Tag: Family Guy

What ‘Bob’s Burgers’ says about American Society: What people will do to have a good family

At face value, it would be one of those strange mysteries. But when you dig into the issue a bit, it makes a lot of sense and says a lot about what kind of society we really are as Americans. I’ll admit, I was perplexed as to why any studio would produce a Bob’s Burgers theatrical release. With so many streaming services that are out there these days, why would anybody make a movie of the somewhat popular cartoon on Fox called Bob’s Burgers, which is a version of the typical animated formula that they have made so popular over the years with other offerings like The Simpsons, and Family Guy? I’m not too fond of Bob on Bob’s Burgers; I think of him as a loser. He’s not very ambitious; as a dad, he’s perpetually broke. He runs a little New England burger place in a resort town, and he can barely rub two pennies together.

Most of the episodes are about the problems they have as a family because they never have enough money to do things. And of course, my famous saying to people complaining about not having enough money is just to work and make more. Especially in America, if you want money, you can have it. You may not make all the money you want in 8 hours of work. Forty hours a week may not be enough; you might have to work 80. When I was raising a family, I have told the stories of only having one car, and I rode a bicycle 25 miles a day, so my wife could have the car for the kids and worked two full-time jobs to make the money we needed as a family. So, I can’t relate to Bob in Bob’s Burgers, and I find it odd that young people like the show so much. But, apparently, they do. Enough so that they made a theatrical movie release this year as something they thought was justifiable. 

I also had a unique experience while attending various comic cons with my daughter, an outstanding illustrator who does exhibitions of her work at those types of events. As I have said, it’s interesting to watch people cosplay at comic cons, the kind of outfits they want to dress up in, and invest so much of their time to bring characters they enjoy to life in some way. I can understand the various Star Wars characters and those from the Marvel movies. Those are action movies that make you feel good when leaving the movie theater in some way, so it makes sense that people would want to dress up as those characters during Halloween and at comic cons. Bringing fantasy to life is a specific function of the human imagination, a conceptual vehicle that expresses inner values that manifest in mythological impressions during social exchanges. Dressing up as a favorite character is a way to vote for the kind of values that you see in pop culture. Imitation is the ultimate compliment. But while I was at these events, I was just a little shocked to see young people dressing up as characters from Bob’s Burgers, which is hard because they are all cartoons. It’s not easy to bring a cartoon character to life, yet people did, and some were really good costumes. Why? I’ve watched many episodes of Bob’s Burgers, and I just don’t enjoy the show that much. For me, it’s often filler in the background while I’m doing five or six other things. I occasionally watch it because I like the colors of cartoons. But I can’t relate to the characters much at all. 

Oddly enough, my wife likes Bob’s Burgers a lot. I’d say it’s her favorite show, so this problem has been something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Yet, in working to understand the current political sentiment of our mass society, I felt something was going on with Bob’s Burgers that was worth noticing, significantly if film executives believed that a theatrical release of a subpar cartoon series on Fox justified its own movie. So the one thing that really jumps out about Bob’s Burgers that is likable is that all the family members like each other. Bob, his wife, and his three children all live in a little dump of an apartment, yet they don’t act like a bunch of losers who are waiting in line with a bottle of booze to buy lottery tickets. They work hard for the money they make and love each other as a family while running the family burger business. Bob is always a few cents short of whatever the family needs, but his wife never talks about leaving him for a better life with a more ambitious lover. The kids are just happy to have mom and dad together in the house. The brothers and sisters aren’t out to kill each other; they go on many neighborhood adventures and solve problems like rational people. They are a very “traditional” family. 

And that’s what it is with Bob’s Burgers; like many of the other Fox primetime cartoons, they all have in common a mom and a dad in the home who love each other. That is certainly the case with Family Guy, a very progressive show that features a family that stays together. There aren’t step-parents and step-children in these cartoons. They are all very traditional. Other animated shows have tried to make it with more progressive storylines, but they always fail. The ones that stick around over the years are the cartoons that feature traditional family settings. The Simpsons have been on for decades now, a very long time. And yet, with many hundreds of storylines, Homer and his wife Marge still love each other and work through marital problems together in a way that never ends in divorce or a family breakup.   And that was the key to this Bob’s Burgers mystery. Here was a family on an animated show with many problems, and they seemed limited in their ability to solve those problems. But, they enjoy each other as a family. You don’t see Bob running around on the town to cheat on his wife. Or running away from the attention that the kids obviously want from him. He’s a good dad, even if he’s unambitious socially. And his family loves him for it. Obviously, the audiences who can’t say the same about their own families have found a reliable father figure in Bob’s Burgers. In Bob’s Burgers, they see the family they always wanted and never had in the fictional settings. And it has such an impact on them that they even dress up as the characters in cosplay. It says a lot about the true state of our society when those types of fictional stories indicate what people really feel inside. Their vote for the type of entertainment they wish to enjoy says what all people really crave outside of political theater. Most people would give up a lot to have a family like Bob’s Burgers, where at least mom and dad loved each other, and their siblings worked together to help make the family a family. In a world full of disappointments, at least Bob and his animated television family were willing to fight through disappointments for the key ingredient to all happy societies, a good family that might not have a lot of money, but at least they had what all humans crave, a genuine love for each other. And that is worth noting and something that should give us all hope for the future. 

