3. The Humour
Ill be honest; I dont mind off-colour humour too much. And Family Guy is nothing if not short of blue humour. But sometimes the shows humour transcends off-colour and decides to be full on offensive for the sake of it. Lets look at the infrequent Michael J. Fox gags as an example. Every Michael J. Fox joke in Family Guy is to do with him having Parkinsons Disease. Taking the piss out of public figures is the bedrock of satire, but the point of what makes such piss-taking satirical is making fun of people for them either doing something stupid, or being inept at their job. Family Guys Michael J. Fox jokes dont fill either of those criteria. Theyre making fun of him for no other reason than having a degenerative and incurable medical condition. Thats not being satirical, thats being an arsehole. And of course, even when not targeting specific public figures, the humour just goes for full-on tastelessness such as the sequence in Brian And Stewie that features Brian eating Stewies faeces, licking his (Stewies) anus clean, and then eating Stewies vomit. The writers try to play it for laughs but it never evolves beyond being disgusting. Another negative aspect of Family Guys humour is the overly long gags that are used to either get away with not having enough story to fill an episode such as Peters fights with Ernie the Giant Chicken which always last around five minutes (a quarter of each episodes runtime), are astoundingly elaborate, and have only once had any sort of context within an episode. The other type of overly long gag is one that focuses on dialogue that is either recorded (e.g. Clevelands birthday message to Peter in Baby You Knock Me Out) or takes place in a separate room from the animation (Peter and Chriss discussions about Meg in FOX-y Lady) that are done solely to save on animation. Its not funny, its just lazy. If you can do such elaborate animation in the Giant Chicken fight scenes, then you can easily do something other than write a scene specifically that you only have to animate blinking for a whole minute. But hey, like that one-off character in South Park said At least it doesnt get all preachy and up its ass with messages...