discrimination.

And really, who’s fooled when the broadcast-TV edit of “Snakes on a Plane” includes Samuel L. Jackson proclaiming “I have had it with these monkey-fighting snakes on this Monday-to-Friday plane”?

"Jonas Brothers: the 3-D Concert Experience" was released on home video Tuesday. Although the brothers sang as cherubs in the recent "Night at the Museum" sequel, "Walter the Farting Dog" will be their first foray into big-screen acting.