Sex is easily the bigger hot button. Which is why Adult Swim doesn't get fanservice heavy cartoons. The sex in Family Guy and Robot Chicken is probably about as far as they want to push that line. Holkimcardie1 brought up a good example for Metalocalypse.
Violence on the other hand can get to ridiculous levels and pass a TV-MA and sometimes even TV-14-V.
The other one that might be a problem is fecal matter. Characters can vomit up the whazoo and they can also take massive dumps as long as you don't see a lot of the actual fecal matter but otherwise monkies throwing crap is what we've seen so far regarding fecal matter. In comparsion I recall an episode of South Park showing a teacher with runs so bad that they propelled them into the air and made a mess all over.
Language is an odd thing. They muted instance of "Jesus" in "sweet zombie Jesus" on Futurama but that was a few years ago but off the top of my head I don't remember utterances of "Jesus" or "God" as an explitive but maybe I'm not paying enough attention. It seems like anything flies except S-bombs and F-bombs unbleeped. The only time they go unbleeped is when somebody bleeps up such as that recent episode of China, IL. Which would mean Archer would get quite a few more bleeps on Adult Swim but I think that would be the only difference. Maybe they'd have some qualms with the amount of sex or tastefully covered nudity. They say at least some racial slurs but maybe not all of them.
Those are the comedy standards more or less. Just from looking at the shows they air and how they air them it's easy to see why someone would assume the anime standards are stricter. Some words that might not be bleeped for a comedy may have been bleeped in Durarara, it's hard to tell. They generally avoid fanservice anime but they did have Code Geass and still have Bleach which have quite a bit of fanservice. That's probably their limit though and while I appreciate that they feel they don't need to air... smut, they are shooting themselves in the foot by not airing shows with more fanservice to keep the horny young adults interested. They can get away with a lot in violence as Trinity Blood, FMA: Brotherhood and Ghost in the Shell prove but maybe not the ultraviolence of Baccano where a boys hand is shredded by using the moment of the train pushing his hand against the train tracks, that same boy is shot point blank and is spalltered all over a room, some guy's face gets punched to a bloody pulp and other such violent scenes occur. I think they could pull it off with a disclaimer though. There are of course more violent shows that Baccano, they probably could not air Hellsing for instance. I'm not sure whether or not they could potentially run Deadman Wonderland given in the first episode all but one kid in an entire class is murdered violently. Violence towards children and women is a much bigger issue with the S&P than violence toward adults.
Adult Swim can probably push pretty far with violence in anime but some of the most violent anime are all the ones with a lot of partial nudity and other forms of fanservice and that takes them out of the running pretty quick, High School of the Dead comes to mind.
HELPeR for the TOONAMI, Mobile Suit Gundam, Dragon Ball Z, Harvey Birdman and Perfect Hair Forever boards. Feel free to ask me anything on those topics.
sketch only puts the arrogant whiney punks in their place... sort of like batman, except on the {AS} boards - THECZAROFGNAR
Sketch, should we make sure it's imprinted on your grave stone "He felt very strongly that Bleach belonged on Toonami!" - .hack-SIGN_John
"We aknowledged that Toonami is cooler than us... and they aknowledged that we're full of ****." [adult swim]
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