This week, I’m going to try and look at Family Guy in a different way from the usual Simpsons-lite angle that I normally hold on the show. A while ago, someone in the comments – I can’t remember precisely who, so speak up if it was you – mentioned that they look at Family Guy as an animated comic strip. That intrigued me, and tonight was a pretty good episode to use that lens, since there were plenty of cutaways, and a lot of scenes in the main plot only lasted around a minute. That seemed the perfect length for a couple panels of a comic strip, with a usual setup, complication, and punch line dynamic.
First, I have a note on my personal interests in newspaper comics. I love Calvin and Hobbes, The Far Side, and I get a kick out of Zits. I dressed up as Hobbes for Halloween several years, even acting out several of the strips with my oldest friend from elementary school, and somewhere in my childhood home is the outline of a screenplay based on Zits from when I was about twelve. Foxtrot makes me chuckle every now and again; Doonesbury always reminds me of my father, in a good way; Boondocks always strikes me as trying too hard; Garfield is the mindless Top 40 of the funny pages; Peanuts isn’t really for me, but I appreciate its pastoral nature, and think of it as the Robert Frost of comic strips. There’s a general summary of some major comics that I enjoy, but Family Guy as a comic strip would, in my mind, be something like a more vulgar mix of Garfield and Dilbert.
So how is watching Family Guy different if you look at it as a series of comic strips? First, I’d think about in terms of how you treat a comic strip. I can remember cutting out daily strips that I particularly enjoyed, but that happened very rarely. If I didn’t think the funnies lived up to their nickname, I did what everyone does with a newspaper. I threw it away. Well, recycled it, but still. Then I read the strip again the next day, as if the previous one hadn’t existed. That’s how I tried to watch this episode, paying some attention to the Griffins in Amish country, but mostly isolating each joke setup, figuring out what I liked, and then moving on to the next one. Family Guy isn’t the kind of comedy that keeps throwing joke after joke on top of each other in consecutive lines It mostly constructs situations that last about a minute, which is a strength if those jokes are thought out, but dangerous if they’re lazy and sloppy. Tonight, I was surprised by just how well the comic strip approach helped my outlook on the show. It was easier to ignore the jokes that didn’t work, and a few good setups buoyed this episode enough to keep it above everything else this season aside from the Brian/Stewie pilot time-traveling from a few weeks ago.
The main plot actually did quite a good job of mirroring the usual Simpsons trope of starting in one place, going to another, and then taking a left turn into the actual central plot of the episode. First, Peter finds himself too heavy to ride roller coasters at Six Flags, so he uses a girdle to make himself appear thin, but causes a coaster disaster. That could be an episode right there, but instead that turns into Peter deciding to go on a diet. The rice cake bit seemed over-the-top already thanks to Peter’s horrific retching in response to very little taste, but after that overlong joke finished, we got the requisite racist joke of the night. The ancient Asian stereotype and “ricey ricey rice no one likes rice cakes” line in the cutaway stacked racism on top of a bad joke in the worst way.