UGO.com interview with Seth MacFarlane
Phillip Roncoroni
Exclusive interview by Daniel Robert Epstein, contributing editor
When I first discovered The Family Guy it was like that Golden Age of The
Simpsons [Seasons 3 & 4], but just dirtier and more twisted. A lot of this
is due to the work of series creator Seth MacFarlane, and that's why the man
is a god to me. I hope that people who read this interview find it amusing,
because he answered questions I have wanted to ask him since the show first
went on the air in 1999.
UGO: I'm one of those Family Guy fanatics.
Seth MacFarlane: [laughs] The more of you, the better.
UGO: I think the most unique things about Family Guy is how you let jokes go
long. Like Peter fighting the Chicken Man for about two minutes. I timed it.
SM: Yeah, it was the majority of the first act.
UGO: Also him banging his knee in the Willy Wonka episode and hissing in
pain.
SM: That's a very frequently referenced scene.
UGO: So people always compare Family Guy to other cartoons, but that kind of
joke is so different. How do you know that letting a joke like that go long
will be funny?
SM: You really don't. The chicken fight may have been the first time we
tried that. The Simpsons has done that type of thing, but never to that
extent. The chicken fight was a gamble. I think it was three or four writers
who came up with that gag. It was something that made us laugh on paper. So
we thought, what the hell? Let's try it.
UGO: No one has ever done gags like that before. Not [Monty] Python, no one.
SM: Sometimes, live-action comedies will do it, but not intentionally. It's
the easiest thing in the world to write, because it knocks out another two
minutes you have to fill.
The chicken fight was a very complex scene to put together. It was one of
those things that the longer it went on, the more we were laughing. We
thought it could be a trademark for the show. It became the joke that
begins, and it's funny, then it goes on longer and it's not funny, then it
goes on even longer and it's hysterically funny.
UGO: When doing my research I found that, when you started the show, you got
this unprecedented three-year, $2 million-plus a year contract before your
25th birthday. That must have blown you away.
SM: My credit rating went up overnight, which was nice. Prior to that deal,
no one would give me a credit card. That was the greatest benefit of that
situation. But yeah, it was exciting. It was a one-time thing; those deals
don't exist anymore. I've been with FOX for five years, and it's been a
great experience.
UGO: Do you find Family Guy as funny as everyone else does?
SM: It's interesting. The problem that I have is that I've seen all the
episodes about a thousand times because of editing and everything else. When
I'm watching an episode I haven't seen in a while, I get a chuckle. I was
going through some deleted scenes that will hopefully be on the second
release. I found myself laughing out loud at that stuff.
UGO: I spoke to Harry Shearer about the movie he directed, called Teddy
Bear's Picnic. There were a lot of racist jokes in it and, when I asked him
about that, he said that those jokes are about making fun of racist jokes. I
would assume Family Guy's racial humor is the same thing.
SM: Our philosophy was that we were the equal opportunity offender. If you
single out one particular group, then you're in trouble. But if you hit
everyone equally, it becomes a general kind of thing.
UGO: Was the problem with the episode that never aired ["When You Wish upon
a Weinstein"] was that it made too many Jewish jokes?
SM: That episode is, ironically, not the edgiest episode we ever did.
UGO: I saw a download of it.
SM: The episode we did with the Pope ["Holy Crap," season 1 episode 11], I
think, was a lot more offensive to Catholics than the "Weinstein" was to
Jews. I think more of it had to do with internal politics.
UGO: So it didn't air because Jews run Hollywood?
SM: That could be one theory [laughs]. I think it was that hearing the story
described scared a lot of people. It was one of those situations where every
executive told us privately that they think it's hysterical, but it can't be
aired. It makes for a good extra feature for the next DVD set.
UGO: Are we never going to find out what's up with the evil monkey in
Chris's closet?
SM: Chris and the evil monkey, who knows? There was an episode in the third
season where we got a little bit of inside info into the evil monkey's
background.
UGO: Yeah, I think his wife was cheating on him with another monkey.
SM: He just snapped and ended up in Chris' closet. I'm not sure how. There
was a writer on the show named Mike Barker, and he pitched the concept of
the monkey in the closet. That pose that the monkey used to do, the pointing
and baring of the teeth, was something that Mike used to do in the writer's
room.
UGO: Jokes like the monkey and the idea of crashing a car into the house
happen over and over again. Do those jokes come from the same person each
time, or do the other writers pick up on it and want to do it in other
situations?
SM: It's sort of a general thing. Somebody will say, "Hey, that joke was
funny, we should find a way to bring that character back." It's kind of a
collective feeling that the entire writer's get about a certain joke. The
relationship between Brian and Stewie was something that did not exist. It
never occurred to me that those two characters would be good together as
perfect foils. That emerged from the writers. With any half-hour comedy, it
kind of takes on its own life and finds itself.
UGO: How does a writer pitch a coin being dropped off the Empire State
Building, ripping through a cop and exposing a naked little man inside?
SM: I think they may have done that joke on Becker.
UGO: [laughs] I guess I'm really trying to find out how your writer's room
worked.
SM: You start to think in terms of it being a cartoon where anything could
happen. What haven't we seen before? Some of those more out there jokes were
written in the wee hours of the morning when we were working very late.
Somehow, they remained funny the next day. Those come from different places.
