How to Do Reference Comedy: The Simpsons vs Family Guy
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- Опубліковано 22 тра 2024
- After my recent video on the Worst Simpsons Episode, I thought it would be nice to look at something the Simpsons does well! So, the question for this video is how does the Simpsons incorporated pop culture references into their comedy, and how does this compare to what we see in the typical comedy of Family Guy? Hope you all enjoy!
Credit to the UA-cam channel School of Wok, from whom I got the clips of Chinese food being cooked
00:00 Exhibit A
09:57 Making References Work
20:40 Bonus Point - Фільми й анімація
When you don't understand a reference in the Simpsons you think, "That was funny, feels like it was referencing something"
When you don't understand a Family Guy reference, it's just, "I don't get that reference"
Thankfully, the character will usually explain the joke in painstaking detail just in case
Remember the Polamer All Fruit ad bit? That was painful.
Or sometimes you have Family Guy trace/rotoscope over the original scene they’re referencing like in their Star Wars episodes or their Little House on the prairie intro.
@@austriacontinente154typical family guy fan defending garbage
@@austriacontinente154exactly like how is explaining a joke completely deadpan funny I just don’t get it
Skinner unhumorously explaining a joke as the punchline is so in character for him that you don't need to know the reference to find it funny. There's intent and reason in choosing those two characters to deliver that joke. That's what makes the Simpsons so much funnier.
but in order to know he is butchering the punchline you still need to know what it is referencing. you need to know theres a comedy routine where a guy asks who is on first and its someone called who
@@ThePurpleCheesecakeZebra The joke isn't the butchering of the punchline, though. It's Skinner being Skinner and sucking all the intended comedy out of the situation. You don't need to actually understand the reference because that's not where the comedy is placed.
Was my joke not funny? No, its the children who are wrong.
Even if you do not know the characters Skinner and Chalmers, it is obvious that it is two unfunny people trying and failing to be funny in public. It is funny, it is relatable, and it works even in a vacuum.
It's the fact that even if you don't know what it's referencing, you know it's referencing something funny, and you understand what the original content was enough to make the joke that much funnier. That's clever!
Growing up with The Simpsons I've lost count of how many times I've watched an old movie and realized that a memorable gag was actually a reference.
I watched The Music Man for the first time a few years ago. I had no idea that the Monorail episode was referencing it wholesale.
Same here! The number of times I assumed something was a Simpsons reference when it was actually a joke about source material I wasn't aware of it too high!
Still happens to this day when watching old movies or seeing clips from gameshows from the 80s on youtube.
My first time watching Twin Peaks and seeing "this suit burns better" blew my mind
I don't hate modern Simpsons, but if there is something that I really dislike about it, it's how pop culture references are handled.
The same thing of ''I've lost count of how many times I've watched an old movie and realized that a memorable gag was actually a reference'' happened to me, but when watching newer episodes, there's suddenly weirdly out of place/forced gags and I end up thinking ''Is this a reference to some current media/celebrity that I don't know, isn't it?''.
It's so on-the-nose that if you don't know what the gag is referencing, it's not even funny by itself, unlike older episode's homages.
my favourite part of the joke is chalmers calling skinner a sexless freak, it's so out of pocket
Wanted to like this but the likes are at 69 and it fits with the joke
@@lioedevon42756 more likes and the comment’s going in the trash.
And if you know the characters really well, you realize Chalmers said that out of anger, and you realize he's been carrying that weapon around in his back pocket for years which lends additional evidence to the (unsurprising) conclusion that Super Nintendo Chalmers is, in fact, an asshole.
You know damn well Chalmers is hoping kids start calling Seymour that
Almost as good as when Agnes calls Seymour a malaysian transexual.
"Also, you know what they call cheese in Paris?"
"what do they call it?"
"Le fromage"
"Le fromage. Maaan, it's like those french guys got a whole n'other language!"
Source: earthworm jim
“Man, what do they call the Big Mac?
“Well, it’s still called the Big Mac, but they call it LE Big Mac.”
The only French joke that actually makes us laugh
Yeah
Lmao
There's another layer to the Simpsons rendition of the joke, which is the relatable childhood experience for most Americans in which your school admin faculty tries to be funny, and it falls completely awkward and flat.
Oh yes, those school assemblies where they hired a PG-13 Gallagher to make jokes and tell you to not smoke.
Family guy just steals the joke instead of honoring it
Originality is slowly dying. Many people have made this joke. Technically the simpsons stole the joke first.
@@stealemerald919 family guy just butchers references at least Simpsons uses it creativity
@@user-it8re8jv2l The thing is: Humor doesnt have limits. People do. So what could be funny to you might be unfunny to me. For example, I see the Owl and Costello bit (on its own) as an interesting take an an otherwise drained joke. But with the Simpsons interpretation He's essentially just explaining the punchline and with a dry ass voice. Nothin against you. Just trying to make a point.
@@stealemerald919 family guy literally put Conway Twitty songs for a joke
@@user-it8re8jv2l Whats wrong with conway twitty?
Early Family Guy cutaways were a lot funnier because they usually tied more into the characters. "This is like the time I..." or "This is worse than the time I..." now they don't even bother having the characters involved.
Yeah my general take is that seasons 1-3 were solid, 4-5 it got a bit hit and miss, 6-7 the misses started to really get in the way of enjoying the show, and season 8 and up it's just a show that's worth mindlessly watching for the occasional joke that actually lands
@kcreviews8161 It is a shame they've killed most of the character-centric jokes they have. The Simpsons has a diverse cast of unique characters but Family Guy feels like it became so restricted in the later seasons. They made reference humor so much of their bread and butter they decided they didn't need their own recurring characters anymore.
@@kcreviews8161that except, FG really didn’t go completely off the rails until seasons 14-16. the old 4:3 format pisses me off.
Modern FG: “Wow this is a bad thing. Kevin Bacon in a pork factory. Thank you”
@@GenMilleXial "4:3 format pisses me off" excuse me what? So you can't watch anything in full screen?
"Imagine if you'd never heard of CinemaSins" Oh I wish!
tHiS sCeNe CoNtAiNs nO LaP dAnCe
[attractive woman] Is nOt mY gIrLfRiEnD
@@Zorothegallade-gg7zg Truly the peak of "comedy" and not just personal views
Ironically, CinemaWINS took Cinemasin's format wholesale (but thoroughly acknowledges that) and flipped it completely to positives instead of negatives, and honeslty? It's truly infinitely better- both more feel-good AND funnier. Ironic since this video is trying to say that would be a bad thing, when in reality that has literally happened and improved what it was based on massively. But that's because Cinemawins is actually insightful in his observations and actually talented at weaving comedy through the format, as opposed to Cinemasins which is just very, very lazy and cynical. Kinda like Family Guy.
@@Stathio Yeah he actually talks about the movie instead of making a dick joke every 10 seconds.
I think was really funny about Family Guy's blatant plagiarism is how the staff is deeply insecure about it. The Simpsons made a joke at their expense once, calling Peter Griffin "Plagiarismo" and Stan Smith "Plagiarismo di Plagiarismo". The staff was so offended by this blink and you miss it joke that they dedicated an entire segment of an episode to having Quagmire rape Marge and kill the whole family in response.
