It’s been a rather long time between this article and my last, but this is something I feel very strongly about (a phrase that pretty much begins everything I write here): how much I dread the new Seth McFarlane creation, The Cleveland Show.  You probably all know Seth McFarlane as the creative mind behind such popular cartoons as Family Guy and American Dad, but what you probably don’t know, is the horrible crime he commits daily, namely, the sin of not being funny in the slightest.

As after-school-specials, countless re-readings of sci-fi books like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Batman have taught me, popularity does not necessarily equal quality, nor does it mean that what is popular is right.  This is that thing that our teachers in middle-school and high-school always tried to tell us, and it has never been more true than with the cult that Seth McFarlane has built up for himself.  After Family Guy became popular and opened the doorway for American Dad to pollute television airways, I made a startling observation: retarded middle-school and high-school students are McFarlane’s biggest audience.

I can’t really put my finger on why people think Seth McFarlane is funny, and I’ve tried to watch episodes of his shows, only to barf out my innards so that they spill onto the floor in a bloody mess.

There are a number of reasons I can’t possibly find McFarlane’s work funny.  Maybe it’s because of his heavy reliance on throw-away jokes that have nothing to do with the episodes’ plot, or his over-use of poop jokes, or how he thinks calling a character the equivalent of “a filthy Jew” is side-splittingly hilarious  (Racism.  I’m talking about blatant racism here, folks).  Maybe it’s all of that put together. I don’t know, really.  It doesn’t really surprise me that McFarlane has gotten so much exposure, though.  Not because I’m some elitist who thinks that he’s better than everyone else, and culture is going down the tubes: It’s because it’s so easy to be famous if everyone hates your freaking guts.

So many people have gotten ridiculous amounts of exposure for being either useless or hated, like Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Perez Hilton, the list goes on.  I would count McFarlane among this group.  Even though he has legions of  fans, they are not the ones who create his fame.  It’s his detractors, however, who get him and his creations in the news on a weekly basis.  Angry parents, religious groups, other cartoonists who can’t stand the man’s work (if you had read the Wikipedia article on this stuff, you’d know what I’m talking about), all of them are actually getting McFarlane out there even more, and he freaking loves it.  He can’t get enough of the bad publicity, because he gets to make more terrible jokes, because bad publicity is simply making him more and more famous.  I posit that he’s not a witty commentator on the social issues of today, or a television producer, or even a writer/comedian.  He’s a kid trying to get as much attention as he can.

I’m not going to waste time saying his work lacks quality.  Other, more qualified people have already done so.  I’m just saying, please stop paying attention to Seth McFarlane, especially if you can’t stand him, because then, with nobody to congratulate him every time he writes an episode for one of his shows, his shows will stop being aired, mostly because no one is paying him any mind.  He’s already ruined Star Wars.

He needs to be stopped.  If ignoring him doesn’t work, then there’s only one other solution: