I never got these two jokes on Family Guy: Referring to Rick Astley as a gay guy and Doug Henning hoping he doesn’t get AIDS. What exactly are the jokes supposed to be?
For the Rick Astley bit, the scene is a parody of BTTF where a very white Marty appropriates a Chuck Berry song.
The joke is that a very straight Brian is appropriating a Rick Astley song. It’s not really a joke about Rick Astley, and in 2007 nobody really knew who Rick Astley was (it was this one gag that re-launched him into the pop culture sphere). IMO Seth McFarlane must have picked the gag first, a song to go with it, and then considered whether or not Rick Astley was actually gay not at all.
I don’t think Brian’s implying that Astley is gay, since Rick has to be informed of the song’s existence by his cousin Marvin. FWIW, if I were hearing the song for the first time, I might assume it was written by a gay guy too, simply because the lyrics are so tender and sensitive. It’s also definitely intended to be sung with a disco beat, like in a gay nightclub. (Now I can’t stop thinking about that scene where Vito is outed in The Sopranos. 
)
I’d need a lot more context to explain the Doug Henning joke. Did he in fact get AIDS back in the '80s or something?
I’m guessing the Doug Henning joke is a reference to this incident:
Justine Sacco provoked an internet storm when she tweeted: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white.”
Nope. That incident appears to have happened over 5 years after the Family Guy episode aired.
So I’m still looking for an explanation to the Henning joke. And the explanations to the Astley joke were weak as well.
The core of the joke is that they’re imitating the Johnny B. Goode scene from Back to the Future, except that instead of something as culturally iconic as that song, they picked a mediocre '80s pop number that few people (aside from '80s-obsessed nerds like Seth MacFarlane) remembered at the time.
I don’t think there’s anything deeper to calling Astley gay than it just being typical Family Guy random “you don’t remember this celebrity so let’s make something up about them”, a la Stewie calling Bruce Jenner “an elegant beautiful Dutch woman” well over a decade before the Kardashians became culturally relevant and Bruce became Caitlyn, or Bill Cosby beating up a midget, or Robert Loggia being obsessed with repeating his own name out loud.
This may or may not factor into the joke, but Doug Hennig died of liver cancer, which was sometimes used as cover for someone who had AIDS. That was the case with Rock Hudson.
Said another way, the Rick Astley joke is that it takes the iconic “Johnny B. Goode” scene from Back to the Future and swaps in (bait and switch) “Never Gonna Give You Up,” which is about the least revolutionary, gloriously uncool song you could possibly use for a scene that’s supposed to feel like the birth of rock history. So instead of Brian channeling some culture-shattering musical genius, he’s basically rickrolling the past. And Brian introducing it as a “song by a gay guy” just adds one more layer of dumb, offhand Family Guy nonsense for flavor.
Just to bake the implicit explicit, presumably that scene is supposed to take place in 1985, further tying it in to Back to the Future. As far as the gay thing goes, I think it’s meant in the sense of “that’s so gay” as opposed to referring to actual homosexuality. As someone who was in high school in the early early 90s and still enjoyed listening to Astley’s music at the time, even though it had only been a few years since it was popular, I definitely got the “that’s gay” comments directed at me for liking his music. The implication was that the reason I shouldn’t like it was because his music was old and no longer cool, not that I shouldn’t like it because Astley was homosexual.
ETA: The way “cousin Marvin” describes the music as being “mediocre and generic” emphasizes that gay is being used in the sense of a pejorative for something uncool rather than as a slur against a gay person.
Disagree. I think if that was the case Brian would have said, “Here’s a gay song” rather than “here’s a song by a gay guy”.
Tibby got it right.
I don’t remember any actual rumors that Doug Henning was gay, but it certainly was a joke back in the day due to his flamboyant clothes, the general regard for magic among manly men, and photos like this:
Exactly. Henning’s look and mannerisms definitely pinged on people’s “gaydars,” even if he was, in fact, straight. Couple that with the fact that he died young, and at a time when a lot of gay men, especially in the entertainment industry, were still closeted, and “he died of AIDS” is an easy punchline.
Bill Cosby using a mind-control device on people. Probably a coincidence, though MacFarlane has been known to hint at rumors.
I wonder if the Foo Fighter incident mentioned here had anything to do with the “gay” reference:
The Story of… ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ by Rick Astley - Smooth