What a rational, good nature joke, amirite guys? And the cherry on top was how in a DVD commentary, Seth McFarlane was downright confused at how neither the audience nor the network liked that "joke". As if it couldn't be more obvious that the entire writing crew is creatively and emotionally bankrupt.
not shocked considering they have a weird beef with Bob's Burgers and constantly insult it.
@@BackwardsCourage i'm pretty sure outside of providing his voice Seth doesnt work on the show anymore.
George Bush Sr. said Bart Simpson was a bad influence and they proceeded to write an entire episode making fun of him and having Homer Simpson beat him up. And it's hilarious.
@@BackwardsCourage
This is oddly bad, would you please tell me how rape and mass murder is somehow funny. Pls mr internet man, explain how it is funny for an offhand joke to be responded with rape and voilence. I am sure the more you try to explain it the worse it gets. But you know you grabbed the rope and now you can tie the knot.
@@christianlangdon3766 Yeah, sure... It's called cartoons. Do you watch The Simpsons or South Park and think everything they do in there is real? I would hate to bring up the countless times of horrible shit that goes on in South Park? It's just a cartoon. Stop taking every single thing you see so seriously.
It always kind of feels like family guy has this weird distaste for whatever it’s referencing if that makes sense.
Yes, which in some ways is even more apparent when you look at some of the full parodies Family Guy has done (the most well known being Star Wars), since it's pretty obvious they do respect the material in those.
It does feel like Family Guy in particular doesn't respect other comedy. It's like they think only their sort of comedy is funny.
@@ChrisCooper312 Bingo! Its been harder for me to enjoy the early seasons now because it’s like the ghost of Christmas yet to come a vision of an evil future
I remember Daft Punk fans getting pissed off at the show because they did a cutaway joke that shit on how Daft Punk made their music. It's techno club music, it's going to be repetitious. The joke is even more distasteful when you learn that Seth MacFarlane actively dislikes most modern music and prefers swing/show-tunes music from Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, etc., so the joke has a bit of a "boomer humor" vibe to it, like when the show tried to make jokes about anime, all of which weren't very funny.
@@AluminumFusion22remember how bad jokes about anime used to be in the 2000s...the same 4-5 tropes at best every time
@@AluminumFusion22 To be fair to MacFarlane, he's also willing to make fun of his preferred music, such as the ad for the "all their most bigoted hits!" Rat Pack collection. As you correctly point out, of COURSE club music is gonna be repetitious... so fans of club music should have thicker skins about jokes pointing that out. It's a valid point.
The main problem is that most Family Guy jokes aren't very clever - there's rarely a sense that they spent more than 30 seconds coming up with one. But the show is roundly popular, so I guess that says as much about us as it does about the creators.
Well here i am as a perfect example of his point as someone who didnt know shapoopi was just a whole song that already existed and now think way less of that whole scene
Me too. It really seems like a song written for Peter too.
Or even "Mister B. Double-O. Z. E."
@@yggdrasil2 wow does family guy actually have any original songs?
@@Rurike Honestly not sure.
@@Rurike not in their top 10, mostly
Not gonna lie, getting an ad mid-“HA-HA!” made the joke infinitely funnier.
I got that as well. It was hilarious
Same
Same
Bowl
in 2024 you STILL choose to allow google to feed you ads in the middle of a video?
A great example of a reference done perfectly in the Simpsons is the episode “Barthood,” an entire episode thats a reference to a film, but as someone who knows absolutely nothing about that film, the episode is just a great episode and I don’t feel the need to know the references to get the context; it uses the Simpsons characters to create a reason for the story to take place.
That's a really good example!
This can apply to a lot of the Halloween specials as well. Sure some don’t hold up as well as others, but some are fun mini-episodes on their own.
Didn't that episode end with Homer saying "Boyhood? That's what we're parodying?"
"Cape Feare" is still top tear on parody episodes
What makes that episode good was that it focuses on the characterization and interaction relationships of all the Simpsons characters first, then acknowledging it as a reference to a film of the similar name secondhand.
There was a really good Animaniacs Abbot and Costello joke where Slappy and her nephew were talking about "The Who" like the band and honestly it was so faithful to the original bit and was one of my favorite jokes in the series.
Family guy trying to be like "Check out how much funnier we are than these old comedians!" as like a bit doesn't even hold a candle.
"You sound like an owl, Skippy."
"who"
"The band on stage."
"The Band isn't on stage."
"Then who is on stage"
"Yes."
That also fits Slappy's character because she loves old-style comedy that it implies was big in her day because she's meant to be an old-fashioned cartoon character.
I came here for this! I think of this joke frequently. Three 60s bands with wacky names that I didn't know at the time, but the joke still worked.
They were at the legendary '69 Woodstock music festival where The Who and The Band played, but "Yes isn't even at this concert."
The idea of doing "Who's on First" With band names goes back quite a way pre-Animaniacs. The Credibility Gap in the late '70s had a sketch, and SCTV did their own version in '81. I remember hearing it on the Dr. Demento in the '80's, and no doubt the Animaniacs writers did as well.
As kids we were watching that episode with our mom. She absolutely died, calling it one of the funniest things she'd ever seen.
13:30 to be fair I do genuinely think that the Godfather joke actually is one of the best jokes in the series, because even if you know nothing about The Godfather or have just never seen it(like me when I first saw the clip), there's something so funny about a family who are about to drown to death with their last words being an argument on whether a movie is good or not
Yeah that is fair! Sometimes the visuals I include as b-roll aren't references I actually have a big problem with. I just needed a lot of visuals so I could switch up scenes enough to avoid the wrath of the auto-content claim system
Pretty sure the scene itself is also a reference to/stolen from The Drowning Pool (1975).
@@blurqeqoherds Huh, to be fair if the original scene isn't comedic then I'd say it's good use of it
Plus everyone has had that moment when they’re judged for not liking something everyone loves
Speaking of Family Guy jokes not being funny if you don't get the reference: In one of the more recent seasons, there's an episode focused around a series of short segments, and the framing device is that each segment is a different pilot for a possible "reboot" of Family Guy, being shown to a focus group at a mall. At one point a member of the group raises his hand and says, "Yeah, I don't really _get_ Family Guy?".
The executive running the group responds "What is there to 'get'? You just need to have been born in the '80s, but still be a teenager!".
I don't watch much Family Guy these days, but that joke has stuck with me. It feels... _remarkably_ self-aware.
They do like their self-aware jokes every now and then. I think based on the fact Seth has literally said the show should have ended over a decade ago, it seems like they're sort of past pretending they care if the show is meaningfully good
That ep was a cry for help.
@@kcreviews8161At this point they couls juat say fuck it and make it good again. American Dad got better with a new team and the will to make it interesting again
@@kcreviews8161 Correct, but they far exceed pretending to care.
Just 6 years ago:
ua-cam.com/video/Gdjfamniy5I/v-deo.htmlsi=gQ9E-3QbTyBB4NcY
Season 16, ep 7 has an entire cuttaway dedicated to a single comerical that just slaps you with the direct rip, Peter doing 4th wall live comentary with the og commercial, and THEN they do their own "parody". Just back-to-back... I honestly felt dumbfounded and kinda disgusted(?) after it all.
