Family Guy: Blue Harvest
“And wouldn’t you just know it, in the next scene the kid’s sitting there playing poker!” And then the appreciative guffaw, settled by the sip of strong, lunchtime tea. I’d look up from Silas Marner in confusion, chewing ruminatively on my meat paste sandwiches.
“Sorry, what?”
“The kid! He’s playing poker!” His eyes gleamed merrily through his prescription glasses at the very thought of it.
“But I don’t get it. How’s it funny?” And the old chap, love him and bless him, would sigh in tolerant resignation of my habitual stupidity.
“It’s a kid. Playing poker.”
It’s a CAT! Wearing a MONOCLE! It’s an OLD LADY! Listening to RAP! It’s a NUN! Driving a MONSTER TRUCK! It’s a BABY! Dressed as DARTH VADER! It would be fashionable just to blame the fashion, but there’s no denying it; people still like Family Guy, long, long after it has jumped the shark. They’re not pretending – well, not all of them – and they’re not stupid – well, not… umm… hmm… – they just actually enjoy watching scenes from Star Wars re-enacted by a fictional fat guy and his talking dog. It makes them happy. And who is going to piss on that?
Who indeed?
Maybe I’m not the one to say anything. I laughed at Monty Python and the Holy Grail in Lego, and prefer Angryalien.com’s pastiches to most of the actual movies. Yes, perhaps all humour essentially boils down to “It’s an X! In the unlikely situation of Y!” And we should be pleased to find in ourselves this common ground, all of us liking different versions of the same thing. But, like all formulae and universal laws, it creeps me out, the tidying up of human nature, broompiling and rationalising for efficiency savings. Sooner or later, all we are will be pushed back inside the chalk outline of our humanity, the cut-out-and-keep, colour-it-yourself paper doll from the back of a cornflakes box; and there will be as much space between what we are and what we can be as between a cookie and a cutter. So fuck Family Guy and its comedic equations, fuck high-concept Hollywood and its marketing executives, pissing out the boundaries of human experience; let’s colour outside the lines a little.