Op-Ed: Between “Family Guy” And “The Prince”, Adult Animated Comedy Still The Most Controversial Genre In The Industry (That’s A Good Thing)

Recently, New York Times bestselling author Robin DiAngelo was on Joseph Jaffe’s podcast Joseph Jaffe Is Not Famous where she let into popular animated comedies like South Park, The Simpsons, and Family Guy saying that these series punch-down and are racist towards people of colour. While she’s totally fine with minorities being racist towards white people, the reverse, she feels is “punching down”. She believes the aforementioned series feature acts of “subtle racism”, and as such, should somehow be censored or modified to skew towards subjective tastes.

With the recent season premiere of The Prince, USA Today has cited parody bot accounts when accusing the new HBO MAX series as “controversial”, even as the show itself (non HBO MAX subscribers can watch the first episode for free here) features a disclaimer at the beginning of the episode. It’s the typical route of most major mainstream press is to cite Twitter bot accounts to support faux outrage over any attention-getting entity. Instead of doing the hard work in journalism, they refuse to understand the boiler plate of what is in fact comedy, especially comedy in animation.

The genre of adult animated comedy is designed to challenge the paradigms of whatever constructs are put in place. Whether it’s race, sex, creed, or celebrity, the definition of comedy is pining those who take themselves too seriously. British royalty is a long outdated symbol of government, Spitting Image has been teaching us that for almost 40 years and is an even funnier parody than anything Gary Janetti’s aforementioned series has done.

Perhaps it’s fate that we’re celebrating the 40th anniversary of MTV, the network that gave us some of the most important series of all-time like Beavis and Butt-Head, Daria, and Liquid Television, so much so that MTV is both reviving classic animated IP all-the-while developing new ones. Yes, it can be scary to be “free”, but as we covered in our expose of Chris McCarthy’s efforts of skewing animation comedy writing, the best thing to do is to get of the way, understand we’re in a world of parody focused on false constructs, and as such, be able to enjoy the constant ribbing of our flaws. Comedy is just that, the reminder to not take ourselves too seriously.

Robin DiAngelo, Tipper Gore, Joseph Breen, for whatever reason people in America never seem to appreciate their artistic freedoms. Take note, as of this writing, China is rumored to NOT want to showcase Marvel’s The Eternals or Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings in local cinemas. Their reasoning? The Eternals is directed by Chinese director Chloe Zhao who has been critical of the Chinese government. Shang-Chi? Who the fuck knows?? That’s why commercial-free streaming is so important, less reliance on international subjectivity to art and it’s why streamers like Netflix has done so well. HBO MAX has a short history, already too long with flirtations with censorship. If WarnerMedia wants ANY chance of succeeding, they should knock off the warnings and disclaimers, and just focus on the good times. Disney is still trying to figure this out, but I think with the aforementioned Chinese news, that will hopefully a hit on the nose to not be afraid to take chances