As I've mentioned before, I think the right's attempt to conflate gay marriage and abortion is both wrong and deceptive, certainly as a constitutional matter. And I'm coming to believe this false analogy might also be wrong as a cultural matter.
Fox's " Family Guy " is easily the most wildly satiric, boundary-crossing show on network television. It is sometimes compared to "The Simpsons," but no matter how far out "The Simpsons" gets, it always swings back to television's essential sentimentality; "Family Guy" will have none of that. "South Park" is more caustic, still, but "Family Guy" sets the network standard for how far comedy can go.
And that's pretty far. For the unitiated, one year-old baby Stewie is gay (and has made several aggressive attempts to murder his mother), next-door neighbor Quagmire is a sex-addicted airline pilot, and any attempt to chronicle the carnal lives of husband and wife Peter and Lois would not be publishable in most newspapers. And that's not to mention the old pedophile who lives across the street, with his eternal affection for very underage boys.
Amidst all that explicitly sexual content is a lot of homosexuality, which Fox seems to have had no problem with. But abortion is where Fox draws the line. The show's inspired creator, the divine Seth MacFarlane, finally decided to do a show about abortion (35 years after "Maude" did, with no intervening encounters), and the network wouldn't air it. The best they'd agree to do is include it on a DVD of the series.
Even reading a description of the episode, and watching the three darkly riotous clips read by the cast, shows that abortion is in a completely different class from homosexuality -- it is still incendiary as the subject of humor.
That is as telling as anything I can think of. In fact, it may clarify what distinguishes the right from the rest of the country. With sitcoms like "Ellen" and "Will & Grace" happily ensconced in syndication, most of the nation is comfortable enough with homosexuality to laugh about it and with us. It's not a touchy issue for the most part, except among a shrinking number of cranks and malcontents. In contrast, abortion is something that really is, always, deeply serious and off-limits to jokes.
To be fair, a lot of lesbians and gay men can tend to be ill-humored, particularly when our rights are at stake. I'm that way, myself, sometimes. But it should comfort us all that there is room in the culture for kidding around about homosexuality. It shows a healthy acceptance.
7 Comments for “Famly Guy: Just Kidding”
posted by Rarian Rakista on
Us progressive pro-lifers do exist and many of us believe that if you can’t laugh about something you can’t do anything about it. I have worked for the better part of a decade for gay rights including marriage and pro-life issues. Thee is even PLAGAL the pro-life alliance of gays and lesbians. It would be nice if you did not lump us all with the conservative reactionaries at Fox. Thank you.
posted by David Link on
Rarian Rakista, that is a very fair point. In fact, it’s close to the point I was trying to make, and perhaps falling short. Abortion is always a hard moral issue by its very nature. Homosexuality not only doesn’t need to be a hard moral issue, looked at rightly, it shouldn’t be any harder than heterosexuality — at least at its core. Like heterosexuality, it can be immoral in certain cases, but also like heterosexuality, it is, for most people, a supremely human expression of love and pleasure. Once people view homosexuality as being on the same moral plane as heterosexuality, it is capable of being laughed at in equal terms — and there isn’t anyone on earth who doesn’t find something worth laughing at in human sexuality.
Abortion is radically different. The attempts to view gay rights and abortion as legally and culturally similar shows us, more than anything, how such people misperceive homosexuality’s moral nature. Abortion is no laughing matter. That’s not true of homosexuality.
posted by Quo on
Daivd Link wrote,
“With sitcoms like “Ellen” and “Will & Grace” happily ensconced in syndication, most of the nation is comfortable enough with homosexuality to laugh about it and with us. It’s not a touchy issue for the most part, except among a shrinking number of cranks and malcontents. In contrast, abortion is something that really is, always, deeply serious and off-limits to jokes.”
You’re kidding yourself. The nation is laughing at you, not with you, and there is less acceptance than you think.
posted by zeng on
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posted by James on
~”it should comfort us all that there is room in the culture for kidding around about homosexuality. It shows a healthy acceptance.” ~ David Link
I very much agree. I’ve long believed that while it is important to have homosexual characters portrayed in a prominent, positive light in the media, it is actually more helpful to have us portrayed neutrally as minor aspects. I despise how often homosexual characters in movies are portrayed stereotypically and often quite dysfunctionally (see Stewie). Alcoholics, drug-abusers, promiscuous, over-sexed, violent, unstable, even sociopathic at times. Rare are we just your average everyguy/everygal who just so happens to be homosexually oriented. Larger society needs to see us for who most of us actually are. And most of us are not superheroes nor sociopaths. In fact, most of us could be described as ordinary. Not unlike any other demographic.
Speaking of vulgar comedy. I recently watched the movie ‘Tropic Thunder’. I found the movie to be hilarious and quite soulless for lack of a better description. In other words, beyond irreverent. One thing that I really liked about the movie, (spoiler alert) other than the exotic casting, was their usage of a gay character. He was in many respects the least dysfunctional of the many characters of the movie, and yet he was also gay (and closeted). And, while his fellow adventurers had a typical macho over-reaction to this revelation, it was henceforth a non-issue for the movie. He was a guy (portrayed as a hedonistic ladies’ man) who actually wanted to be with someone special. That someone special that he just happened to want to be with in particular but didn’t have the courage to ask (which we all can relate to) was another guy (something obviously not everyone can relate to). At the end of the movie we find out that after his adventure he did manage at some point to get up the courage to ask this special guy, Lance. His character was even permitted to give a non-threatening hug to his same-sex date. What I liked about this was how much it wasn’t a big deal in the movie and how he wasn’t an easy target of scorn or ridicule.
These little things, I believe, are an important sign of progress.
posted by Throbert McGee on
Let it be noted that South Park on Comedy Central has done some brutally scathing treatments of the “it’s just a blob of cells” pro-choicers who maintain that stigmatizing elective abortion, and stigmatizing women who have totally elective abortions, and stigmatizing the doctors who perform elective abortions, is more or less just as draconian as criminalizing abortion altogether. And South Park did this YEARS before Family Guy.
posted by roger on
“Family Guy” creator Seth Green thinks it’s funny to mock Ann Frank and her family being captured by the Nazis. If that’s your idea of wonderful transgressive humor, you’re welcome to it.