MAGIC         PORK

There’s something that I’ve been afraid to admit. I know I’m not going to make friends with this post, but I’m going to come clean here. I don’t like Family Guy.

When Family Guy first came on the air, I watched an episode. I thought “this sucks” and never watched it again. I didn’t know anyone else that watched it, so I was under the assumption that others had the same opinion of it. I was therefore not at all surprised when I heard that it got canceled. Then I started to hear stuff about how it was finding an audience on DVD, and lo and behold it actually got put back on the air. There was much rejoicing. Not by me, but by the legions of fans the show apparently had. I read people posting online about how it was the funniest show on TV, some even said the funniest show EVER, how stupid Fox was for canceling it, and so on.

Family Guy is pretty edgy / controversial in its jokes so of course for all the fans, it meant that if anyone didn’t like the show it must be because they’re offended by it. Well that’s not the case at all with me. I didn’t like the show because it wasn’t funny. I started to doubt my sense of humor, which I had always thought was pretty good.

Friends would forward me video clips from the show. Some were funny, some not so. Finally I figured I’d better check the show out again and see what I missed. Maybe I just saw a bad episode.

Well I did see an episode that I would call funny, but it guest starred Norm MacDonald as the voice of the Grim Reaper, and he was the reason it was funny. So I don’t know if I can really count that one. I watched another episode, and this one I really wanted to turn off half way through but I forced myself to watch the whole loooong half hour. I then determined that I’d seen enough to make my conclusion. But just before posting this, I thought maybe I should give it one more chance, and I looked up some more clips of the show. I rated these clips on the following scale:

1. Didn’t even smile. Not at all funny.
2. Parts of it made me smile. But still not funny overall.
3. Elicited at least a chuckle. Could possibly be considered funny.
4. Outright laughter. It’s funny.
5. Sustained laughter. Hilarious. I gotta forward this to someone!

Here’s my results: Six clips rated a 2. One clip rated a 4. The other five rated a 1. I’d tell you which was the 4 but I think it’s more fun to make you guess. I will say however, that the clip was a solid 2 until right near the end.

(OK, I lied a little. One of the clips was very long and was a 1 except for one tiny part of it that made me laugh out loud. It just didn’t seem fair to rate it a 4 because of that, so I rated it a 2. Also, in the spirit of full disclosure, I must say that almost all of the clips that I’ve seen online involving the character Quagmire were funny.)

I think I don’t like Family Guy for the same reason I don’t like to watch Robin Williams do stand-up. He rattles off a million jokes that have no relevance to anything he was talking about. They’re completely random. Maybe 20% of the time he’ll hit on something funny but it’s bound to happen just by mere chance. The other 80% of the time he’s not funny and I just want to slap the guy and tell him the shut up. In other words, sitting through the 80% crap just to get the 20% funny isn’t worth it for me. Yes, you just switched to an Ed Sullivan impersonation. I get it. Not funny.

So just when I was thinking something must be wrong with me that I’m not liking this show, the most recent two-part episode of South Park was shown. In it, everyone is up in arms about an episode of Family Guy that’s going to show a cartoon Muhammad. There’s a lot going on in the episode which I won’t get into here, but the point is the writers of South Park completely trash Family Guy. They even show some fake Family Guy clips that the South Park writers made that are spot-on. Those could 100% be from a Family Guy episode. They’re basically saying that it would be a cinch for them to write Family Guy because the writing is so bad.

So thank you Trey Parker and Matt Stone for allowing me to realize there’s nothing wrong with me for not liking Family Guy.

Side note: South Park had an episode years ago that featured Muhammad as part of a group called the Super Best Friends, a spoof on the DC Comics cartoon Super Friends. The group also had other religious figures like Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, and Joseph Smith (now that’s funny!). I forgot all about that when I did my post about the Danish cartoon.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 16th, 2006 at 11:38 pm and is filed under tv. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.