Family Guy reversed its stance on 'gay jokes'. Why?

When executive producer Alec Sulkin talked about the show's chequered history with jibes about Peter Griffin being gay, he did it in a new and admirable way. And then everything fell apart

I’m not sure how to tell you this, but here we go: I watch a lot of Family Guy. I don’t remember making a conscious decision to start watching a lot of Family Guy. Basically, I met an American man who had come of age, like me, in the 2000s, when watching shows like Family Guy (i.e. cartoons for adults with a knack for political and/or crass jokes) was a harmless, kind of edgy thing to do. Then, said American man and I got married, and, like most millennial couples, we’re incapable of consuming a meal together without simultaneously watching a TV show.

Most nights, we try to stick to slightly more high-brow staples such as The Handmaid’s Tale or Succession, but as it turns out, we’re busy people! We don’t always have time to watch 45 minutes to an hour of TV! This is 2019, and even keeping up with televisual output is much, much harder than it should be.

Cue Family Guy, an easily digestible show that can be watched out of order, any time, and without much previous knowledge. Most episodes last 20 minutes and they're pretty much self-contained. For better or worse, this junk food of the televisual world has become a larger part of my life than I ever intended.

This is why I paid attention when, last year, in the January 2019 episode “Trump Guy” (an interesting episode in and of itself, since it took on the Trump administration and featured Meg Griffin as a victim of sexual assault on the president’s part), the show announced its intention to stop resorting to “gay jokes”. The way in which the decision was communicated, too, was worthy of attention. It started with a fictional Donald Trump telling Peter: “Many children have learned their favourite Jewish, black, and gay jokes by watching your show over the years”, to which Peter replied: “In fairness, we’ve been trying to phase out the gay stuff.”

This moment was great in many ways: the show acknowledged its responsibility in shaping young viewers’ minds, Peter attempted to deflect the criticism with a little touch of meta humour – a Family Guy hallmark – and we were all left looking forward to a gay-joke-free future. Executive producer Alec Sulkin shared this thoughtful tidbit in an interview with TV Line around the same time: “If you look at a show from 2005 or 2006 and put it side-by-side with a show from 2018 or 2019, they’re going to have a few differences. Some of the things we felt comfortable saying and joking about back then, we now understand is not acceptable.”

Sulkin’s quote might not seem extraordinary at first glance, but it’s truly remarkable. Go ahead and think back to the last time in recent memory that anyone in the entertainment industry brought up their own past behaviour, acknowledged it no longer held up to today’s standards, didn’t get defensive, and committed to adopting a different approach in the future. All I can think of are half-hearted apologies and rehashed complaints about “PC culture” and how it’s slowly killing the very concept of comedy. Not many actors, producers or directors ever get to the point that Sulkin seemed easily to have gotten to.

But of course, this is 2019 and we can’t have anything nice, remember? So it’s not exactly surprising that, in a recent season 18 episode, Family Guy appeared to do a complete 180 by reversing its stance on so-called “gay jokes”.

Titled “Disney’s The Reboot”, the episode sees Peter and his family trying to find a new identity for their show. Peter gets thrown into a fictional episode of Carpool Karaoke, James Corden’s recurring segment on The Late Late Show, and announces he just had a threesome with two other men. He later asks the host to let him out “next to this hot guy”. The sequence isn’t so homophobic that it makes you want to throw your remote into your TV screen (though by all means, feel free), but it’s still kind of “meh”. If you’re going to joke about sexuality, do it properly, and maybe make sure your quip packs enough of a punch to justify its own existence – otherwise, you’re just joking about being gay for the sake of it.

After this sequence, Peter Griffin goes back to the focus group helping him craft a Family Guy reboot, at which point someone asks him: “I thought I read you guys were phasing out gay jokes?” Peter shoots back: “That quote was taken out of context and widely misunderstood.”

Again, on the surface, it’s not enough to elicit an outraged gasp. It’s just another bit of meta humour. It’s almost self-deprecation on the show’s writers’ part – we thought we could do without “gay jokes”, but it turns out we just like them too much, silly us! And of course, this is Family Guy, one of several shows (see also: South Park) that has made irreverence part of its brand, meaning that any criticism of it can immediately be classified as finger-wagging.

And yet, it must be said: what a shame, Family Guy! You were so close to getting it right! You set such a nice example of what things might look like if the entertainment industry reflected on its own practices with a sense of accountability and kindness, and then you snatched it all away. Why?

Peter Griffin’s sexuality is a recurring theme on Family Guy, where it’s regularly implied that Peter, a middle-aged married man in the fictional city of Quahog in the (real) state of Rhode Island, might be gay. The “Peter is gay” jokes are never the most incisive in the series, and frankly, you could remove them without losing out. That’s not to say it’s impossible (or forbidden) to joke about “sensitive” topics such as sexuality. But if the point of your quip is the very concept that someone might be gay, one might argue that your writing is getting kind of lazy.

As aforementioned, Family Guy is currently in its 18th season. Staying abreast of our times should be a priority for the show’s writers, who presumably want to see it challenge The Simpsons’ longevity record someday (The Simpsons has its own issues, but the point I’m trying to make here is that it’s been on TV for 30 years, which makes it the longest-running scripted series in history). If Family Guy’s commitment to “irreverence” (sometimes, “irreverence” is just another word for “insensitivity”) takes precedence over its quest for relevance, then the show’s future will be jeopardised, and rightly so.

That the show would specifically highlight the topic of “gay jokes” in this manner before doing a public about-face is just bizarre. How hard can it possibly be to shelve the “Peter is gay” punchline once and for all? In the words of Nike (I know), just do it.

That punchline is useless. It’s clutter. Go full Marie Kondo and thank it for its service if you must, and then dispose of it. The world (well, maybe not the world, but at the very least the fictional town of Quahog) will be better for it.