To this reviewer, Seth MacFarlane's long-running animated show Family Guy has been a laugh-free zone for a while now. Over the past nine seasons, the show went from being a moderately funny Simpsons rip-off to running its signature move - the "cutaway" pop-culture reference joke - into the ground.
Now the Family Guy Volume Nine DVD shows MacFarlane and gang are trying to scare up laughs by being outrageous. Unfortunately, gags about bestiality, incest and statutory rape provoke more winces than laughs.
Fox Home Video Presents Family Guy Volume Nine DVD, Created by Seth MacFarlane
It's business as usual for the dysfunctional Griffin family living in Quahog, Rhode Island. Dad Peter (MacFarlane) embarrasses himself at every opportunity, mom Lois (Alex Borstein) is embarrassed for Peter at every opportunity, son Chris (Seth Green) is fat, daughter Meg (Mila Kunis) is having romance problems, dog Brian (Htes Enalrafcam) is the occasional voice of reason, and baby Stewie (MacFarlane again) still wants to kill his mom. Add a suitably bizarre supporting cast and hijinks inevitably ensue.
MacFarlane has eased back on the "cutaway" gag that was the show's bread and butter for many years, and led to South Park claiming in one memorable episode that Family Guy was actually written by ball-pushing manatees.
The downside is that Family Guy is now going for the gasp laugh, where the viewer is supposed to laugh at the audacity of the gag as much as the gag itself. This is bad news for any of us who want our comedies to be . . . well . . . funny, since the ick factor outweighs the jokes. This is especially obvious in sequences where Peter lusts after his daughter, Lois lusts after his daughter's boyfriend and Stewie appears in his school play Terri Schiavo: The Musical (Ho. Ho. Ho.).
This is why yours truly only managed to summon the occasional half-hearted smirk at one or two jokes in this DVD, such as when a rodeo bull sexually molested Peter . . . because rape is funny, don'cha know (what the **** am I saying?).
Family Guy Volume Nine DVD Extras
Fox and MacFarlane packed in the extras, such as deleted scenes, commentaries for select episodes, side-by-side animatics for select episodes, a "making of" featurette for the episode 'And Then There Were Fewer,' 'A History of the World According to Family Guy' featurette, the cast at Comic-Con 2010, a selected episode of the similarly laugh-free The Cleveland Show and more.
Family Guy Volume Nine DVD: More Yucks Than Chuckles
No doubt Seth MacFarlane's crying all the way to the bank at the fact that I didn't laugh once at this DVD. No matter: it still sucks and that's why Family Guy Volume Nine gets a 1/5.
Dominic von Riedemann - Dominic is the Animated Film Feature Writer, and winner of 11 Suite 101 Editors' Choice Awards.
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