Rich Hoffman

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Mitt Romney is Wrong, Joe Biden is Not a Good Man: The collapse of the Liberal World Order as shown on the Family Guy

Mitt Romney’s article in The Atlantic was remarkable in many regards. It reflects the view of The Liberal World Order, as they call it now, and their perplexed quandaries into the nature of political existence. It sums up their coastal assumption that peer pressure was always going to be able to pull everyday Americans over to their view of things and that they would end up as the masters of that liberal society as the borders of American thought came down and the rise of international globalism would replace old ideas of nationalism. Their entire premise was like asking fans of the NFL to cheer for the football organization instead of any particular team within it. Instead of having a favorite team to go to a stadium to advocate for, the Liberal World Order believed that people would cheer on the NFL itself.   They believed that after all their liberal educations, top-down management style, and tampering with markets with their slow and cumbersome ideas, people would cheer on this Liberal World Order and would like it. So they are bewildered as to why President Trump is so loved and why there are still investigations into election fraud from the 2020 election, even two years later. It was just announced that Maricopa County in Arizona rejected the election results of that 2020 election, which is taking us historically into new territory; more will follow. And on that same day, Wisconsin declared that drop boxes were illegal that were used during Covid to steal votes for Joe Biden. And that those drop boxes were illegal during 2020, so all votes counted by that method must be rejected, which would give the state to Trump naturally. The Liberal World Order is watching all their schemes fall apart and see how much they are hated, and it’s shocking to them. However, they only have themselves to blame. 

Over the 4th of July, I was looking for some kind of White House celebration, which I couldn’t find. Biden did give a speech, obviously to his progressive base urging people to hang tight, that things would get better. But the contents of the speech really weren’t aired until the next day. Not even ABC News, owned by Disney, showed it. Yet what I did find on television was a 2019 episode of Family Guy that featured Peter Griffin working at the Trump White House. I like Family Guy, and even though they are typically a very liberal group of creative Hollywood types, their humor is usually funny. But this particular episode was obviously filled with frustration and hate toward the Trump family and a direct shot at the people who elected him. It was so filled with hate that I wondered who at Fox, who aired the program, did they think made up their audience. Satire is one thing in comedy, and usually, with a show like the Family Guy, that is where the laughs come from. But this was an episode I had not seen before, and they were showing it as a repeat on the 4th of July, which seemed like a pie to the face of America. It was interesting to watch, especially in the context of Mitt Romney raving in The Atlantic about how a return to Trump’s America would essentially be the end of their dreams of the Liberal World Order. After all, that was the view of that Family Guy episode. They didn’t make it for the general public but for their progressive viewers, whom they think are the majority. But only now do they see that they don’t have a majority, and they never did. They are being rejected wholesale and aren’t sure what to do or think about it.

What’s different now as opposed to times in the past is that they have let us know during the Trump years what they really think of us. And now that the information is out there, they’ve created this awkward society where the truth about how we feel about each other is known.   For many years, just like the Family Guy show, we put up with their liberal viewpoints because we wanted some entertainment. So we gave them the benefit of the doubt so long as everyone was generally polite with each other.   But after we elected Trump, and they failed to secure the election for their pick, Hillary Clinton, they felt entitled to make fun of us and use all methods of peer pressure to drive us toward their Liberal World Order, which was never going to be an option. Yet they thought it was.   That much was evident in art like what the Family Guy broadcast. Before we knew just how much they hated us, we could join together mutually over popular entertainment or good food. But once they revealed how much they hated Trump and his voters, there was no way to put those sentiments back into confinement. The problem was always their intention to take America someplace it didn’t want to go. The frustration from Mitt Romney and his good friend Joe Biden is reflected in that mentioned Family Guy episode. It was a joke to their kind of people, the Liberal World Order. It’s an inside joke only they understand because it’s their view of the world. To us, it seems like some foreign sentiment that is not American. And now that those battle lines are clear, we do have a different kind of society, and they realize just how much in the minority they have always been.

When Mitt Romney said in his article that Joe Biden was a good man, he clearly was out of step with the rest of the world. According to Joe Biden’s daughter, the two showered together. That isn’t a “good man,” that’s a pervert, a scum bag by every measure. There is nothing good about it. And knowing that, it’s no wonder that Joe Biden and his wife raised a bunch of screwed-up kids, especially regarding Hunter, a known drug addict and sexual deviant at best. The Biden family was selling out the highest office in the land for years and got rich off it. They are what the Liberal World Order intends for a specific class of elite rulers Mitt Romney wants to be a part of. But Joe Biden is not a good man, by any measure. Yet that is what that side tells us, and when we refuse to see things their way, they feel entitled to attack us, just as a group of Antifa thugs harassed Bret Kavanaugh at a local restaurant upset about Supreme Court rulings. These same Liberal World Order people who run The Washington Post, The Atlantic and make cartoons for the Family Guy will deny that Antifa even exists, as they have burned down cities. But they seem upset when they see the wrath of MAGA as they steal elections because it’s the only way they can attempt to prop up their world order that nobody but them wants. And they are in the gross minority, yet they appear to have just discovered it. I would say to them, they would have seen this reality earlier if they didn’t steal elections to maintain power. Because the people are not with them. They have never been. Any assumptions they have made about the nature of American life were made in a bubble of their own creation. That is a fault of their own; their failure to acknowledge reality and assuming progressive peer pressure games would shock and awe ordinary people into following them. They never liked us; we used to work to get along with them. In entertainment programming, we have put up with their jokes against us until we realized they were serious. And now they have to deal with our anger, which they made. That means for the Mitt Romney types out there that Liberal World Order is collapsing under the many mistakes of the left, and it’s not coming back. That fault is their own, and certainly not from MAGA and the Trump voters who were always in the majority no matter how much smoke and mirrors, with the help of media, attempted to hide it.

Rich Hoffman

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