Family Guy has jumped the shark

It may just be me but Family Guy isn’t funny any more.

The show that viewers demanded Fox bring back used to be one of my favorite shows to watch but ever since 2010 something’s changed about the show. It’s as if the writers deliberately decided to shut down one of the shows main veins of humor. I don’t know.

What happened at the end of 2010…. What was it… What could be so titanic in nature that it caused the shows writers to turn away from one of the staples? Oh yeah, a Democrat was elected President.

Family Guy was a show that was never afraid to take a shot at the Bush administration but has never even once criticized Obama. In fact they’ve gone so far as to portray him as a rock star. It’s clear the show has a liberal slant and they’re just not afraid to come out and state it. Seth McFarland and the writers once implied that McCain-Palin was the choice of the Nazi Party but is unwilling to make any political references since Obama took office, and it’s killed the show.

With political humor off-limits the writers have had to go farther afield to find storylines. They can’t mention the economy, because that would reflect on Obama, they can’t address the war because that would be a statement about Obama. There’s fewer laughs than there used to be. Now that they’ve left political humor aside, at least until a Republican takes the White House they’ve had to push farther to be edgy and a lot of the time it comes off as just mean. Yes their Christmas special was awesome but other than that this season has largely been a letdown. There are a couple of good lines here or there but its not the same show it was when Bush was in the White House.

It's not like every episode contained a Bush joke but they took plenty of shots at Bush throughout his eight year term and have yet to mock Obama on anything. They're only portrayal smacked of fan-boy favoritism. It's just sad to see that the show I thought was funny really had a political agenda the whole tiem.

Now it’s not funny to see them crack on Republicans anymore because they're not willing to hit a Democrat. Its not just a joke, but it’s a political statement. The writers aren’t trying to be funny they’re throwing their own ideology up and hoping you agree with it.

I don’t want my cartoons to preach at me. The Simpsons and South Park have done a very good job being funny without being preachy. After seeing the last two years of Family Guy I have to wonder if the first eight or so were just a thinly veiled political agenda.

“Are ya’ll still open?”

I think there could be a zombie outbreak and people would still be streaming into the restaurant.

On Friday a massive storm front rolled through the south. It hit Atlanta with rain, high winds, golf-ball size hail and at least one tornado. It was a fairly busy Friday night until the big storm hit and once it did no one left. They stood their in our glass enclosed lobby staring out at the storm and the reported funnel cloud that didn’t touch ground, but could be seen from the restaurant.

The front has almost floor to ceiling glass walls, had one of those shattered, or the banks of windows that flank the restaurant the carnage could have been massive. Instead of taking shelter our patrons stood in this glass enclosure and watched the storm… dumb asses.

Once the weather calmed down and reports of down trees and power lines started trickling in you’d think people would head home to check on the damage, but no, more people started coming through the door. Some people even ran from the nearest mall entrance to the front door near the height of the storm to get on our wait list.

We lost power and still no one talked of leaving, nor did my management consider closing the restaurant for safety reasons. Most of us live locally and wanted to check on our homes and family, but we had to keep serving.

I swear we could be in the middle of a full on Dawn of the Dead style outbreak and management would insist on keeping the doors open.

I can see it now, “There’s only been one zombie here. We’re forecasted to do $25,000 so lets just keep the doors open and see what happens.”

New touchstones

So its starting to appear that I might have a, “Type.”

It was probably best expressed by my roommate as saying, “Dude, your bedroom has seen more (Completely Legal) teenage boys in it than a freshman dorm at Georgia Tech.”

Seriously this is not my fault.

Last month I took the roommate’s black lab down to Piedmont Park because Jake and a great personality and everyone loves him. So I took him to the dog park and was walking around the park and this guy comes up and starts playing with Jake and talking with me. Comes up completely unprompted by me, it was completely random, I in no way sought him out.

So I can tell he’s young and I’m trying to get some more information about him and he tells me he’s in school, which I figured, but he starts going on about he’s going to be a senior next year and how cool that’s going to be. I bite the bullet and ask him he’s at Georgia Tech, cause he’s kinda nerdy like that, and he says the name of a West Cobb High School.

Seriously, the kid goes to a high school not far from where I live and was flirting with me. Mind you I think most people clock me as younger than my age, but I was like 15 when this kid was born and he’s flirting with me, which while kinda awesome, and completely legal in Georgia, is a bit weird and something that should be avoided.

So last week I was down at the gay Caribou Coffee in Midtown and I’m sitting next to a guy for an hour or so while we both do some work. We had a couple of exchanges and then we start talking a bit later and again I know he’s younger, so I start comparing him, in my mind to the younger guys at work. I figure he looks older than Daniel, whose 19, Robert who just turned 20, and older than Julian, whose also 20, so I’m somewhat hopeful that he’s a grad student at Georgia Tech, then he says his name and I start remembering this guy from an article we did at Southern Voice.

It wasn’t my story but I remembered him as being in high school and so I hopefully throw out, “So that makes you about 20 now right?” he laughed and then explained, “I turn 19 in two months.”

Seriously, I’m so not seeking these guys out. The one thing that is clear though is that I need to get a better set of touchstones of what 18 looks like because my younger friends look insanely young for their age.

The self-involvement of youth

With a volleyball tournament and a sorority convention in town we had a lot of large parties of young girls in the restaurant over the weekend, and while that was fun for the straight guys it reminded me of one reason why junior high and high school was not so much fun… teenage girls.

My first party on Friday night was part of a party of twenty-five or so and I ended up with the girls while the parents sat at a different table. I won’t go into the details of how complicated it is to do thirteen separate checks and then hand them to different adults who are paying with another server, what’s memorable about this table was something else entirely.

“Can I get my refill in a cocktail glass so I can play an April fools joke on my mother,” a little blond girl asked.

“I’m sorry, no,” I replied.

“Well why not?”

“Because its illegal,” I said, “And I would probably lose my job.”

To which she replied, “So?”

I responded the only way I could without getting in trouble at that point. I walked away and ignored her for the rest of her dinner.

Now I get she was probably joking. I get she would think she was trying to be sarcastic and funny, something teenagers aren't good at anyway. I get she’s never had to work a day in her life yet, pay bills or worry about meeting her mortgage and utility but it’s just not funny to joke about costing someone a job so that you can pull a selfish prank.

Restaurants use different glasses for alcoholic and virgin drinks for good reasons. One so we don’t get confused and serve the alcoholic drink to the wrong person, the other is to keep the alcohol out of the hands of minors. Serving a minor a drink in a cocktail glass might be funny, but it violates both my company’s policy and state liquor laws. Making a mistake with the alcohol laws is enough to get fired on the spot, and understandably so.

According to Gallup research unemployment is at 10 percent and the underemployed make up 20 percent of the workforce. I had always considered myself part of the under-employed but I’ve recently learned it’s a technical term for people working part time looking for full time work. Since I’m working full time I’m technically not underemployed although clearly I am. When you factor in people like me who are working in a menial job outside of their profession the real underemployment number is somewhere close to 30 percent in major cities. Seriously Obama still has his job why?

If I were to lose my current job because of an alcohol violation it would be extremely difficult to land an equal, or better job in the service industry, my backup profession of choice. So yeah, little blond girl, I’m sorry, but treating me in such a dismissive, afterthought manor just isn’t funny.

It’s like me saying “I hope the man you eventually marry doesn’t beat on you during the few nights he doesn’t spend with his younger, thiner, smarter mistress.” See… it’s not nice when people treat you like you don’t matter.