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"[...] Critic Wayne Booth would probably call Family Guy 'blank irony,' because it has no fixed referent of criticism, it simply vacillates between the progressive and conservative, the subject speaking and the object spoken about.

"I think that much of the pleasure for many viewers is precisely in the cheap feeling of transgression, of having that 'he can't say that!' It's no accident that the most appalling characters tend to be the most quoted. For conservative viewers, bigoted characters occupy an unmediated position as the Voice of Reason (see also: Gene Hunt in Life on Mars, Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock), and a certain kind of liberal response (it's not bigotry, it's a critique of bigotry!) ends up just acting as pure alibi for that.

"Because what do we have after all that (blank) irony? Texts that have the SAME recurring motifs, the SAME privileged characters, the SAME slurs, the SAME tired old bullshit.

"Personally, I think they added the more progressive elements of this episode that people have noted precisely TO cover their arses from criticism, precisely so they could then have an extended 'deceiver' storyline ending with a puking joke.

"In the end, nothing is fucking shifted. Nothing."

-- Queen Emily of Questioning Transphobia, 2010-05-12, responding to pushback on criticism of the "Quagmire's Dad" episode of the Fox television program Family Guy

[I have not seen the episosde. In the past I have found Family Guy sometimes tastelessly juvenile, sometimes screamingly hilarious, and sometimes both ... but I kind of lost interest in it a while back when either the show or my perception of it started to shift to a lower wit:everything-else ratio. (I would expect that the show is still capable of moments of brilliance, but they started coming too infrequently for me to really care about missing a season worth of episodes at a time.) I did see a similar episode of the spinoff, The Cleveland Show, and most of the criticisms brought up at QT -- and responses to the excuses against those criticisms -- apply to that. Hauling out the same "I was so disgusted when I found out I'd been 'tricked'" line that murders of trans women use in court, as a punchline (with an over-the-top vomit sequence), is not progressive social commentary by way of irony; it's reinforcing old anti-trans memes, even if that's not what the author intended it to do. As Dyssonance wrote elsewhere in the same comment thread, "A more effective mirror would have been to have quagmire the only anti trans person, with everyone else going 'huh? What? eh, who cares.'"]