‘Simpsons’ Writer Accuses ‘Family Guy’ of Ripping Off This Classic Joke
It’s no secret that Family Guy — a show about a cartoon dum-dum with a wife and three kids — borrowed heavily from The Simpsons. Maybe a little too heavily.
As we’ve mentioned before, Matt Groening’s long-running animated series has playfully ribbed Seth MacFarlane’s show for its copycatism on multiple occasions. Family Guy’s rejoinders, on the other hand, have been a tad less playful.
But Family Guy’s Simpsons mimicry may run even deeper than you might think. As former Simpsons showrunner Mike Reiss just pointed out, literally every single episode of Family Guy begins with a low-key rip-off of a classic Simpsons joke.
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While guesting on Nancy Cartwright’s podcast, Simpsons Declassified, Reiss discussed the Season Four episode “Lisa’s First Word,” specifically the couch gag from the opening credits. Up until that point, the couch gags were typically just very brief one-off jokes, like when the Simpson family accidentally sat on the dog or the time they met the Flintstones.
But in the beginning of “Lisa’s First Word,” after the Simpsons arrive in their living room in the usual fashion, the orchestration of the theme music becomes more circus-y, and they’re joined by a chorus line and jugglers. The walls then lift, revealing a Las Vegas-esque stage show complete with elephants, magicians and fire breathers. The whole thing was way longer and more involved than all the couch gags that had come before.
“I’ll be the catty one to say, we did that, and then when Family Guy came on the air, the opening credits of Family Guy look exactly the same,” Reiss stated. “The curtains open behind them, it’s a big production number.”
“Steal from the best!” Cartwright added.
It’s true that the ending of Family Guy’s intro does bear a striking resemblance to that one Simpsons joke. But as Reiss admitted, the joke was only written to solve a major production problem. “We did that because the show was too short,” he explained. “We had no desire to write an extra-long couch joke, but Al (Jean) and I were very ruthless and we cut anything we didn’t think was working. And we would wind up with, like, 17 minute shows. We just wrote that out of necessity.”
Reiss also noted that Sideshow Bob’s classic rake bit, in which Bart's nemesis repeatedly gets smacked in the face by yard tools over and over and over again, was similarly devised “because the show was too short.”
Thank goodness Family Guy didn’t also steal the “character makes the same pained groan for a shockingly lengthy amount of time” joke. Oh, wait.