@@kcreviews8161 There's another episode where at the end of the episode the non-MacFarlane voiced characters roast him. Lois goes, "We get it! You watched television in the 80s!"
I can confirm the planet of the apes musical joke works because all I know about that movie is the liberty scene, and yet it is still one of my favorite jokes, ever.
The Rhyming, the costumes, the dancing as they sing 'Doctor Zeus'
I've never seen the movie yet it still greatly entertains me.
You don't need to know Rock Me Amadeus to like the Planet of the Apes musical joke.
Yes, it's a great example because it references both Planet of the Apes and "Rock me Amadeus" yet you don't have to be familiar with either of those to still find it funny.
I was allowed to watch the Simpsons starting at like 7 or 8 years old and I saw that Dr. Zeus and my dad was really surprised I had seen Planet of the Apes and I was like, huh? And my mum just said, she got that from The Simpsons
I will have you know that they in fact sing "Doctor Zaius". And I should know.
@@DrZaius3141What's wrong with me?
Family Guy also has a really bad habit of name dropping random celebrities and expecting the viewers to know who they are in order to get the joke
yea and its possible for seth and his writers to not do that i mean american dad does it sooo much better
The point about characters is so important. During the Simpsons clip I actually started laughing even before they started talking. I knew their characters well enough that I expected Seymour to flounder the joke and Chalmers to get frustrated. The anticipation contributed a lot while cutaway gags rarely have more than a line of preperation.
Cutaway gags are best when you're SUPER stoned so that you can't remember the setup by the time the punchline lands
@@ninjalectualx I think this should be added to the thesis of this video. I think this is the actual secret to Family Guy's rise to stardom.
Seth McFarlane is like one of those film bros whose whole personality revolves around the fact that they have seen media
When you put it that way, he sounds like a hipster
Kinda based
To be fair I hardly think the family guy writers want to respect the original vision Seth had for family guy when he was still writing, Despite what Seth says in public I really don’t think he wants to do Family Guy anymore, he just voices everything because it would be both weird if he didn’t and he wouldn’t have any money if he stopped.
Doug Walker has entered the chat.
Don't know how true it is but I've heard that Seth hasn't written the show since 2005. I think these lazy references in place of jokes definitely increased around then or after that. I don't think Seth is to blame. I've recently re-watched a lot of Family Guy season 1-3 and after so long I had forgotten how funny and creative the show used to be.
The big problem with Family Guy, even before it got stale, is that the jokes don’t work if you don’t get the reference. The reason why people like how the Simpsons references other media is that you can appreciate the moment even if you don’t understand it or even know if it even referenced something. Another issue with some Family Guy jokes (even back then) is that some of them are just “the kid who said it louder” rather than trying to add more to it or make it somewhat different from the joke they’re inspired from.
As much as I like Family Guy prior to Season 9 when the show became stale, there’s a reason why people prefer other shows, even Seth’s other show American Dad.
I can agree with this, because i did enjoy the Family Guy a bit more actually, but it’s because i know the reference, and i love the absurdity of it being both preformed by and ruined by an owl.
The Simpson joke may be overall better, but the gist of it just being skinner explaining the joke isn’t very funny to me. I can appreciate fully that it is in character and get a smile, but to me personally, family guy gave me more of a chukle.
@@MrUnmake
But like, that's the easiest possible joke you can make with that setup. There's zero thought put into it, and to rub salt in the would the show outright tells you as such. I get the Simpsons bit is only mildly chuckleworthy, but I fail to see how FG's is even THAT.
Honestly, I'm glad people are giving American Dad its props. It's actually a great show once it gets going past the early seasons, and it often feels like the overlooked one. Seth's performance of Stan is straight up funnier than Peter ever was, a bunch of the comic timing of his line deliveries as Stan is hilarious.
I had no frigging idea the monorail song was based on a movie. And you're right, made me not like Shipoopi anymore.
The fact that Family Guy made a referential joke to Kevin Spacey's misconduct and crimes years before anyone outside of Hollywood insiders would recognize it as a reference is just... I don't know what to make of it.
Family Guy just straight up stole the “Run like the wind” mispronunciation joke from a Treehouse of Horror episode.
Granted "Stole" it wouldn't surprise me if that is a really old joke
By far, the worst example of family guy coopting an entire scene from a movie is Peter's "You wanna hurt me?" speech in Season 7 Episide 4's "Baby Not on Board". Lois snaps at Peter for his profound incompetence, and instead of having peter give a witty retort or using it as a vehicle for the plot, they have him recite, word for word, beat for beat, a speech John Candy gives in the 1988 road movie Planes Trains and Automobiles. The worst part is 90% of the people I'm talking to when this gets brought up *dont know it's a reference* and assume its "that joke from family guy". I can't even me mad at them because usually you naturally assume that the writers wouldn't just steal an entire bit in the name of reference comedy, and without knowledge of the source material, there's no way to know.
Yeah that clip is buried somewhere in the b-roll of this video, even though I didn't make explicit verbal reference to it
I saw that movie for the first time a couple of years ago and recognized that line from Family Guy. This show is unbelievably lazy
that pisses me off because Planes, Trains & Automobiles is my favorite movie
doesn’t chris also immediately say “haha, movie references!” afterwards?
@@GribbleGobsame even a TF2 mall map references PTaA
As regards to Family Guy's referencing comedic things and it almost coming across as stealing, I have encountered many people online even in the mid-late 2000s who thought the Peanut Butter Jelly Time meme was _from_ Family Guy, not just referenced _within_ it after years of circulating on the internet. Family guy made a joke that was literally just a reference and it was mistaken by many for being Family Guy original non-sequitur humor.
Another example is that Sans in Undertale referenced a few memes circulating online at the time, such as "You're gonna have a bad time" (a South Park meme) and some of these lines are presumed to originate from that game. That comes across less badly even as a hardcore memelord because so much more of Undertale's humor _isn't_ just "DOGE" and the like.
They even sold merchandise of their stolen meme, didn't they? I once saw a crane game toy of Brian in the banana suit with his maracas recolored red for some reason; this seemed doubly bizarre to me as I believe the white "maracas" were meant to be the original banana's _hands._
Exact same thing with the "I work at Burger King / Would you like an apple pie with that? / Ding, fries are done" version of "Carol of the Bells". It seems like every year around Giftmas time, I have to tell more people than the year prior that that was its own original bit that Family Guy completely lifted wholesale, not something original to Family Guy.
@@Mitsuraga See, I hate when they do that, just repeating an entire scene from somewhere else with no actual new spin on it, simply inserting Peter or Stewie into the lead role.
I've absolutely met people who think Kool-Aid man busting through walls is a running gag made up by family guy.
The amount of people I've met who thought that the "what are those" joke originated from Black Panther or that the "Sanic" drawing originated from the Sonic movie is so disturbing. Usually its from boomers with limited internet usage, but still.
Watching The Simpsons as a kid/teen I think at least 90% of the references went over my head and I still enjoyed the show immensely. Just watching this video had me go "That was a reference?!" in the back of my head a few times.
