On any internet forum you can see some guy with a Stewie Griffin avatar thinking he is the funniest, most edgy motherfucker on the planet. Even in real life you see people wearing family guy shirts. These people are easy to classify, too; I’ve noticed that both groups are never actually funny people, and they are compensating by showing us that they like a “funny” TV show. Now, the show itself is constructed for these people, and the nature of the show’s reliance on cutaway jokes makes it ideal for people looking funny by easily quoting those context-less joke. So the lazy, plotless writing and undeveloped characters gets the show a niche audience, win-win!
Talk to these average Family Guy fans and you’ll usually hear that what they like best about the show is that it refers to things they saw when they were growing up, and they’re just tickled to find that someone else remembers it, but that’s lazy comedy writing: there’s no perspective on the stuff Family Guy is referencing, no actual joke beyond the reference itself. A golden rule of bad comedy is that if people recognize the reference, they’ll laugh even if the joke’s not funny. Family Guy goes beyond that; it doesn’t even try to have a joke half the time – it just assumes that making a pop culture reference is inherently funny.
Going back to undeveloped characters, this show’s characters have completely inconsistent personalities. I am not even talking about between seasons, I am talking about episodes, and even scenes. If you watch more than a couple episodes, this is painfully evident. Peter is supposed to be the archetypical father unaware of his own stupidity, but if some vapid joke calls for it, he is suddenly supposed to be the reasonable and intelligent sounding. Lois is the worst offender. She is supposed to be Peter’s foil, who retains realistic reactions to situations. This is 70% of the time. Other times the writers decide for Lois to be inexplicably just as stupid or cartoony as Peter, such as the episode where she dresses like Mystique to seduce the Jewish kid that likes meg. So in this regard, it’s like the writing staff hasn’t even been to middle school to understand the concept of characterization. They entire cast is just a vessel for interchangeable joke after joke.
An annoying thing about Family Guy is that it presents itself as “cutting-edge” but is actually gutless. Its “offensive” jokes are neatly calculated to make sure they don’t actually risk offending their fanbase; instead they make jokes that would be offensive to the kinds of people who don’t watch the show – sexual prudes, for example. Any genuinely cutting-edge comedy will risk offending people who watch it; but how is a penis joke supposed to offend the average college student? The answer is, it’s not supposed to offend anybody who watches the show; it’s supposed to give college kids a smug sense of superiority in believing that someone else might theoretically be offended by that penis joke.
This goes hand in hand with the trendy liberalism that McFarlane tries to hammer into the fanbase. Oh, and they are putting Limbaugh on the show in a desperate attempt to make headlines and pretend to look at things from the other side. As if some blustering buffoon of an entertainer actually represents thinking non-liberals, but that’s an issue of media strawmen. Apparently the episode is that Brian the dog, MacFarlane’s liberal mouthpiece in the show, decides that since Obama was elected, leftists have nothing to complain about. LOL WUT?
Now, even I will admit that Family Guy is occasionally funny. But the thing is, it is never, EVER during one of those mind-numbing cutaway jokes.
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