October 20, 2008
Family Guy Does Hitler
Spoken Too Soon
OK, OK, I just posted on the last two weeks of television but last night's Family Guy was so good I couldn't keep from commenting. It's a well-known fact that creator Seth Macfarlane is a big fan of old-school music and musicals, but this episode (authored, incidentally, by Patrick Meighan and not Macfarlane) was symphonic in more than just a tonal sense: it combined so many different styles of humor, I don't even know where to start.
Or maybe I do: the show made light of the Holocaust, Hitler, and WWII. This is risky territory, and I can't think of many who have done it successfully. In American movies, Mel Brooks pioneered the practice with The Producers. Monty Python made fun of Hitler (or rather, of Mr. Hilter) on occasion, as did one episode of Seinfeld. There have also been movies like Mrs. Henderson Presents or All the Queen's Men, which are set in WWII but don't exactly parody it. Indeed, Family Guy had already made isolated Holocaust jokes, but never treated the topic comprehensively. The show did a great job, in my opinion, but I'm curious to see if anyone gets offended.
Actually, there has already been some outcry, but for reasons I wouldn't have expected. In the midst of the 1939 invasion of Warsaw, we saw not-so-subtle (but when have they ever been?) digs at modern politicians. The first happened when Stewie found out there was uranium in Berlin and incredulously asked, "What, they have weapons of mass destruction? Why doesn't the US get in there?" Brian, looking steadily at the camera, replied acidly: "Oh, I don't know. I guess it's because they don't have oil?" And the second, a small but beautiful moment when Stewie steals a Nazi uniform and says, "Oh, wait, there's something on it." Cut to a closeup of a McCain/Palin button on the lapel. Very nice, although several viewers on the boards voiced their displeasure at the partisan attacks. This has become a refrain of its own lately--and how interesting that the appearance of that button should stir so much more controversy than a cartoon portrayal of Nazi invasions. Some might say we have our priorities out of whack here.
And what to make of the show's tortured relationship with the Brits? On the one hand, when Brian and Stewie first arrive at a still-smoldering London, they comment, "Wartime London. That's great." An acknowledgement, unusual in American entertainment of any type, of what the Brits suffered and we didn't. But next, some standard jokes about homosexual soldiers and unattractive British women. Then, finally, an oddly Anglophiliac moment when Flash Gordon's Prince Vultan (voiced by the actual Brian Blessed, I note) flies in to save the English planes, complete with Queen guitar riff. No one can include Queen without a hint of affection for the Brits.
Vultan's appearance came right after the Top Gun reference, one of many moments of 80's nostalgia. The music, while original as always, stole some recognizable themes (and scenes) from Back to the Future and Indiana Jones. And there was the surreal, almost Daliesque moment when there was an underwater police-car pileup (a la Blues Brothers, I think) after the submarine crashed. And I won't even go into the insanity of Stewie playing Hitler momentarily, and then performing the classic Marx Brothers "mirror" routine when he ran into the real Hitler.
I'm pretty sure I'm not even getting all the jokes; many of the more epic scenes had the distinct ring of being movie references, but WWII films are not my forte. I'm sure Wikipedia will catalog them all eventually. But for now, wow. To a humor theorist, this was the equivalent of an opera: complex, sweeping in scope, and at the top of its form. Bravo, Family Guy, even if the rest of the world gets angry. I'm not even gonna try to explain the humor at this point. I'm just going to chuckle happily.