Can confirm the Airplane! bit. After watching the clip you showed I chuckled a little bit, first time I even somewhat laughed at a family guy joke in ages, but then after revealing it was from Airplane! i absolutely just felt like they ripped it from that movie
You should definitely give Airplane! a watch if you haven't before. It is an incredible movie, one of my top 3 all time favorite movies. There's a ton of jokes in that movie that have been used in other comedies.
you're not actually laughing at Airplane!, you're laughing at Zero Hour! where that joke is originally from, almost a one to one
@@molotays True, I think watching Zero Hour! makes the Airplane! experience better, but Zero Hour! is an entirely different kind of movie altogether.
@@Alexander_Grant As mentioned in the video where the simpsons isn't referencing comedies, that's why Airplane works. The largest metajoke of Airplane is "Someone genuinely thought this was a thrilling narrative." And that's not entire joke. Still haven't even seen Zero Hour., but Airplane has other bits as well.
Watching too much Family Guy before finally properly watching Airplane! fully is a trip- Family guy straight up stole like every other joke from that movie, Seth must've been OBSESSED with it to a similar degree that he was obviously obsessed with Star Wars.
You're not gonna believe it, but I have deadass heard the exact same Chinese food joke before. Like it had the exact same components, cannibalism included, except the writer actually remembered to have the victim be Chinese. They even went the extra mile of making them Mao Zedong, so even if it's dark you don't really feel bad for anyone.
I think part of the reason people don't get that full from Chinese food is that white rice is broken down much faster by the body compared to other carbs.
In other words....Family Guy steale every joke, even the original ones
@@phillipclearman859 To be fair, it was probably a really easy joke to make in the late 80's. Hell, the whole concept of Y2K was the object of many jokes at that time.
Where did you hear that joke from, I'm curious
@@lordanubis1458 It was in the comic strip Piranha Club, which was popular i the late 80's and 90's, particularly in my home country of Sweden, even though it's actually made by an American.
I've always thought the "Hungry half an hour after Chinese food" concept originated from the fact that a lot of East Asian meals, especially cheap take-away, contain added MSG which tricks your body into thinking it has consumed protein, which is difficult to digest, when you've probably mostly eaten refined carbohydrates from white rice, which digests quickly. So your tongue and stomach tell your brain how full you are when you're actually not, and an hour later the rice and MSG have been digested and you feel hungry again. I think this is probably all kinda true to some extent but as a joke it has been played out and exaggerated for decades, often with an obviously xenophobic and racist component. I think added MSG is actually just as common if not more common in Japanese cuisine, but it didn't become associated with them in the West because there were much fewer Japanese take-away places there, especially before Sushi exploded in popularity.
The Simpsons _adds_ references _to_ humor, while Family Guy _uses_ references _as_ humor. (EDIT: Awesome, you say exactly the same thing at just past 14 min in!)
I'm just realizing how often i was just staring at the screen waiting for the cutaway to end when i was a kid watching family guy
I feel like the really disappointing thing about Family Guy's style of humour is that the writers are capable of being genuinely pretty funny. I feel like the first couple Star Wars parodies hold up decently and are at their best when they're riffing directly on the movies-- stuff like the star destroyer crew being bewildered by the order not to fire on the escape pod ('What, are they paying us by the lazer now?') and Brian telling the audience to go watch the actual Empire Strikes Back because Lando really IS wearing han's clothes in that one scene land pretty well and don't detract from the actual story.
A lot of the time Family Guy's cutaway jokes feel like they're just... there to fill runtime, because they didn't have enough episode for the episode. If anything they work better viewed out of their original context.
my friends and i have agreed for years that the best way to watch family guy is out of context clips
Like the video says, they took a serious movie to parody which forced the writers to finally write jokes
I just assumed the Trish joke was because she was slimmer, therefore less to eat
I had thought it was about the news being hourly honestly.
That's what i assumed the joke was too. Like Peter asking why they don't eat someone bigger one instead of the tiny woman.
I thought that the joke was that Peter is fat, so he would be hungry again very soon even after eating a whole person
So where I believe that it comes from is that MSG makes you crave more of it shortly after eating it. It isn’t that it doesn’t fill you up, it’s that it tricks your brain into wanting to eat again, despite you NOT actually being hungry again.
This was a big topic in the 90s, at least in North America. There were several “exposes” on the news and all of these studies about the effect of MSG. It was demonized, similar to the way that eggs and carbs were at that time.
So this is probably an age thing, as I haven’t heard anything about MSG in probably 15 years.
@@happy.time.boredom That's actually a good one, goddamn it. So many ways to take it and they just fuck it up.
Old Looney Tunes cartoons are also very good at reference comedy, to the point most of the time you can't even tell they're making a reference to something but you laugh anyways.
yeah like that bugs bunny mentioning that toothpast comercial, tho that one is obvious
Bugs Bunny, for example. He's one big reference to Clark Gable's character from a movie (even the carrot chomping), and one of his catchphrases ("of course you realize this means war") is directly lifted from Groucho Marx.
@@latviandragon2718It wasn't obvious to me (the ad is older than my parents and wasn't emitted in my country), but when I watched the clip it was very funny because of how absurd it is.
@@trevortuominen8233 And nowadays, everyone thinks carrots are a staple of a rabbit’s diet because of him.
Now if you excuse me, I’m off to go feed my hedgehog some chilli dogs.
@@ARCtheCartoonMaster And Foghorn Leghorn's really a rooster version of Kenny Delmar's Senator Claghorn character. Delmar didn't have the foresight to copyright it at a time when copyright wasn't automatic in the US, but WB did copyright Foghorn, so Delmar had to get permission from WB to use his own character.
I Love to Singa was also meant to reference The Jazz Singer, and The Dover Boys is a parody of The Rover Boys.
I loved the Family Guy "Optimus Prime is JEWISH" joke back when I first saw as "lol random."
Years later, though, I'd put the actual joke together.
You see, by being Jewish, Optimus Prime is "semitic"
SEMI-tic
Oh wow that's quite a layered joke!
Yeah… honestly, for me personally, that falls into the “Tom and Diane eating Trisha” category, where the joke works *better* when you don’t fully get it.
"SEMI-tic" is an absurd leap. You're thinking too hard - Family Guy is not above "lol random."
Spending a whole 23-minutes explaining a joke, relevantly, starting with a joke of a joke being explained, relevantly, is so amazingly meta, I would love to know that you did that, on purpose.:)
I don't know if it was exactly on purpose but I was aware of the irony throughout!
@@kcreviews8161 It was impressive, intentional or not!!:)
I had no idea shipoopi wasn't an original song. That was the one family guy clip that I thought ''ok fair enough family guy. good job on that one'' oh my god 😭
Also, fun fact: the song sung by the effeminate guys at the English football club is from an old opera called _The Sorcerer,_ by Gilbert & Sullivan, who also did _HMS Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance_ and _The Mikado_ (the last of which is where Stewie’s “little list” song originated), among several others that no-one remembers.
@@ARCtheCartoonMaster the only reason I recognize what _The HMS Pinafore_ is, is because of The Simpsons
Ever since the Seltzer and Friedberg parody films, I figured parodying something that was already funny was really just stealing. They had a Lazy Sunday parody in one of them that was the exact same joke as the original, just about a different movie.
