No, I feel the same way. Not to turn this thread into yet another Futurama vs. Family Guy pissing contest, but a great many of Family Guy’s jokes just relied on the viewer recognizing a reference to some other TV show. After a while, it just lost that appeal for me. Futurama’s cleverness and the fact that I cared about the characters made it a show I still enjoy watching.
It will hold liquid, true. The joke is that in topology theory, a Klein bottle has only one side, and therefore has no volume. (That’s why the good folks at Acme have a nice graduated measure decal that goes from zero all the way up to zero.)
Hey, Fark picked up my Slashdot story. I feel like such a celebrity.
[sub]P.S. Thanks fluid. You’re my hero.[/sub]
Comparing (ick) Family Guy to Arrested Development?!?
Them’s fightin’ words!!!
I wouldn’t call AD absurdist comedy. AD relies on very complex, interwoven storylines and usually very subtle (and dark) humor. There are many words I would use to describe Family Guy (lame, sophomoric, low-brow). Subtle is not one of them. 
So mods stepped in to fix coding in another user’s message, but I have a Frankenmessage that’s a mix of a quote of someone else and what I was writing. I reported it and mentioned it later in the thread, and yet none of the mods have actually dealt with it.
:: sigh ::
Subtle?
Tobias’ Mary Poppins act to get close to his daughter is “subtle?” “I just got off the steamer from Blackstool!” 'We squirt a tube of frosting down out throat before we take our medication… Lalalala!"
Buster having sex with the Roomba that replaced the maid he was having sex with is subtle?
A father that talks about the famous brothers from the Bible, “Goofus and Gallant,” isn’t absurdist?
You realize that you could take most of the gags in Arrested Development and drop them into Family Guy without anyone blinking, right? They have very similar sensibilities, as far as humour is concerned: dark, over-the-top absurdism and shock – the main difference is that one has a larger ensemble, is live action, serialized, and narrated, and the other one has a baby with a football-shaped head.
AD is capable of subtlety and complexity that Family Guy is not, but yeah, it’s not always like that. Yesterday’s episode had several jokes about GOB putting a dove in his pants (ending with a boner joke, of course).
“AD” is more consistently absurdist than Family Guy. From Family Guy I can immediately think of examples of satire (Church of the Fonz) and wit (“she looks like someone pulled silly putty over their knee!”) and loads of parody, but almost all the memorable gags from “AD” are absurdist.
That’s not a bad thing. Even though the concept sounds simple, it takes talent to come up with a competent absurdist gag. I can easily have a straight-faced conversation about teacher’s unions and randomly crow “cock-a-doodle-doo” while doing so, but that wouldn’t be as funny as a guy at a PTA meeting screaming “The PTA has disbanded!” and leaping out of the window, only to immediately leap gracefully back in when the PTA head tells him he’s mistaken.
I saw the article I quoted from is now being quoted on a few other sites and discussion boards.
friedo’s post can be found in Google News if you googlenews Futurama.
Maybe we can help them along in deciding to bring it back.
Jim