Family guy is one of my favourite pieces of post-modern text. There are many ways in which it is identifiable as being post-modern.
One feature of Family Guy that makes it post modern is the bricolage that it uses. There have been suggestions that Seth McFarland (the creator of Family Guy) has taken a lot of inspiration for the characters from past animations, for example the family dog Brian, bears resemblance to the famous character “Snoopy” in that he participates in human activities and also his general appearance.
The episodes are usually non-linear narrative. This is demonstrated in each episode there are numerous comedic flash backs to previous events in the lives of the characters. They are usually set off when one of the characters says a line similar to “this is worse than the time…” After this line there is a flashback to when something has happened in the past. They sometimes contain twisted cartoon representations of famous people in comedic situations, personifications of objects such as clouds talking to one another, or situations which are dragged out over a reasonable amount of time to make them awkward and make the audience almost cringe, which amplifies the humour.
The sitcom is heavily based around inter-textuality, examples of which are often seen in flashbacks or sometimes on the family’s television. An example of this is the episode which features the program “Jackass” – where Johnny Knoxville is seen to take a shotgun blast to the face, and then dance around laughing and shouting in pain with a partially revealed skull. Whilst this is a highly entertaining example of pastiche (another feature of a post-modern text) it is highly ridiculous situation, which would never be plausible, as it would almost definitely result in death or serious injury rather than giggles and moderate pain. This playfulness with realism is another post-modern convention.
Another example of the many Intertextual and pastiche references seen in Family Guy is the feature length film “Blue Harvest” Which is a Family Guy take on the Star Wars films. The name came from the fake working title used to hide the 1982 production of Star Wars VI: Return Of The Jedi, which, again, enhances its intertextuality. It features the characters from the episodes starring as the many characters from Star Wars, for example Stewie playing Darth Vader, Lois playing Princess Leia, Peter as Hans Solo and Chris as Luke Skywalker. More fun is poked at star wars by the suggested paedophilic character Herbert playing Obi-Wan-Kenobi.
The decline of the meta-narrative is also prominent in Family Guy; frequent criticism is made about Christianity, Buddhism, and other religions. Examples of this are when Jesus comes to dinner, and when “the super devil” (a devil riding a flying motorbike with a jar of marmalade which forced people to commit adultery). This is then used to make fun of politicians when a picture of George Bush sharing a beer with the ‘super devil’ is seen. Making fun of politicians and other influential people such as Bill Gates is frequent in Family Guy.
In Conclusion, Family Guy is a hilarious post-modern text in many ways, it’s constant inter-textual references, playfulness with realism, confusions over time and space and bricolage are all features that can be described as post-modern and set it aside from some of the other family based cartoon sitcoms.
Dan Groombridge
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