I don’t know how else to phrase this but hear me out
Is Family Guy funny? 98% of the time, no. There are a couple genuinely funny bits tossed in here and there but the average episode of Family Guy is some weird, uninteresting plot that keeps getting interrupted every 2 minutes with some cutaway gag that usually involves some form of bigotry/violence against a minority group or a crude joke no one over the age of 15 finds funny. Sometimes there will be a sort of funny gag about how your local pizza place makes the worst “salad” or that one bit about Pat Tillman which was really funny, but I can’t imagine anyone older than the age of 16 saying “yeah, time to turn on the TV and watch Family Guy!”
Literally who is the target audience for this? This show has been going on for nearly a quarter century now and stopped being good after like three years and yet it still keeps getting renewed. I don’t know anyone who watches it. I couldn’t even imagine what a Family Guy fan would even look like. Like, if I walked in on someone sitting on the couch at their house and they were unironically tuned into Family Guy, I’d be thinking “holy shit is this guy for real?”. But apparently, considering how much air time and ratings this show gets, there are millions of people out there watching what’s basically the equivalent of a dollar store joke book written by your racist uncle that nobody wants to invite to thanksgiving. Everyone knows about it, it’s not funny, nobody yet also millions watch it? I can make Family Guy references and people get what I’m talking about because we’ve all fucking seen it and nobody likes it. It’s just this white noise TV show that you just use to fill space. It might as well just a blank screen that read [Insert TV program here] because it just feels like filler. You can just put Family Guy in literally anything and it somehow just… fits? It’s the TV show that you put on when no one actually wants to watch it. Remember like 6 years ago when “they added Peter Griffin to Fortnite” was a dumb meme? It was a dumb meme, and then they made it real because after it was funny, then it became real and now it’s just like. Yep. They got Peter Griffin in Fortnite"
Family Guy isn’t funny, but it’s deeply funny in the metasense because of it’s omnipresence and renown, clear attempt at humor, yet complete lack of anything approaching substance to say nor any coherent overarching message. Forget the average Family Guy viewer, who writes this shit. I genuinely can’t imagine anyone who makes this show actually wants to write more Family guy, they just do it because they’re Family Guy writers and that’s what pays the bills. Didn’t we have a post here like 3 days ago saying that Patrick Warburton and his mom really want to quit the show? It’s even more incongruous because there’s even a handful of times where they TRY to have some kind of moving message or deeper themes, like the one episode where Brian and Stewie are trapped in the bank vault all night and Brian opens up about his suicidality and alcoholism and there’s either very few or no cutaway gags. But of course, it’s Family Guy so they can’t actually do something interesting or good without fucking it up so of course they write in a joke about how “haha brian has to like stewie’s poop off his ass”
I don’t know how to put it into words other than I’m laughing at a clown that isn’t funny. It’s trying to be funny, it isn’t, and THAT’S what’s funny. Come to think of it, that’s basically what I’ve always thought about Big Chungus and why I ran that as a pfp/username here for like 3 years. It’s the comedic equivalent to “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”. “This is not a joke”, yet it clearly presents as one
As a result, all I can do whenever I see Peter Griffin in literally anything is just laugh because it’s just not funny. I can make myself cackle by doing a bad Peter Griffin impression saying “Hey Lois” because shitposting about Family Guy is just what the fucking writing staff of that show does
The Simpsons is like the less edgy version of this, South Park the slightly more edgy version, and Spongebob Squarepants the kid-friendly version. And I have a gut feeling that in ten years’ time people will be asking “who are the millions of people still watching Rick and Morty?”, which will mark its ascent into the pantheon of American cartoons that can literally never be cancelled.
deleted by creator
Agreed, I would say that having a good first few seasons is a necessary ingredient to create the “American Cartoon that Never Gets Cancelled” that we see in my examples. Early Spongebob holds up the best out of the four because it’s timeless, while Family Guy/South Park/The Simpsons are all pretty heavily rooted in the era they were created in, but all of them were definitely beloved by their original audience in their original context.
SpongeBob seasons 1-4 are goated. They changed the animation style and flanderized all the characters, got rid of all the good writers. I can’t go that long without making a SpongeBob reference or joke because it’s just so on point every time lmao.
Totally agree. I’ve watched a few episodes of NewBob with my younger siblings and it’s painfully bad, but there’s a reason why spongebob memes are all from those first few seasons and are still so prevalent.