That's one of the reasons Airplane still holds up so well. It's a parody of a serious movie from the 1950s
@@Vitorio582And it holds up even if you never seen the other films because the jokes are more centred on the tropes and premise than being based on a pre-existing film. Same with Galaxy Quest.
Don Quixote is a parody of the romantic hero genre and TMNT was a parody of gritty comics in the 1980’s.
There is a really old anthology movie called Kentucky Fried Movie that my friends and I used to love back in the early days of video rentals. Years later, I found out that one of the segments ("A Fistful of Yen") was a parody of Enter the Dragon and when I finally saw that, found it hilarious too.
"Well, see, we can make fun of the joke by... doing it... more?"
@@Vitorio582 I relate so much to the main character in that movie. I also had a drinking problem for years, luckily I was over it by the time I started school.
One piece of media that I've always thought does reference comedy well : Sesame Street. Especially the early stuff.
There are TWO separate classic Sesame Street sketches that parody "The Seventh Seal". They knew that the kids would not get the reference but the parents might. So they had to make jokes that worked on both levels.
If they had just depended on their audience of toddlers being familiar with Scandinavian art-house films about the Black Death, ... they probably would not have lasted 54 seasons.
Should this even be a debate ? The whole reason Family Guy exists is because of The Simpsons
“We act like we didn’t take a lot from The Simpsons but we took a lot from The Simpsons”
-Peter Griffin
And American Dad because of Family Guy.
@@brodriguez11000
"Such would be the successive phases of the image:
it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever;
it is its own pure simulacrum."
family guys constant put down of other shows and actors when they put out slop constantly will never be not funny, theres somthing that never gets old seeing the writers announce how mad they are people dont give them enough praise (i think they went after bobs burgers like 3 times XD)
Yeah obviously I had to find a lot of examples of them referencing things for the b-roll in this video and it was INSANE how many times the references were directly insulting other shows
Bob got the last laugh in the last few few times he cameoed on Family Guy. He couldn't remember Peter's name LOL.
17:51 [picture of Peter Griffiin labeled "Plagirarismo" ]
17:52 [Picture of Stan Smith from American Dad labeled "Plagirarismo di plagirarismo" ]
Well that second one got a good laugh out of me. Even though American dad isn't remotely plagiarizing Family Guy because both were made by Seth MacFarlane.
Yeah, American Dad grew into its own, much much better thing. It's actually great. To be fair, it kinda was being "Family Guy 2.0" in the earliest episodes (probably back when The Simpsons made that gag) cutaways and all, bizarrely, but it soon carved out its own identity, thankfully.
No but its plagiarising Simpsons by plagiarising the plagiarism
Family guy humour is just lazy. it's like they realise their audience is getting bored of the plot so they need to stop and jangle keys for a second to get their attention back. Seth's western parody is the only film I've ever walked out on in the cinema and I've sat through Halloween Kills. Seth's belief that he is so much more deep, intelligent and nuanced than everyone else makes him really talk down to his audience to the point he's had characters blurt out the punchline of visual gags, this one really what made the western very tiring.
Are we really surprised that Family Guy, the show that stole gameplay footage off UA-cam then copystruck the original upload of the footage they stole, plagiarizes all it's jokes?
Did they really do that? Damn, that's low. What it the Street Fighter 2 bit?
@@SonofTiamat maybe? But the famous one is Double Dribble
@@SonofTiamatnot that i’ve seen, it was actually the super techmo bowl bo jackson zigzag gag and followup double dribble corner 3 pointer bit (both videos by the same channel, btw)
@@SonofTiamat FOX automatically copyrighted it, they undid it and apologized.
Did they pay them royalties?
If the answer is no they still stole the footage@@brace110
In case you were interested I think I say some variation of the phrase "by/in contrast" 9 times in this 22 minute video essay. Thank you for supporting this nascent channel as I learn to actually vary my language in my scripts going forward
I didn’t even notice in the slightest don’t worry
yeah i didnt notice either
One of my favorite gags from Family Guy flips the reference script by having Peter mention Benjamin Disraeli then it cuts to Disraeli saying 'You don't even know who I am'
The shiboopi scene feels like an interesting middle-ground example. It's clearly from something. But the point of the scene is that Peter is show-boating too much, so the joke is not only that the scene goes on for ages and the absurdity of painstakingly recreating some musical number, but it does actually tie to the plot.
While I do think older episodes were ghenerally better written and funnier, I also think initially, the idea that a gag can just come out of left field and completly consume everything was kinda novel. That's part of what made the first Chicken Fight so memorable.
EDIT: An example of a joke that I was pretty mad when I found out it was just ripped from a film was the Surfing Bird CD smashing scene, which was just the Printer scene from Office Space.
EDIT: I assumed the same on the Trisha Takinawa thing. Actually, while you say that was the intended joke,I really wonder if it was. It wasn't set up very well. I dunno if you heard that in a commentary or something. Even if it was accidental, I'll take the initial interpretation.
the shipoopi scene is also funny bc peter's "victory tune" for scoring a touchdown has nothing to do w/ football or anything, and everyone just joined in lol.
also the chinese food thing was def an intended part of the tricia takanawa joke but I think peter mistaking a japanese woman for being chinese / having such a chill reaction to cannibalism were also part of the joke--it's funny in multiple ways
I agree! I've personally been saying this for years at this point: To make a GOOD reference, it needs to be entertaining whether your audience gets the reference or not. The Lion King is a prime example: It's a brilliant film in drama, comedy, and romance, without people needing to get that it's based on Hamlet. (Elsinore represent!) Family Guy too frequently relies on you getting the reference to find the joke funny. The times they've dodged this have been with music: Shpoopi is just fun to sing, even though it's a cover, and The List song from Mikado done by Stewie is funny because he and the original version is so petty about why he wants these people done in.
Or Galaxy Quest and Red Dwarf.
I was actually thinking about how “The Lion King” has at least two quotes that are direct references to other films-but they fit into the movie so well, you don’t need to know the reference. They’re more of an Easter egg, aimed at the adults in the audience.
In case you’re wondering what I’m looking it:
Simba: You’re weird, Uncle Scar.
Scar: You have no idea.
(The dialogue is identical to a scene in “Reversal of Fortune,” with Jeremy Irons saying the exact same line in both films).
Puumba: They CALL Me MR. PIG!
(The original is “they call me Mr. Tibbs,” from “In the Heat of the Night.”)
@@CSXIV That's super interesting! I have never heard of the first one, and I've only heard people say the second one is a reference, but they never actually showed the original after mentioning it in their videos.
Mel Brooks did referencal comedy brilliantly
I don't really agree, especially when you look at some of his later works. The Home Alone joke in Robin Hood Men In Tights is _abysmal_.
@@swishfish8858 His whole career post 1980s is just ripping off Zucker Abrahams and Zucker
I haven't seen every Mel Brooks movie, but I think a lot of his work are more like genre parodies, right? So Blazing Saddles is a parody of westerns in general, and Spaceballs is a parody of sci-fi movies. I think that's a good way to do a reference, because the story itself and a lot of the jokes are quite original, but the whole thing is wrapped up in a bow of references. That's how I'd describe it, at least
Some at least. Space Balls is probably the best example
Young Frankenstein totally works as an actual film while being a huge homage
Me watching Cape Fear 20 years after its release: Oh, so THAT'S what that entire iconic Simpsons episode was referencing!
