Family Guy and the Fringe Principle Reexamination

My regular readers will remember my made up Fringe Principle from one of my earlier posts about the Grammy Awards and Lady Gaga. Basically, the Fringe Principle states that just because a line is able to be crossed doesn't mean that the line should in fact be crossed. In the earlier post I discussed how Lady Gaga's increasingly crazy antics have led to a degradation of quality in musical performance in recent years, and that eventually I would love it if she revealed that her entire career had been some Borat style character study to see how far she could take the world of pop culture before it finally called her on her insanity.

Tonight I had a discussion with one of my very good friends, let's call him Patrick. We were watching Family Guy and discussing how we felt that, in recent years, the show had sacrificed a lot of its cutting edge "I can't believe they just did that!" humor in favor of more time filling "I can't believe they're still doing that!" humor. Neither of us find modern Family Guy to be anywhere near as funny as the originals.

To give you a particularly timely example. In this weekend's most recent episode, Herbert (the old pedophile with a thing for Chris) and another older gentleman get into a physical confrontation. For the better part of ten minutes (almost a full third of the episode), the audience is expected to sit and watch the slow motion old man fight where a "blow," consisting of little more than a push on the face and a small amount of balance lost, can take almost ten seconds to land. The joke pulls all of its humor, if it has any at all, from the length of time that the show drags out the bit, not from the merit of the joke itself. It's the same thing every time Peter falls and scrapes his knee.

Anyway, as a part of our discussion, Patrick mentioned how he believes that at this point in his career Seth Macfarlane must be incredibly bored with his animated empire and just be toying with just how far he can stretch the limits of humor before his audience starts pushing back.

The two thoughts seemed to go together well. Lady Gaga's imaginary quest for artistic vision and Seth Macfarlane's made up quest for comedic gold.

The problem is, both entertainers seem to be trying to reach their goals Christopher Columbus style, by circling back on their goals after running too far in the opposite direction.