14th June 2011, 4:12 PM
Yeah it's subjective. Honestly it was the worst that first season after they got renewed, but it's toned back a bit now. I know I'm reading too much into it, but my interpretation of it is that life is absurd, things happen completely unrelated to whatever narrative you've created for yourself, and deal with it honkey tonk.
Family Guy has some very confused morals when it deems it necessary to "teach" them. The guy doesn't seem to realize what paralysis is (due to 3 separate episodes, I get the impression Seth actually thinks that paralysis just means your legs are broken and getting a "leg transplant" would fix it), and often lately his lesson is "we're all terrible, let's just stop trying to improve ourselves in any way".
Fry: I know I should but I just can't!
South Park at least makes the lessons more concrete, but it's so stuck up about them that it gets annoying. That's ignoring the fact that lately a lot of those lessons are completely insane. "It's okay to make fun of any specific religion, but you can't make fun of religion overall!" was one theme I picked up. Also, apparently being "smug" is worse than pollution. Then there's the very general lesson, nobody ever made a difference, the world is never going to get better so stop trying to do that, and the world will never get worse so stop worrying about the president, whoever it is. All in all, both of them are psuedo-intellectual fools who think that the secret to enlightenment is art, because that's all they know about, and their "edgy-ness" consists mostly of latching onto whatever bandwagon of "how about THESE guys?" the rest of the world is already making fun of, legitimate or not.
I can still laugh at a dumb joke though, so I watch them occasionally. Now Aqua Teen, that's a show that specializes in insulting their core fan base on a regular basis. The movie did the best thing ever, first coming up with a perfectly sensible (in the context of the show), explanation for where the 3 characters came from, then throwing that away and coming up with a less sensible one, then throwing THAT away and coming up with a completely idiotic and insulting explanation. It's the sort of thing that would enrage the fans, and it was all intentional. Now THAT'S comedy.
Family Guy has some very confused morals when it deems it necessary to "teach" them. The guy doesn't seem to realize what paralysis is (due to 3 separate episodes, I get the impression Seth actually thinks that paralysis just means your legs are broken and getting a "leg transplant" would fix it), and often lately his lesson is "we're all terrible, let's just stop trying to improve ourselves in any way".
Fry: I know I should but I just can't!
South Park at least makes the lessons more concrete, but it's so stuck up about them that it gets annoying. That's ignoring the fact that lately a lot of those lessons are completely insane. "It's okay to make fun of any specific religion, but you can't make fun of religion overall!" was one theme I picked up. Also, apparently being "smug" is worse than pollution. Then there's the very general lesson, nobody ever made a difference, the world is never going to get better so stop trying to do that, and the world will never get worse so stop worrying about the president, whoever it is. All in all, both of them are psuedo-intellectual fools who think that the secret to enlightenment is art, because that's all they know about, and their "edgy-ness" consists mostly of latching onto whatever bandwagon of "how about THESE guys?" the rest of the world is already making fun of, legitimate or not.
I can still laugh at a dumb joke though, so I watch them occasionally. Now Aqua Teen, that's a show that specializes in insulting their core fan base on a regular basis. The movie did the best thing ever, first coming up with a perfectly sensible (in the context of the show), explanation for where the 3 characters came from, then throwing that away and coming up with a less sensible one, then throwing THAT away and coming up with a completely idiotic and insulting explanation. It's the sort of thing that would enrage the fans, and it was all intentional. Now THAT'S comedy.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)