How has television shows like Family Guy and South Park shaped the tolerability for vulgar and aggressive humor on national television with a specific audience of young teens? Although I wouldn’t call myself an avid viewer of many of the cartoon comedy shows that you’ll see on television today, like Family Guy and South Park, I have seen enough episodes in order to understand the gist of the overall jokes in both shows. That being said, I’m familiar with the jokes that have created controversies because of the satire, mockery, and backwards humor that offends the victims of the comic attacks, and/or spectators in general. In many cases, these two shows have made a mockery of high profile celebrities, businesses, religions, etc. by either casting them in a bad light, or poking fun of them for recent embarrassing events. If you were to watch an episode of either show, there’s no doubt that you’d find an occurrence of aggressive humor. Consequently, I have heard that there has been a number of lawsuits filed against both these shows, and complaints regarding their content. From some of the most famed celebrities in our world today, to the common parent that doesn’t want their child watching such “garbage” television, many people have spoken up about their opposition to these shows. I would assume that many of the people who have felt, and are feeling victimized by either of the shows have sued the management or television network who created it. I’m not sure exactly what these charges may pertain to, but I would imagine they are probably along the lines of censorship.
After I Googled “South Park controversy” and “Family Guy controversy”, a whole list of articles came up that covered the topic. There were articles written by a number of blogs as well as the mainstream news sources like CNN and NY times. I only skimmed through the articles but I found that the more serious cases of displeasure for the shows came from religious groups that felt very offended by South Park and Family Guy’s nature. Not only that, but Family guy has stirred problems with political figures like Sarah Palin over her depiction in the show. Palin also complained about the way Family Guy made fun of a character in one episode, who had down syndrome. The number of complaints rolls and I’m very curious as to what other areas of the public sphere that these two shows have caused problems with, and how those problems are reacted to by the media, and if there has been any sort of solution to prevent there occurrences.
Therefore, I’m also curious as to how the databases work here at Trinity, and what tools are provided in order to fulfill student’s research needs. In my high school, we used online databases in mainly history so that we could find old documents, and encyclopedia type information that was essential to writing a research paper. I would expect that the Trinity library has similar tools.
This topic does in fact interest me because I enjoy watching South Park and Family so much when I get the chance to. But when I view some of the vulgar content in each show, I wonder how they still air on Fox and Comedy Central, both widely popular stations. I’m curious if my assumption that people respond negatively to the controversial subjects in each show is true, and to what extent.
