Summary of "Family Guy and Freud: Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
- Submitted by: bigdaddydglenn
- Views: 801
- Category: Politics
- Date Submitted: 02/04/2015 10:04 AM
- Pages: 3
- Report this Essay
It’s Not About Freud
Antonia Peacocke, author of “Family Guy and Freud: Jokes and Their Relations to the Unconscious,” was like many other Americans, she admits, only seeing shows like Family Guy at the surface, thinking them to merely be toilet humor and bad language. She even confessed about having made comparisons of this shows insensitivity to that of “Don Imus’ infamous comments about the Rutgers women’s basketball team” (Peacocke, 300). However, as there are always (at least) two sides to an argument. She saw that the fans cared about the show so much that they saved it from getting cancelled TWICE. With her brother and friends constantly urging her to watch it, she finally cracked to the peer pressure. She began to see it less as a show merely being offensive for the fun of it, and notices the blatant satire that many Americans fail to see. Peacocke succumbs to the fact that it is offensive, however the writers know that the Family Guy audience is not full of mindless drones blindly following at laughing at whatever they say. We are much more aware than past generations; aware of what is funny to us personally and what is meant to be satire.
We must stop pretending that our audience members are stupid. This is a new age, with video games allowing players free-roam, to make their own decisions, and that results in an “unwillingness to be programmed by the programmers”, allowed to make our own decisions about what’s funny. You even see it with the large disappearance of sitcoms; people don’t need to be told when to laugh anymore. However, where shows like The Simpsons don’t comment on social issues, rather on the media’s portrayal of these issues, Peacocke argues that “Macfarlane and company seem to do the reverse” (305). The writers trust their viewers to be able to discriminate between satire and reality, and really analyze what they’re watching. The world is becoming more intelligent, though it may not seem like it with crude jokes being a...
Antonia Peacocke, author of “Family Guy and Freud: Jokes and Their Relations to the Unconscious,” was like many other Americans, she admits, only seeing shows like Family Guy at the surface, thinking them to merely be toilet humor and bad language. She even confessed about having made comparisons of this shows insensitivity to that of “Don Imus’ infamous comments about the Rutgers women’s basketball team” (Peacocke, 300). However, as there are always (at least) two sides to an argument. She saw that the fans cared about the show so much that they saved it from getting cancelled TWICE. With her brother and friends constantly urging her to watch it, she finally cracked to the peer pressure. She began to see it less as a show merely being offensive for the fun of it, and notices the blatant satire that many Americans fail to see. Peacocke succumbs to the fact that it is offensive, however the writers know that the Family Guy audience is not full of mindless drones blindly following at laughing at whatever they say. We are much more aware than past generations; aware of what is funny to us personally and what is meant to be satire.
We must stop pretending that our audience members are stupid. This is a new age, with video games allowing players free-roam, to make their own decisions, and that results in an “unwillingness to be programmed by the programmers”, allowed to make our own decisions about what’s funny. You even see it with the large disappearance of sitcoms; people don’t need to be told when to laugh anymore. However, where shows like The Simpsons don’t comment on social issues, rather on the media’s portrayal of these issues, Peacocke argues that “Macfarlane and company seem to do the reverse” (305). The writers trust their viewers to be able to discriminate between satire and reality, and really analyze what they’re watching. The world is becoming more intelligent, though it may not seem like it with crude jokes being a...