Just one week after swallowing my blogger pride and wondering if “Family Guy” had perhaps turned a corner and become watchable again, the show slammed right into that corner, fell faster than gravity, and writhed around clutching its blood-geysering forehead (and, of course, went on twenty seconds too long).
Most puzzling among last night’s atrocities, however, was a segment ripping on Robin Williams for his really fast, spastic, stream-of-thought comedy, his really obvious, stereotypical jokes and lame voices, and his seemingly insecure, self-conscious desire to be in-your-face funny at all times. Does that sound like any other shows currently running on television? Any animated ones, perhaps? That involve the words “Family” and “Guy” in the title and aren’t The Discovery Channel’s revamped new show “American Guy Chopper Family”?
After the jump, the Robin Williams clip from last night’s episode. I’m not saying Robin Williams doesn’t wear a bullseye on his back that’s visible from outer space, but still, this clip might as well just be Peter calling a kettle black for sixty seconds, then asking that kettle if it’s filled with grape soda:
(Sidenote: For those of you, like Blagg, who ask why I continue to watch this show when I so obviously hate it, my reasons are sort of threefold. One, I hate people who vaguely rip on how “bad” shows have gotten, like SNL, when they haven’t watched the show in years, even if it’s often accurate. Two, it’s not inconceivable, as I found last week, that the episode might, against all odds, end up being funny on a given week, which started happening with “The Simpsons” again after about four years of total drudgery. Three, sometimes I enjoy being flicked in the balls, both literally and comedy-wise.)
