Here’s A Tip For You
The Age are running an opinion piece written by some fucktard who is slightly pissed off over something on television:
This Family Guy isn’t funny, just offensive
Although I appreciate clever, edgy humour, last month’s episode of American sitcom Family Guy crossed the line into offensive anti-Semitic caricatures that skewered Jews and Judaism.
The episode, entitled “Family Goy”, dredged up age-old stereotypes about Jews and money and reinforced deeply embedded prejudices that still abound today.
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So offensive was the program that Jewish groups in the US wrote to The Fox Broadcasting Company expressing their dismay at its excessive employment of false and hurtful perceptions of Jews.
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Family Guy has form in depicting violence against Jews. As an opener to the eighth season, the writers turned the entire cast into Disney characters, transporting them to that magical world.
At the end of the segment, Mort Goldman, the Jewish pharmacist, comes to the door. He is drawn with classic anti-Semitic features — the big nose, crooked teeth and a large yellow Star of David around his neck. Together the characters turn angry, shout “Jew” and proceed to beat him up. While I understand that the reference was to Walt Disney’s reputed anti-Semitism, is using extreme violence against Jews an effective way to discuss anti-Semitism?
The show’s creator, Seth MacFarlane, also has a history of ridiculing the Holocaust.
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Not all jokes are funny.
Oh, fuck off you whiny cunt.
People fall into two camps: Family Guy fucking rocks! or Family Guy fucking sucks (or “Is that the show about Homer Sampson?”). There’s not much in between. I fall into the former category.
Family Guy is funny because it’s well written and frequently pushes or exceeds the boundaries of good taste. Combine that with the countless often-subtle pop culture references, general stupidity and filth, it’s a real winner. After 20 years The Simpsons has become so fucking stale that it’s simply not funny or intelligent any more, and Family Guy kinda fills that gap. For me at least.
Anyway, back to the whiny cunt.
Wikipedia tells me that as of the date of this post, there have been 133 episodes of Family Guy produced since 1999. Dvir Abramovich, the author of the piece in The Age, is targeting TWO episodes, both of which had a heavily Jewish theme.
Most – if not all – of the other 131 episodes completely rip the shit out of black people, Mexicans, Asians, homosexuals, Catholics/Christian, the disabled as well as whatever other minority group you can think of in some form. I don’t see Abramovich standing up for or defending any other person or group in his piece. There’s not even the slightest mention. If I actually had any I’d probably give a bit more sympathy to his case if it wasn’t so fucking self-centered. In fact he even claims that in his opinion the show didn’t cross the line up until the point there was a Jewish joke in there.
I’m going to go ahead and guess that this fuckwit has never even watched a single episode of Family Guy until someone called him up and said “OMG JEWS AND FAMILY GUY!!!1!!!1!”. And I bet that he hasn’t seen any other episode to compare it against.
By coincidence I happened to watch the episode that was referenced in the article last night, as well as the one that contained the Disney sketch. Verdict? Not offensive at all, but downright piss-funny, because I’m not an uptight cunt and can laugh at things.
Abramovich asks about the depiction of violence against the Mort Goldman character in the Disney sketch, and admits that it is obviously a shot at Disney and their perceived (or once-perceived) hatred of Jews. He’s right there, but that’s all it fucking was. I get the impression that no matter how it was portrayed he’d have fucking whinged about it. Having watched almost every episode of Family Guy, I really can’t agree that the Jews are any more “victimized” than any other group. In fact I’d say that they rank pretty fucking low on the scale in that regard.
He ends the piece by claiming that not all jokes are funny. Well, I don’t happen to think that genital mutilation of young children is funny, but I don’t say anything and make a huge fuss about it when you continue the practice and then fucking celebrate it, do I? If you don’t like the show, fuck off and change the channel. You do your thing, and we’ll do ours.
I did a quick Google on this Abramovich fuckwit, and rapidly came to the conclusion that his thoughts don’t mirror the views of the majority of the Australian Jewish community, and many within perceive him to be quite radical. So there.
Fuck me dude, it happened 60 years ago. Isn’t it time to get over it and move on? Stop acting like a fucking victim. I’m surprised you haven’t complained about the ongoing fart jokes across various episodes and made some “OMG GAS JEWS!” sulk too.
If I remember rightly Family Guy have taken the piss out of Hitler a few more times than Jewish people.
Remember ‘Das Gym’? Was that the first episode? And the Hitler talk show where he wanted to see Christian Slater’s butt??!!!!!
Nothing wrong with genital mutilation/circumcision. Hot Jew girls don’t like dick cheese, that’s all.
The Critic is great for Jew/Hitler jokes. The daydream/spinoff gags are not unlike Family Guy, but done years earlier. If you loved mid-90s Simpsons, when they were at their best, get The Critic. You won’t be disappointed. Best of all, you can skip through the illegal copying warnings.
I work for a paper and we are always being flooded with complaints from the jewish community when there is even the slightest jewish reference in any article we publish. The paper can’t publish an article about the Israel/Palestine conflict without the phone lines getting backed up. Its almost like the jewish community have a coordinated committee that gets together every morning and reads every article in every paper and sends out distress calls throughout their network telling everyone to call in. We don’t get the same kind of reaction from any other ethnic group – its quite extraordinary.
Oh please, don’t give me the Jewish cabal bullshit. So some Jews complain, have you surveyed the ones who didn’t? I’d be interested in which paper you are talking about as well… you are not being very specific and you should be willing to defend your views and your paper, as it were.
While I do largely agree with you, and I *lovelovelove* Family Guy (indeed they caricature everyone) I didn’t see Abramovitch make any mention of the Holocaust, so I don’t see the relevance of bringing up the Holocaust in making your argument against his views.
That said, I doubt he’s watched it either. Family Guy jokes can *sound* bad if you read about them, but when you WATCH the show it’s awesome. The “When You Wish Upon A Weinstein…” episode was banned, and yet quite a number of my Jewish friends thought it was freaking hilarious.
But fark, it was a joke at Walt Disney’s expense, not Mort Goldmans’. I can completely understand the Jewish sensitivity to anti-Semitism (which well preceded the Holocaust, btw) but this was irony for God’s sake!
Correction: yes, the ridiculing the Holocaust comment. He clearly doesn’t get the show, I just meant in the Walt Disney critique he refers directly to anti-Semitism, and doesn’t mention the Holocaust in that bit.
I didn’t realise you had only provided a truncated version of the article, which I just read. I am also reckoning that Abramovitch hasn’t watched the episodes he is criticising. It might have even paid for him to do some further research, and while I am providing now a quote from Wikipedia I already know this information because I watched the DVD commentary it quotes from.
“On the DVD commentary for the episode, Seth MacFarlane mentions that he showed the script of the episode to two rabbis, both of whom approved the episode “because Peter learns the right lesson at the end.†MacFarlane also points out that the writer, Ricky Blitt, is Jewish himself, as is Ben Stein, who plays the Rabbi.”