He can't stand Family Guy because it has no plot and is simply a mashup of cutaway after cutaway. Later, he discovers the truth about Family Guy - That it is written by manatees. These manatees derive their ideas for Family Guy from "Idea Balls" which are shuffled up randomly until a joke for an episode can come out of it. When Cartman points out how Family Guy is just one completely random joke after another, he feels superior in the fact that South Park sticks to a plot.
Having a plotline for each episode leaves much more room for character development as Cartman points out in potentially the most meta moment in the series.
Cartman: Good Kyle! That's good anger you're showing there, you see that? That's emotional character development based on what's happening in the storyline As previously stated, having a plot in each episode makes it much easier to see these characters as fully fleshed beings rather than characters that exist solely for the set up of a joke. For example, Meg's whole character on Family Guy is designed around her being the family punching bag.
Although Family Guy has been on for decades, we still know absolutely nothing about her character other than the fact that she is constantly abused. On South Park , Butters is often used as the punching bag, yet we know so much about his character. He is three-dimensional and so are the majority of the characters on South Park , yet on Family Guy , it often feels as though Stewie and Brian are the only somewhat fleshed out contributors to the series.
Often on Family Guy , the characters will do something completely out of character in order to get a joke out of it, whereas South Park stays consistent with every member of its small-town ensemble. Cartman and Stewie admittedly have a ton of similarities. Both crave world domination, both are sexually confused, both have stuffed animals they are obsessed with, both consider themselves to be evil masterminds. They are also both hilarious. Again though, Stewie's character alters a lot of the time based on what would be considered "funny" while Cartman will always be Cartman.
We would watch him gain 50 pounds so he could become the City Wok equivalent to Jared from Subway it was a more innocent time and put prosthetic testicles on his chin so he could go on The Maury Povich Show. Butters has become one of the most essential characters of South Park , and this was where he broke out, proving to be just as important as the four main boys. The show knew he was the most morally repugnant character, but in any episode, he could vary from a typical jerk to a murderous sociopath; this was where the writers found the perfect balance, putting him a little bit closer to the latter.
The dynamic between Butters and Cartman has been one of the most consistently enjoyable parts of the show, and this was where it came to fruition.
South Park has had plenty of great moments since, but seasons represent its golden age. These seasons featured a lot of what made seasons so great, but just…. Pretty much every season could be summed up this way; a few episodes that reminded you that South Park could still be as funny as anything on television, and a few that made you think it was getting long in the tooth. Season 17 was perhaps the ultimate example of the up-and-down quality of these years.
Perhaps that was why Matt and Trey decided to shake things up the following season, bringing us into the most recent era. Seasons The Serialization Experiment. It was a solid episode, but fans had no notion that something was different until about the third episode, when elements of the previous shows began occurring in subsequent shows.
Groening uses intertextuality to criticize not just the two shows, but also the type of humour they use. Who the hell is that? In the online game Stewie has a scatological reaction when he receives orders related to The Simpsons. While it received mixed reviews, The Simpsons Guy brought forward a different type of intertextuality than we have seen before with these three series, a collaborative one, with the mem- bers of the voice casts working together for the episode. Both Family Guy and The Simpsons have passionate fans and critics.
They have both won important awards and are a commercial success in addition to becoming reference TV shows. Nevertheless, more frequently than The Simpsons, Family Guy is considered superficial, with an almost idiotic approach to humour, favouring non-sequiturs instead of coherent storylines. This is often referred to as jump the shark, a throwback to the iconic American sitcom Happy Days that after gradually losing relevance aired an episode Fox, that featured one of the main characters, Arthur The Fonz Fonzarelli, jumping a shark.
That scene entered popular culture and the expression jump the shark is used any time a show starts engaging in implausible or nonspecific scenarios in order to advance the narrative, marking the beginning of the end. One of the main reasons Family Guy is considered relevant is that it does not try to create popular culture, but instead uses what is already formed, tested and made current by other cultural producers targeting the same 15 to 30 years old audience.
