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Every now and then, Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane has to hand it to the censors he’s spent his career battling and admit that, maybe, not every national tragedy needs a cheap Pez joke.
On Family Guy, MacFarlane and his writers have long flaunted their disdain for restraint, picking fights with the pearl-clutchers every chance they get and going after their rivals at The Simpsons with rape-y abandon. Born out of a late 1990s era of comedy when “Won’t somebody please think of the children?” was more than just Helen Lovejoy’s catchphrase, Family Guy was, in its early years, boundary-pushing and iconoclastic in its approach to satirizing American culture.
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However, even MacFarlane knows that “edgy” humor has its limits, and his answer to a question in a 2012 interview with Entertainment Weekly recently resurfaced as Family Guy fans rush to hear which Family Guy joke went too far:
“There have been jokes that I would have rather we not have done,” MacFarlane said when asked if Family Guy’s habitual envelope-pushing ever went too far, in his assessment. “The JFK Pez Dispenser was something I would probably not do now.” The joke comes from the 1999 Family Guy episode “A Hero Sits Next Door,” but Fox cut the bit from future airings.
Whether or not MacFarlane’s regret about the Pez Kennedys joke stemmed from a specific complaint is unclear, but the Family Guy creator did admit that, sometimes, his jokes became suddenly personal when faced with the targets themselves. “Adrien Brody got very upset with me at a party about a joke we made about him,” MacFarlane admitted. “I felt horrible. Because I actually think he’s a tremendously gifted actor. If you’re going to take a stab at somebody — even a celebrity, it can’t be just mean, it also has to be funny or they have to really, really deserve it.”
Well, for the record, I think that Marge Simpson is pretty gifted, and I don’t know if she really, really deserved what MacFarlane made Quagmire do to her.