Family Guy recently returned to airwaves. Here are the funniest cutaway gags from the show’s first three seasons.
Family Guy returned to the airwaves recently for the second half of its 18th season. Who could have guessed that this show would have lasted over two decades since its rocky beginnings? It was cancelled after its third season due to low ratings, but the show’s young, college-aged fans were persistent, and as a result of strong DVD sales, Fox revived the show.
Since then, creator Seth MacFarlane has become a mainstream success, authoring additional animated shows, several films, and a sci-fi send-up of Star Trek. He even has a moderately successful career as a singer, specializing in big band American standards.
What has kept Family Guy unique and distinctive for 18 seasons is its reliance on cutaway gags. These are rapid fire non-sequiturs, that are framed either as flashbacks or intrusions upon the episode’s main plot. Good cutaway gags allow the show to indulge in the bizarre and the nostalgic, and make Family Guy easy to binge, because even the weaker episodes can have fantastic individual jokes scattered throughout.
We’re looking at the best cutaway gags from the first three seasons of Family Guy–the original run of the show from 1999-2003, before it became a mainstream success. Family Guy is currently streaming all its episodes on Hulu.
1. Kool-Aid Man
Episode: “Death Has A Shadow” – Season 1 Episode 1
Trigger Line: “Oh no!”
The biggest laugh in the show’s pilot episode came from this gag, when the Kool-Aid Man broke through the wall of Judge Blackman’s courtroom. “OH YEAH!” The show has continued to reference this early, classic moment; the Kool-Aid Man has made at least 10 appearances in subsequent episodes.
2. Do Not Push Button
Episode: “The Son Also Draws” – Season 1 Episode 6
Trigger Line: “Rules were made to be broken!”
What makes this gag work is the unexpected effect that pressing the button has. One would expect a bomb to go off, or for some other, mechanical chain reaction to take place. Instead, a karate master walks into the room, bows, and kicks Peter in the head.
3. Hit A Deer
Episode: “Brian: Portrait Of A Dog” – Season 1 Episode 7
Trigger Line: “Yeah, except for the time Dad hit that deer.”
It’s a nightmare situation for every driver: You’re in a fender bender, and you have to interact with the other driver. Is this worth calling the insurance company? Do you call a cop? Do you take down the other guy’s information? You just want to get out of there before one of you starts screaming. Or grunting, in the deer’s case.
4. Fixin’ The Shed
Episode: “Brian: Portrait Of A Dog” – Season 1 Episode 7
Trigger Line: “Can’t you two go back to the way things used to be?”
Family Guy created this loving tribute to black and white cartoons from the pre-synchronized sound era. Especially nice touches include Brian’s black pupils, the flexible stretch-and squash physics of the characters, and the subtitle placard at the end of the short. “ha-ha-ha-ha!”
5. One Horse Town
Episode: “Peter, Peter, Caviar Eater” – Season 2 Episode 1
Trigger Line: “Quahog? That one horse town?”
This gag is simple but effective; it’s a figure of speech, taken literally. For whatever reason, Family Guy has the best horse characters. This is one of many examples.
6. Chicken Fight #1
Episode: “Da Boom!” – Season 2 Episode 3
Trigger Line: “I don’t take coupons from giant chickens. Not after last time.”
All this over an expired coupon? This is one of those things that people who don’t even watch the show know about. The Family Guy chicken fights are a loving sendup of every action movie trope. This first one, which has Peter and Ernie fighting on a truck, on a helicopter, and in an office building, got the proverbial ball rolling on one of the show’s longest running gags.
7. That’s Tom Selleck’s Food!
Episode: “Da Boom!” – Season 2 Episode 3
Trigger Line: “When I think back at all the food we’ve wasted in this house…”
When Peter wastes money, he wastes it in a way that benefits no one. Remember the Peter-copter? Or the gold tuxedo? Or how about this cutaway, where he takes time to feed beans to Tom Selleck on Magnum P.I.? None for Higgins though. He already had his.
8. I’m Not Stephen King
Episode: “Brian In Love” – Season 2 Episode 4
Trigger Line: “He suggested I go out into the world and pursue my dreams. I’m leaving tomorrow.”
Stephen King once said that Dean Koontz’s work is “sometimes… just awful.” Clearly, Brian Griffin agrees with that assessment; this cutaway is a send-up of the infamous car accident that nearly killed Stephen King. Brian is initially worried he ran over King, but when he finds out it’s actually Koontz, he backs over him again for good measure.
9. Albert Einstein, Patent Thief
Episode: “The King Is Dead” – Season 2 Episode 7
Trigger Line: “Peter, a lot of creative people have mindless jobs… Albert Einstein worked at a patent office.”
Albert Einstein is more a myth than a real person these days; his name is shorthand for “genius.” So when Family Guy exploded that myth in one, hilarious cutaway, it hit that much deeper. Smith’s Theory of Relativity is now Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, thanks to a cutthroat attitude and a booth window to the back of the head.
