I will never, for the life of me, understand why I--why ANYBODY--thinks Family Guy is so funny.

It's a form of "humor" I dislike most--a random set of pop culture references played out to thirty minutes, with some vague semblance of plot popping up here and there. There's usually some plot that revolves around Peter drinking or Stewie trying to kill Lois, and they'll tell their jokes through "LIKE THAT TIME I..." or "IT'S LIKE..." Instead of the characters being funny themselves, or the situations they're in presently being funny, they merely make random pop culture references that are supposed to be funny.

Perhaps it's because I was raised on stuff like Monty Python. I think someone once called it absurdism. It made a handful of pop culture references, but it mainly kept in its own canon. The Pythons had to THINK to bring us this wonderful comedy from out of their own heads. And they had to make it flow! It flows seamlessly from sketch to sketch and it's all-around funny, instead of "situation + reference = punchline/joke", as Family Guy is.

I like Futurama, too; it makes a ton of references to scifi stuff, but it's far more subtle than Family Guy is. The characters are funny, and the situations they get into are pretty funny. (My personal favorite is the Roswell episode, quickly followed by the Bender-becomes-a-folk-singer episode, because of my massive music geektitude.)

I dunno. Maybe there's subliminal messages--forget Priest and Sabbath and Maiden and Zeppelin, there's subliminal messages telling you to LAUGH in Family Guy!