I figure it’s not too often tha you find out how depraved you are. I watched last nights The Family Guy. It was a take-off on Willy Wonka, here’s an episode guide if you missed it. Though I found most of the humor harmless, I was kind of dusturbed that the the song the Chumbawumbas sing to Joe made me laugh. Anybody else feel that way about the episode, or any other for that matter?
Sort of related. I just started watching Adult Swim, I had no idea there were sdo many episodes of the Family Guy. Does adult Swim have the rights to all of them?
Family Guy makes me laugh more than anything that’s ever been on TV—Seinfeld, the Simpsons, Monty Python, you name it.
The slight sense of shame you feel I experience as exhiliration: I love it that the people who make this show are so ballsy, so eager to lay into every sacred cow they possibly can. If you’re new to Family Guy and keep watching, you’ll experience that quasi-shame many, many times again.
AFAIK, Cartoon Network has all the rights to the currently produced episodes. Family Guy is going back into production any day now, and whether Cartoon Network will have a stake in those episodes too remains to be seen.
just shows how divergent tastes can be. i’ve always thought Family Guy to be on par with the opinion most people now have of the 2004 Superbowl Halftime special – a loathsome spectacle that determinedly digs down to the LCD level and excavates harder to find an even lower level to sink to. call me a prude, but i’ve generally failed to see any hilarity in playing up how crude, boorish, selfish or drunken a person can possibly be.
and so in keeping with a place that is ostensibly about battling ignorance. personally, i’ve never seen the connection between glorifying obnoxious behavior and increasing the general level of enlightenment for humanity. but that must just be me again.
About half my laughter during each episode comes from “Oh! That is so WRONG! BAHAHAHAHA!”
What I love about it is (and I think McFarlane even said this on a commentary) that it’s not like these shows that try to be edgy and then fall back on a lame “moral” or the character learning a valuable lesson. Peter NEVER learns a valuable lesson. There’s no very special moments. It never pretends to be uplifting.
Well, that eliminates most comedy, including quite a bit of Shakespeare.
[QUOTE=lachesis]
call me a prude, but i’ve generally failed to see any hilarity in playing up how crude, boorish, selfish or drunken a person can possibly be.
QUOTE]
well, you hit the heart of my whole objection to Family Guy, GMRyujin. Peter never moves off his self-centered spot, doesn’t reveal any (in his case) DEEPLY hidden worth-while traits or redeeming features. Homer Simpson has many of the same flaws as Peter, but within his core is buried someone who does care about his family and wants to do right by them-- but is incapable of getting there on his own unless someone steers him. as i see Peter’s character, he really doesn’t give a crap about anything but what he wants, and only does the decent thing when faced with major penalties (and good behavior lasts only as long as his feet are held to the metaphorical fire).
that’s not a personality i want to associate with, even in comics.
too bad we’re not allowed to import images, mouthbreather… i know a great smiley that literally rolls back and forth across the screen, laughing hysterically.
Chumba wumba gobbledy goo
life isn’t fair, it’s sad but it’s true
Chumba wumba gobbledy gee
When your poor legs are stiff as a tree
What do you do when your stuck in a chair?
Finding it hard to go up and down stairs
What do you think of the one you call God?
Isn’t his absence slight-ly odd? (maybe he’s forgotten you)
Chumba wumba gobbledy gorse
Count yourself you’re not a horse
They would turn you into dog food
or to chumba wumba gobbledy glue.
lachesis, FG isn’t supposed to be character-driven comedy. It doesn’t deal with serious issues, it has no continuity, and it plays havoc with the laws of time and space. It’s much closer to something like The Young Ones than to the Simpsons, which was (until recently*) as upstanding a family sitcom as you’d find anywhere.
I think the appeal of Family Guy is age-dependent to an extent. I’m nearly Seth MacFarlane’s age, and like him spent my formative years watching a lot of mediocre to-bad tv, including the ghastly family sitcoms of the Reagan era to which Family Guy is largely a response (and which provided Peter with everything he seems to know about being a parent). Maybe you need to have childhood memories of Family Ties and Silver Spoons to really hook into FG’s wavelength; I don’t know.
You’re on the wrong track when you say the show “glorifies” Peter’s stupidity. It doesn’t at all; much of the show’s funniest bits are when Peter gets his well-earned comeuppance, usually from the essentially intelligent and decent Brian or Lois. It’s because Peter is so wrong about everything that he’s so funny; like Beavis and Butt-head (another show about stupidity that many mistook for a glorification of stupidity), you laugh more at the main character than with him.
*(The Simpsons has really ceased to be a character-driven show and now tries to be more of a parody of the sitcom form itself.)
The problem with Peter Griffin was that he was just incredibly dull. There was no conflict, internal or external: he just did whatever he pleased and the story changed to accomodate him. And where’s the comedy in that? Behaving outrageously when there’s no tension has all the impact of Janet Jackson exposing her boobs in a nudist colony.
Add to this the fact that the wife and the kids were also dull and most of the stories were lame, and you had a mediocre show, no matter how funny some of the blackout gags were.
The only saving graces were the baby and the dog. That’s because they did have conflicts, both with the outside world and with each other. The wise move would have been to make the show about them. (Come to think of it, they eventually did. Didn’t the series end with an episode about them going off on a Bob Hope/Bing Crosby style adventure?)
Big ol’ fat disclaimer: I’ve never seen Family Guy.
But I have a 15-year old son, so that sort of counts. And the kid loves the show. More than Malcolm in the Middle, more than The Simpsons. And I think it’s the gleeful, unrepentant badness in it that appeals to him. Teenagers know we all have the seeds of selfish, self-centered, misogynistic, glutinous, etc. behaviour in us. They know we fight against these things, usually successfully.
To see a character happily indulging in these things is awfully liberating. The best humor lies in mutual recognition of what goes unsaid, and there it is in this show.
There’s probably also a little bit of “geez - there’s somebody I’m a better person than” involved, too.
My kid’s a very open, accepting, curious, and friendly person with a self-deprecating sense of humor and an interestingly skewed view of things. *Watching the Family Guy * hasn’t lowered him in any way, and certainly hasn’t lowered him in my estimation.
Of course, now I’m really curious . . . I might just have to watch it with him some time. . .
Count me in as another fan of the show but I’m not an ass-scratching, mouth-breathing, nose-picker like lachesis would seem to think I am.
One can laugh at depravity and still have morals.
I don’t have that twinge of guilt when I’m laughing hysterically at something like that song. I think the laughter is more, “Oh my God! I can’t believe they did that” rather than “Cool, they’re making fun of handicapped people”.
Then you’re really gonna hate this Family Guy joke (my fav):
Quagmire hitting on woman at a bar.
Quagmire: “Are you a Sagittarius?”
Woman (bored): “No.”
Quagmire: “A Capricorn?”
Woman: “No.”
Quagmire: “Well, I know you’re not a Virgo!”
Woman punches him. Quagmire falls off of stool.
Quagmire: “Hey, from down here you look like a Pisces!”