10. Infinite Monkey Theorem
Episode: “The King Is Dead” – Season 2 Episode 7
Trigger Line: “Put enough monkeys in a room with a typewriter and they’ll produce Shakespeare.”
The Simpsons did it first and best, but Family Guy’s take on the infinite monkey theorem, which imagines the monkeys as the occupants of a burnt out writer’s room, is a close second.
11. Mr. Fargus Dissects A Clown
Episode: “Running Mates” – Season 2 Episode 10
Trigger Line: “Oh my God! That’s Mr. Fargus! He was my favorite teacher!”
Morbid and distasteful, this cutaway took the cool, fun teacher trope to its most ridiculous extreme. There’s a fine line between outside-the-box lesson planning and emotional disturbance.
12. Big Bird
Episode: “A Picture Is Worth 1000 Bucks” – Season 2 Episode 11
Trigger Line: “[Whistles]”
Big Bird is such a recognizable, beloved figure, that his very presence in Family Guy is hilarious on its face. When Meg practices one of her bird calls in Rockefeller Center, a very grouchy Big Bird shows up to answer it.
“Yeah? Well, whaddya want?”
There’s that New York hospitality. He nearly punches Meg in the face for inconveniencing him.
13. Please Sir, I Want Some More
Episode: “Let’s Go To The Hop” – Season 2 Episode 14
Trigger Line: “‘Oliver Twit’ if you ask me. I would have done things rather differently, I can tell you that!”
One of the most famous scenes in English literature is when Charles Dickens’ protagonist, Oliver Twist, asks for more gruel from the overseer. In the novel, this leads to a beating. In Stewie’s fantasy, it leads to pure wish fulfilment.
14. Cavity Creeps
Episode: “There’s Something About Paulie” – Season 2 Episode 16
Trigger Line: “She doesn’t want to see me fall in with a tough crowd again.”
This is the type of gag where Seth MacFarlane dates himself. Everyone who came of age in the late ’70s and early ’80s knows exactly what this is: a sendup of a classic ad campaign, featuring the squeaky clean Crest Team against the evil, rock-like Cavity Creeps.
15. The Dating Game
Episode: “There’s Something About Paulie” – Season 2 Episode 16
Trigger Line: “What if something happens to you? I’m too old to start dating again!”
The real-life Dating Game was filled with double entendre questions like these, and Peter suffers humiliation from a particularly mixed metaphor.
Woman: “I’m an ice-cream cone. How are you going to eat me?”
Peter: “Well, I would try to eat you really fast, before I got flaccid!”
16. Peter Sees Cats on Broadway
Episode: “Brian Does Hollywood” – Season 3 Episode 2
Trigger Line: “It wouldn’t be the first time you’ve disrupted a performance.”
Now that the Cats movie just flopped at the box office, this cutaway is even funnier. Peter runs over Munkustrap with his car and inmediately begins babbling excuses.
“I didn’t see it! It jumped right out in front of my car!”
At the time the episode originally aired, Cats was the longest running Broadway musical in history, and played at the Winter Garden Theatre for 18 years before closing in 2000.
17. Evil Monkey Origins
Episode: “Ready, Willing, And Disabled” – Season 3 Episode 15
Trigger Line: “You know, the sad part is? He wasn’t always evil.”
The Evil Monkey was one of the earliest viral characters on the show, and this cutaway gives him just enough of a background story. He would later finally get the full story treatment in the Season 8 episode “Hannah Banana.”
18. Expressed Written Consent
Episode: “A Very Special Family Guy Freakin’ Christmas” – Season 3 Episode 16
Trigger Line: “Sorry, the VCR hasn’t worked since you tried to tape Monday Night Football.”
There’s lots of laws and regulations that are on the books, technically, but no one follows. You’re not supposed to tape Monday Night Football, and Peter learns the consequences of doing so, the hard way.
19. Stewie’s Sexy Party
Episode: “From Method To Madness” – Season 3 Episode 18
Trigger Line: “Well at first, I wanted you to fail. But then I realized you’d be out of the house five days a week! Which means I’d be free to throw some of my sexy parties!”
This Hugh Hefner fantasy is oddly innocent (Stewie is a baby, after all) and has made repeated appearances in subsequent episodes. Apparently, Stewie has that ship captain’s uniform underneath his clothes at all times. The kid is ready for a sexy party at a moment’s notice.
20. Eye Surgery
Episode: “When You Wish Upon A Weinstein” – Season 3 Episode 22
Trigger Line: “I just don’t think it’s [laser surgery] safe.”
Family Guy would eventually create full-length Star Wars spoofs of the original three movies. But in this cutaway from the “banned episode” of Season 3, Luke accidentally kills a woman by using a lightsaber to do eye surgery. Obi-Wan’s suggestion–to use The Force to guide him–doesn’t help matters. A frustrated Luke turns to his mentor:
Luke: “Are you happy?”
Obi-Wan: “I’ve never been happy.”
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