It picks and chooses what the target finds funny, while always trying to keep the shock value of it humour higher than other TV shows. No one denies the fact that Family Guy is an unapologetic, lowbrow jokes show that makes fun of anything and anyone, uses all the cultural references a dynamic popular culture consumer can think of, all the while making a title of glory out of it.
The show does not try to hide its lack of a coherent style, its attraction and originality being the fact that it tries to incorporate and engulf as many elements as possible from other popular culture products. As a product of popular culture, the show offers a series of possibilities to control and direct the audience, although it does not force it to co-participate Fiske, a and this freedom may very well be one of the attractions of the show. Family Guy can be viewed as a successful attempt to shatter the myths of the American culture through their repeated exposure to a new perspective, indexing the products of popular culture each episode.
In doing so, it has inadvertently developed an authentic and original characteristic: it can be considered a product of products. Conclusions Each of the three animated series creates an unusual universe, individualized through a particular trait: The Simpsons is the first to coherently tackle the issue of the dysfunctional middle class American family, South Park initiates a strong satire of the politically correct American society, and Family Guy makes fun of anything and everything in a non-sequitur, schizoid collection of popular culture references.
Each show creates its own style and, thus, its own genre, but the signifiers they use create meaning only in the society that generated them or in societies familiarized with that particular cultural production. The moment we take the shows out of their popular culture environment, meaning is lost. This is best shown by the failed attempt to adapt and air The Simpsons in the Arab world. The reason? The show could not be read in the Arab world because the reader did not possess the necessary cultural knowledge.
Their success is not due only to the meanings and unexpected combinations generated by their creators, but also to the recognizable traits of the elements they use and to the fact that the public has the necessary knowledge to decode the messages, sometimes adding their own level of interpretation.
These aspects are directly related to one of the main characteristics of the three shows, intertextuality; it is used not only to create meaning, but also to underline and showcase the central ideas behind the episodes and the series.
Of course, the issues these shows address are many and catch most of the realities of the American society, but each show has its own way of using intertextuality and humour. However, the types of intertextuality and the techniques they use are similar, so we can safely conclude that the three animated series are similar in technique allusions, parody, plagiarism, crossover and typology intertextuality is often deliberate and obligatory, particularly when dealing with inter-referentiality between the shows , but different in their narrative strategy and desired comedic outcome.
Intertextuality is often used in character development, but also in the advancement of the storyline. It plays an important role in underlining character traits or in defining a situation not by genus proximum, but by placing it in a certain cultural area.
It is not uncommon to find self-referentiality in Family Guy, as it is the show that uses it with the highest frequency by comparison to the other two. In addition, intertextuality can be used at various degrees of complexity; it can go from simple allusions to the construction of whole episodes.
Family Guy is a great example of the first level of complexity, where the reader is not required to invest anything else but a rather quantitative knowledge about the American popular culture; the decoding process is thus fairly simple, also enabled by the fact that storylines are secondary to the punch lines and jokes can often be enjoyed even if taken outside the narrative. Finally, The Simpsons uses intertextuality mainly for its parody value, investing more in the develop- ment of its storyline and situational humour, even though it does not shy away from allusions and direct references to its competitors.
The accelerated development of the American society led to the consolidation of such a strong and dynamic popular culture that it has reached a point where it tries to disavow and even destroy its products almost as soon as it has created them. The three animated shows have become an integral part of a cultural mechanism that not only deconstructs its products, but is also cannibalising them by continuously pushing the limits of intertextuality. References Bakhtin, M. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Barthes, R. Dahl, O. Accessed on February 17, Devanney, T. Accessed on October 23, Fiske, J. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Accessed on September 30, Genette, G.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goin, K. High, episode script, Family Guy. Accessed on October 29, Graban, T. Raskin ed. Hall, E. New York: Anchor Books. Halsall, A. Weinstock ed. Hauge, R. Accessed on 23 October Irwin, W.
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