Not to mention, that episode was one of several TV show episodes that got me into the works of Gilbert & Sullivan. :)
Same! Blew my mind how directly The Simpsons parodied that movie when I finally actually saw it- to the point where the "Sideshow Bob theme" you always hear when he shows up in an episode ever since is straight up FROM THAT MOVIE'S SOUNDTRACK! And yet, The Simpsons still did a truly excellent job with it, and it's an all-time great episode!
Someday, Family Guy should just release an episode where someone says "This is even better than that classic Simpsons episode!" then the rest of the episode is just a Simpsons episode playing verbatim for its entire runtime lol
that would be really funny. also i love your profile picture
@@icedlava7063
Hey, thanks! I love yours too!
@@ob2kenobi388 :D
Actually Tarantino thinks of Pulp Fiction as a comedy. A very black comedy. While that’s still not the first thing that comes to mind, there are many places where you’d find humour.
lowkey makes me feel better about finding it funny
Like your point about Risky Business, and how things in Simpsons plots just work regardless if you get the reference, the Simpsons has gotten me to watch movies such as Nightmare on Elm street after seeing the parody in Treehouse of Horror dozens of times. Sometimes you're tangentially aware of a property, and after the Simpsons beats you over the head with it, you check it out and feel (very slightly) enlightened.
I wont pretend Family Guy hasn't made me laugh, but their references feel so distilled that, at best, you might look up a youtube clip and realize "oh yeah, they nailed that ancillary character in an 80s sitcom"
Part of it may actually be the fact that the art style in Family Guy just doesn't encourage any creative reimagining.
I gotta be honest, I kinda liked the Shapoopi joke in Family Guy before; it ran a little long, but over-indulgent celebrations was the joke, so it worked more than it lingered (especially as this was before FG's period of overly-long jokes). Now that I know that this was from another story and not some weirdly-unrelated song Peter made up on the spot, the joke has soured for me. Kinda like how Scary Movie soured on me a little bit when I saw Scream years later and learned SM was a shot-for-shot parody rather than an original plot with references to movies and tropes like I thought (but SM assumes you've seen Scream and it was a big deal most people saw, so this is just on me). Knowing how Skinner works into a failed attempt to reference an old skit, however, still gets me.
I was always aware of Chinese food apparently not filling people, so I liked that joke back then...But I actually prefer your take on it, especially since I forgot that Trisha is Japanese. Oops, heheheheh!
Your point about Shapoopi being ruined by finding out it's from something else is a pain I share about that joke from Airplane
@@kcreviews8161 Sad how the ones we love can hurt us when we learn more about them, heheheh!
@@kcreviews8161had the same reaction when i found out they took from the opening of naked gun for that stewie vs bin laden fight. I loved it when i thought they made it up themselves
@@maydaymemer4660 It's so disappointing finding out things aren't as original as you thought they were and it's weird how much Family Guy likes redoing things. Homages and references are good fun, but some of these things feel more like they just filled airtime with someone else's joke...Like they should share some of the royalties with those people or something, heheheheh!
Well technically Japanese people also eat a lot of rice so the joke COULD still work. Asian cultures in general don't consume a ton of filling food.
Good video, You point out exactly why i stopped watching Family Guy at season 5. I felt like I was watching a 10 minute episode in x0,5 speed because there were so many cutaways and jokes about people I didn;t know so I just tuned out
Yeah I think the only good thing is that occasionally they will have the odd cutaway that's actually funny. I recently flipped on the TV and a later season episode was on and there was a cutaway that actually made me laugh about "the astronaut who thinks the lowest number is 3"
Or the entire Conway Twitty singing, which wasn't even a joke. It was just wasting 3 minutes of run-time because the writers are hacks.
The cutaway format is so Family Guy can game the audience with mindless, soulless, combinatorically-generated jokes (pretty much exactly like how South Park roasts them as doing). Just throwing sh** at a wall and hoping something sticks. Meanwhile the Simpsons, at least at its best, grows its jokes organically out of the story and the characters, or in ways that intentionally fly in the face of them. Either way, the story and characters are the first principle of the jokes, while Family Guy just uses them as a kind of vending machine for random mixtures of references.
My favorite version of the who joke is from Animaniacs.
Uh oh sounds like I need to do a part 2! I need to fully explore the Who's on first references extended universe
@@kcreviews8161i would love a video on the Critic. I mention in another comment that they did a similar joke to Family Guy’s but better, but it’s not based off of Abbot and Costello
@@maydaymemer4660 Well, the one thing The Critic has over Family Guy is that it limits its references to the sort of visual media that a film critic working for a big TV network would be interacting with as part of his job. So even if the jokes are otherwise as random and confusing as a Family Guy cutaway, the writers are still exhibiting some level of self-discipline in making the jokes.
Furthermore, the title of the series The Critic informs you up front that you need to be well-versed in movies (both popular and obscure) to get its sense of humor. Family Guy's title, premise, and theme song (a riff on All in the Family's intro) would make you expect the reference jokes to be focused largely--if not exclusively--on classic sitcom plots. It's not so much that Family Guy can't spoof Amadeus, but The Critic has more of a right to go for an extended spoof that calls on the audience to know the movie well.
i still can't believe that one made it past the censors
@@kcreviews8161 If you want another example of reference humor analysis, the Henry Stickmin Collection would be interesting to cover.
It's almost poetic how the Shipoopi scene is centered on Peter's showboating when that whole scene was the show doing exactly that. It was its way of saying "Look at us! We can do grand, fully-orchestrated, show-stopping musical numbers with minute-long dance breaks!"
Was _that_ what it was for? 'Cuz I've never understood why that song was in the musical.
After 20+ years of loving Marge vs The Monorail, I literally just learned now that it references The Music Man.
The Critic did a joke like this in their thirteenth episode “The Pig Boy and his dog” of their first season
Basically a similar setup but the joke is riffing off of Home Improvement, where a character talks to who he thinks is a real guy but is actually an owl. So the character goes:
“Wilson my wife is happy again”
“Hoo”
“My wife eleanor”
“Hoo”
“My wife eleanor”
“Hoo”
“My wife eleanor”
Cuts to dusk
“Hoo”
“My wife eleanor”
“Hoo”
“My wife eleanor”
Basically The Critic did it first and better like a lot of Family Guy’s humor, it’s silly but it makes sense in context. In fact I would argue Family Guy is more of a ripoff of The Critic’s humor than the Simpsons. I love all three shows but thats what it is
Fun fact: I didn't even know the critic was its own show until long after the crossover simpsons episode. Despite the fact they make a meta joke about it being "another cheap cartoon crossover". Anyway, I guess I should watch the critic at some point!
16:52 OK, one night at work I heard one of the dishwashers singing Shapoopie so I asked him if he was a fan of The Music Man. He said "wut?"
I asked him if he was a fam of show tunes. He replied "nah, I'm more a metal head."
I asked where he heard the song and he said on Family Guy.
I said "That makes sense, Seth MacFarlane is a fan of Broadway shows."