When you are in a room and your job is to write jokes ten hours a day, your
mind starts going to strange places. But believe me, there are plenty of
those jokes that we've put in there, then screened and were just not at all
funny, and just felt moronic.
UGO: I watched a lot of Family Guy with a friend of mine that went to school
in Rhode Island where you're from and the show is set. He told me about a
lot of references to Rhode Island that I never got. Like James Wood High
School, because James Woods is from there.
SM: Yeah there is a lot of local stuff. The name of the town, Quahog, is the
name of a clam. In the standard shot of the exterior of the Griffins' house,
the buildings you see in the background is Providence. There is the Fleet
Bank building and the Hospital Trust Building. Also, the beer that Peter
drinks, Pawtucket Patriot.Pawtucket is a town that's near Providence.
UGO: Candice Bergen became a friend to the show. She had her voice in two
episodes.
SM: Yes. One of the executive producers of Family Guy [Craig Hoffman] had
written for Murphy Brown. She was feminist Gloria Ironbox in one episode,
and then another episode, the whole main cast of Murphy Brown [Candice
Bergen, Faith Ford, Charles Kimbrough and Joe Regalbuto] came back to do a
Murphy Brown gag. That was pretty amazing. On top of that, it was a joke
that made fun of the show. It was extraordinary that they all got it.
UGO: I saw picture on the Net of you where you looked like Stewie.
SM: That was probably when I had my old glasses frames. I had these large
round frames that made my eyes look big and bulbous, like Stewie. My
assistant hauled me out of the office one day and forced me to go get new
glasses.
UGO: I spoke to Lacey Chabert recently [Lacey had done the voice of Meg
originally]. She said she liked the show, but couldn't commit to it.
SM: We never really quite understood what went down there. It was some kind
of contractual mix-up. She had not meant to commit to an extended number of
seasons.
UGO: Was it a conflict doing a Nickelodeon show [The Wild Thornberries] and
your show?
SM: We're not sure. She was really sweet when she was there. It was early
enough on that it wasn't a big deal to replace her, and Mila [Kunis] did a
fantastic job.
UGO: Something you mentioned in the commentary is that Mila is a talker.
SM: She is. If you let her go, she could go on for a good 45 minutes. We
would let her run off some steam at the beginning of the record sessions.
UGO: Do you think you ever made mistakes on the show that contributed it to
being cancelled?
SM: Our third season, I thought, was really our best. We really found the
characters. We were still doing a lot of cutaways, but we weren't relying on
them as much as we were. The characters could really hold their own. Even
certain people at the network have said the show had a scheduling problem.
Everyone at FOX thought it was funny, and tried their best. After the first
scheduling blunder, when we moved to Thursdays after seven episodes, we
really had a tough time recovery. There are a lot of networks that would
have pulled us after the second season.
UGO: It was just too bad because, some weeks, even fans couldn't find the
show.
SM: Hey, there were nights I couldn't find it. I would be calling friends
and asking them when the show was on. It was a tough situation, but it's the
kind of thing where we hope there will be life for these characters beyond
this initial run.
UGO: I hope you're not talking about comic books, because those Simpsons
comics really suck.
SM: No [laughs]. Well, you got Harvard grads writing that show.
Well, with the combination of the DVD release, and the Cartoon Network is
going to be showing the reruns. In a perfect world, we would love the Star
Trek phenomenon. We'd love that to happen, but I think it will be
rediscovered.
UGO: Some critics really hated the show, like Ken Tucker at Entertainment
Weekly.
SM: We never understood what his beef was. There were some reviewers that
would make specific complaints, like it was too offensive or scattershot
humor. Peter's too much like Homer. To me, Peter is more like Ralph Kramden
or Archie Bunker than Homer. But Ken Tucker would consistently be very
vague.
UGO: He would just write, "I hate this show."
SM: Yeah, pretty much. There was no pleasing the guy. At one point, there
was a gag we eventually cut out because we thought that, if we put this on
the air, then we're going to look petty. At one point, Peter turns to the
camera and says "Up yours, Ken Tucker".
UGO: I did read that some critic called Stewie a Nazi baby.
SM: Well, Stewie is what he is. He's not a character one should emulate.
There was one bit we did that was cut out where Stewie is hearing sounds in
his head, and it's sounds from a Hitler rally. That's not where we wanted to
go with Stewie. It was intended to be showing Stewie wanting to take over
the world. I always thought of him as a Professor Moriarity [Sherlock
Holmes' archenemy].
We found another aspect of Stewie's character I wasn't aware of. Stewie is
this villainous character, but he's also this big queen. We got a lot of
mileage out of the fact that he is wrestling with his sexuality and his
frustration emerges by wanting to dominate the world. He was the most
complex character in the series.
UGO: The kind of comedy that Family Guy does is very American, which also,
Chris Elliott used to do on David Letterman and Get a Life. Are you a fan of
his?
SM: I didn't see a whole lot of that show. The few episodes I saw, I thought
were hysterical. Chris Elliott could read the phonebook and he's funny. I
had a lot of friends that were obsessed with that show.
UGO: What's next?
SM: I have a couple of television concepts I'm getting ready to go out with.
I had a nice break after Family Guy ended, which was the one positive thing
that came out of it. I had not had a vacation in four years. I'm also
working on a movie project that I'm not at liberty to divulge. It's
animated, and I think it will be really groundbreaking.
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<snip>
TC1
jimmy
Great interview, thanks for the post as well.