The dishwasher had zero idea it was a real song. He just thought it was funny cuz they said "shapoopie" which honestly is a pretty funny word.
That's quite a funny story! It's also funny that Seth's love of showtunes means that people now don't even associate those showtunes with their original context
When nobody understands why I don't like Family Guy, here is the reason.
Finally someone wising up and finding out why this show sucks.
Family Guy used to be decent to solid. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure that it’s been over 1.5 decades since it has been so.
Now Family Guy stands for what not to do in comedy writing, as well as some memes that are funnier than the show itself.
@@heihogreenzx4704I been around before Family Guy ever existed. I don't remember a time Family Guy being decent.
@@SuperCartoonist I want to quip back “Guess you just forgot”, just because I don’t want that line to go to waste, but eh, you just dislike the show more than me, since, while there are moments from the show I do genuinely enjoy, the Show peaked quickly and almost immediately decayed like Gallium. I know seasonal rot hits almost every long runner, but hooooolyyyyyyyy did it hit Family Guy *particularly* bad.
@@heihogreenzx4704Hey, I give the show a chance on the first season. The show has no acquired taste to it, you are overlooking that this show has been doing the same thing since the beginning.
Simpsons can blow a reference as well. I keep recalling all of the people I met who thought that the point of the Paint Your Wagon joke at the start of the first clip show was that there was NO way a musical with Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin could exist, rather than the joke being it actually does.
But I'm not sure you always have to get it. I'm sure a lot of people who listened to Brian singing "Republican Town" don't know it is parodying "The Company Way" from How to Suceed in Business Without Really Trying, but they still thought it catchy. I didn't know "A Bag of Weed" was referencing Chitty Chitty Bang Bang when I first saw it since I hadn't seen the movie at that point. But I still got the point.
Or how about all of the South Park bits with Lemmiwinks? Do you really need to KNOW that all of the songs are parodies of one's from the Rankin Bass Hobbit and Return of The King? The obscure references are part of the fun.
That's a good point about Paint your Wagon. Yeah the point of the joke is totally different depending on if you get the reference or not, which does kind of ruin it. I preferred the joke back before i knew paint your wagon existed. Or honestly I assumed paint your wagon did exist but was a violent shoot 'em up western. Finding out it is a cheesey musical ruins it!
no absolutely the krusty burger scene and the scenes with snake work so well without having 22 short films ab springfield was one of my favorite simpsons episodes growing up and the first time i saw pulp in fiction like a few years later i was like holy shit
I've seen Airplane half a dozen times and still, when you showed that Family Guy clip, I didn't realise the reference. Because Airplane has like one gag every ten seconds, I probably still don't remember most of them.
I think what makes it worse is that Airplane borders on Family Guy humour anyway on quite a few of it's jokes, including this one. The thing is though, Airplane did it first, so it worked. Family Guy though does it all the time, so without knowing the reference, a funny gag from Airplane can easily be just another bad Family Guy joke. Even with Airplane 2, some of the recurring jokes didn't work.
@@ChrisCooper312 *family guy borders on Airplane! humaor anyway
sorry just hate it when people make that comparison backwards.
The amount of jokes Family Guy stole wholesale from Airplane! is absolutely ridiculous- it's like every other joke at times (I can immediately think of four off of the top of my head without even really trying- TWO of which they shoehorned into their Star Wars: A New Hope parody episode, like... geez, space them out at the very least). To the point where I honestly feel like the entire show was trying to be Airplane!, only a crap, lazy version of it.
Ya know, I feel like the family guy joke could have been salvaged, if after a couple of whos, the owl suddenly said, "What?" indicating that it could do more than just "hoo"
Like that joke about the talking dog who says "Ruff!" when asked who's the best baseball player and the guy's really angry and then the dog's like, "Do you think I should have said Dimaggio?"
And what d'ya know: that's a baseball themed talking animal joke as well!
@@kcreviews8161 exactly, if they are gonna do a lame joke, suddenly swerving away from the obvious punchline, suddenly its funny for a different reason. The joke is still bad for reasons ya said, but at least it kinda is funny for another one
Aside from the 'It's funny even if you don't get it option', the other good one is 'you don't even notice it unless you know'. Like, it comes off as just regular dialogue to people who don't know the reference. That's way harder to do, but it can payoff
9:50 it's a man and an owl on a stage and the owl goes whoooo whenever he asks a question, you really don't need the reference to get how that's funny
18:00 100% this. I've made this exact point to people before. I remember thinking exactly that "This is a really funny family guy joke" and quoting it to someone. Its not a reference at all, just entirely stolen. Same with the office space "reference" when they're destroying the surfing bird record. Thought that was hilarious. Genius even. Nevermind, later found out from a UA-cam comment it was a shot for shot reference to a film most people haven't watched
Galaxy Quest is a great parody of Star Trek because it uses the original series, the real life experiences of the people and fandom insight involved to tell a great love letter to it while standing strong on it’s own two feet.
The Red Shirts getting whacked (What Guy is afraid of being), Rock Monster (Star Trek V was meant to feature a rock monster before they were cut), the unbelievably section full of hydraulics while one of the characters says they want to kill the writer for that bad writing in the episode it was from (So many instances in Star Trek of where the writer and director either breaks what’s established for dramatic effect or taking leaps in logic for the sake of plot like Turnabout Intruder), the characters doing conventions to pay the bills while one of them laments the typecasting (The cast of TOS’ careers during most of the 70’s until the production of the Motion Picture with Leonard Nimoy suffering badly from the typecasting with only his work in Mission Impossible, Columbo’s A Sitch In Crime and the Invasion of the Bodysnatchers remake really standing out offhand) and so on. All of which you only realised have a basis when you have broad knowledge of the subject it’s based on and stuff the people involved would know because they’re fans themselves.
Plus it’s the film where the immortal ‘Is there air? You don’t know!’ clip came from and one where you could safely say out loud Buzz Lightyear, Ripley, Adrian Monk and Snipe worked together to save the galaxy without being looked like you’re red-faced with hysteria.
I knew the krusty burger scene was a reference as a child because simpsons characters dont talk like that and simpsons dialogue isnt paced like that
i feel like cut-away jokes would work if they reflected the adhd condition: something makes you think of a joke or reference or whatever, you get it out of your system, and quickly move on.
don't give the viewer time to potentially realize it was a bad joke, just carry on and if the joke landed the viewer will probably just find it even funnier because the hilarity wasn't acknowledged. After all "perfectly cut X" is its own entire genre of humor at this point
The way you ended this made me laugh hard. I think Family Guy has it's moments and can be a little too hated on at times, but agree with every point made here.
nah. If anything it's praised too much for how bad it is
The cuttaway to a reference style is exactly why I never really got into Family Guy and always preferred the Simpsons
I'd say the Amadeus joke still kinda works without knowing the reference, as someone whose quoted it without seeing the film, if because of the absurdism and contrast between scenes and delivery Peter gives in his last line. At least like a simple, shallow appeal if the reference isn't gotten like what was said of The Simpsons Soprano example of the music being nice. But IDK.
I do agree honestly! Tbh, the last few minutes of the video kinda made little sense.. especially with the “airplane joke” example.
I still find it funny, even more so it’s meant to be a reference to airplane!
@@SeymourYukiteru What would you consider a rip off, instead of a reference?
I liked the joke in Bojack Horseman with Dr. Hu, who was an Asian man.
The Family Guy version was more obvious but the Simpsons version was funnier because it fit the characters better. Skinner was too naive and he spoiled the joke.
Family Guy doesn't even do straight comedy half the time of their cutaways. There are at least 5 times where they just play a live performance of Conway Twitty singing literally the same song.
Unfortunately, The Simpsons changed so much that what it's said in this video isn't really about their new seasons. One example is that most couch gags or Treehouse of horrors in the last seasons fall in this category where the joke is the reference.
Simpsons took a bad turn for me right about the time Family Guy made it big. I remember calling it the Family Guy Effect.
I don't think Treehouse of Horrors has been great for almost 2 decades now. Most of them were just references. Like, I see people highly praise their Toy Story parody, but aside from the animation, I don't see anything good about it. It's literally, "Bart tortures his toys. The toys torture Bart to death. The end."
There have probably been more bad seasons of the Simpsons than good ones. I could be wrong because I stopped watching around season 10 or 11 when it started to make me cringe instead of laugh. Honestly, Family Guy may never be as funny as Simpsons' first 8 seasons but it's still funnier than what I've seen from the Simpsons in this century.
The part about reference humor is that taking something and putting it in a different context is pretty much just Step 1 in a series of steps of gleaning comedy from the differences in both scenarios (as you highlighted, usually between a dramatic work and a comedy). Family Guy often stops at Step 1 without going too much further. Family Guy is capable of doing it, as the Star Wars episodes are generally well-regarded because they got to take an established story and use the contrasts in character quirks between the Family Guy character and the Star Wars character. For example, the couch scene in Blue Harvest is very well executed.
I still like the Amadeus scene. It works pretty well because it is inserted pretty organically in the story and still kind of works without the reference. The setup of the polluted water needing them to wear wigs leads into them doing classical era things. Until Peter puts on the mask, you could believe that it wasn't a reference. The shift to Old Peter probably wasn't necessary, but Peter's over-the-top delivery does carry it over the hump compared to the original source.
The Millennial/Zoomer experience is laughing really hard at a Family Guy joke and then later realizing that it's just a joke from something from the 80's
Time frame of millennials being born: 1981-1996
Time Frame of zoomers being born: 1997-2012
Thought you might want to know this unless you are a literal boomer (or Gen Xer).
The cutaway that really get me mad are ones that don't actually have the thing their weak setup says.
"You'll bring everyone down like a retarded rooster" then showing the rooster, but not anyone being brought down by him.
weak cutaways are especially funny when you realize they use those as an excuse for the shows quality since they put more effort into those than writing a coherent episode.
there is an argument to be made that family guy is written for people that get the reference while the simpsons is written for a more general audience that might not recognize it.
Billy and Mandy actually also does the Chinese Food Joke in the 'Little Rock of Horror's' episode
The lyrics say "Go down to the wonton shop, fortune cookie says that I just can't stop, I suck the noodle right out of their head, and half an hour later I'm hungry again".
Funnily enough that one is also about cannibalism...
what's neat is you don't even need the stereotype about chinese food for the line to work, since the brain is already a massive glutton eating every brain in town you just think he says it because he craves that many brains.
Technically, not cannibalism, since the brain sucker is “just your average evil meteor from out of the sky.”
@@EmbarassedSkunk True, True, Humanivoria then
It reminds me of the time I took a popular culture course in university (before the Internet existed). One guy took a Simpson's episode and surveyed people what they thought of it. He gave his presentation and after that, I asked the question, "Didn't anyone know that the whole episode was a parody of 'Citizen Kane'?". Even the presenter didn't know that. The point is that it didn't matter if you didn't know that, but it was so much better if you did.
For me is the opposite but it was for the language barrier, i underestand the joke of FG because, the owl said WHO and Costelo is asking. But in the Simpsons, Skiner just explain something i didn't watch or know yet.
You could make the Family Guy portion about the Nostalgia Critic and change very VERY little
I think Family Guy is funny. But it truly is one of the worst written shows to be as popular as it is. Like literally insulting the intelligence of its audience
To note how much this gag has been used, The PJs also reference the joke;
"Who's on crack, Saywhat's on smack and Idunno freebases."
It's a very, VERY dark version of the joke but it still followed the original more than Family Guy did.
8:19 Bruh, the perfect cutoff from the first “Ha” into a midroll ad sent me 🤣
18:43 I have this same issue with Doug Walker’s style of comedy - he doesn’t always make it clear when he’s quoting a line from a movie. One example I can think of is from his review of the first _Care Bears_ movie, where, when it’s revealed out of nowhere the Bears have a magical ship out of nowhere, he pretends to be one of the kids at the orphanage (who Mr. Cherrywood is telling the story to), pointing out the plotholes with that revelation, then as Mr. Cherrywood he says “Quiet, or I will smack you with my ring hand!” It was only later I found out he stole that line from _Family Guy,_ when there’s a cutaway with four of some old actor on a car trip like they’re a bunch of kids being driven by their parent. And even then, I’m sure it’s probably referencing some movie that actor was in, which _Family Guy_ didn’t make clear either.
I'm gonna go ahead and whiteknight for Doug a little here. The joke is still funny because it's such an out of pocket response to something inaucious, and I'm not even sure if it is a reference to somethibg specific, since I've heard the joke of someone specifying that their fist has rings so it'll hurt even more dozens of times.
South Park's manatee episode aged really poorly, in relation to itself, not Family Guy. And manatee humor can work, a bunch of pre-Rick and Morty Adult Swim cartoons have that kind of humor and they're some of the funniest shows ever put on TV.
8:54 this is why i always had gripes with family guy, when they diss bobs burgers or abott and costello i just feel bad not for the people family guy is dissing, but for family guy itself, because, it's family guy, you can't say bob's burgers looks weird or is not funny when you are fucking family guy
Very good points! It's worth noting I'm not alone in admitting I saw a lot of reference humour in The Simpsons as a kid, laughed at it, and then sought out the reference source later as an adult and gained appreciation for the classics.
22 short films about Springfield has been my favorite simpsons episode for YEARS now, simply because the humor is great and it does an awesome job of showing just how many characters the show has and how well they can work together and be fleshed out. I knew it was a reference to pulp fiction, but it wasn't until a couple years ago that I actually watched the film for the first time
Can there be different types of comedy for different people? No! That is a reasonable opinion, and this is the Internet!
All the more reason why The Simpsons is the superior show
16:42 I think the Family Guy equivalent of The Monorail Song is Republican Town.
They're both parodies of songs from old musicals(We Got Trouble and The Company Way), and they are both funny without knowing the context(but are extra funny if you do),
If you want a good example of reference comedy (or doing references in general), just watch Shrek.
Any references the movie made makes sense regardless the context or is just a nice watch.
The post-bridge scene alone encapsulate everything right. Sure, it's a Babe reference, but Shrek would've said it regardless.
Meanwhile, Shark Tale is the Family Guy. Throwing references that are confusing for those who don't understand and groan-worthy for those who do. Like that "Little friends" shrimp scene.