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Family Guy's jokes have always been edgier than its rival show. However, some of its past episodes aren't as funny anymore when viewed today, just like its rival show.


  • "Road to Rhode Island" originally had a scene that depicted Osama bin Laden getting past airport security by singing show tunes after Stewie did the same thing. The scene was removed from future airings of the episode and even from the DVD release, although it showed up on a later "best-of" DVD note  and, as of 2018, is on the Hulu version. The worst part is that the show's creator, Seth MacFarlane, was supposed to be on American Airlines Flight 11 — one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center — but was lucky enough to miss it due to oversleeping from a hangover, his agent giving him the wrong flight information, and deciding to wait for another flight (until he saw the crash on the news).
  • The Cutaway Gag concerning Katie Holmes escaping Tom Cruise's manor. It becomes a little awkward after their divorce in 2012. This is perhaps seen in a different light if documentaries like Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief and Louis Theroux "My Scientology Movie" that the Church of Scientology has quite an influence and hold on Cruise's life, and how people outside the church can very quickly be considered "Non-persons".
  • Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story:
    • In Chris and Vanessa's wedding, Francis and Thelma Griffin are both seen as attendees and in the scene where Lois helps Stu and Stewie, Tom Tucker and Diane Simmons are shown old and still reporting, albeit what's going on in the retirement home. However, in future episodes, both Francis and Thelma would die (the former from injuries after Peter got drunk and fell on him the latter from natural causes), and not only would Diane's relationship with Tom deteriorate further until he pushed the studio to fire her for a younger co-host, but that, plus her break up with James Woods, would lead her to creating a revenge plot against James and Tom, kill off some of the recurring characters when the plan goes off the rails, and eventually get shot by Stewie and fall off a cliff to her death.
    Tom: Thank you Trisha for sending your people back 1000 years.
  • "Mother Tucker" has a cutaway gag portraying an adult Charlie Brown as a messed up, angry man who is guilt-ridden over selling Snoopy drugs that killed him. Peter Robbins, Brown's original voice actor in the animated specials, had frequent run ins with the law and severe mental health issues before taking his life in 2022.
  • In "The Tan Aquatic with Steve Zissou", when Stewie thinks he's dying, he tells Brian to write down his final words. Instead, he draws a picture of himself hanging from a tree because he was bored and didn't feel like bowing to Stewie's whims. "Brian & Stewie" later reveals that Brian has been contemplating suicide for a long time because he feels like no one cares about him. In some viewers' eyes, this turns the visual joke from a warped one to a cry for help.
  • In 2013's "Turban Cowboy", one cutaway has Peter drive a car through the Boston Marathon, leaving injured, bloody bodies on the ground behind him, and is then praised for winning the race. This was less than a month before two brothers set off a bomb at the real marathon, a scene similar to the one in the show. Between that gag and the episode's plot of Peter joining a terrorist cell, the episode was yanked from Hulu and has become the first Family Guy episode to air once before getting banned temporarily. For added irony, [adult swim] had the misfortune of airing a repeat of the episode just hours after the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015. It got even worse in 2016 due to an eerily similar incident where an ISIS follower drove a truck through crowds of people in Nice, France on Bastille Day. Years later in 2021, in another eerily similar incident, a man named Darrell Brooks would drive a red car through the crowd of a Wisconsin parade.
  • "Save the Clam" opens with Horace pitching for Peter's softball team and being killed when a line drive is hit right back at him and strikes him. Two days after the episode first aired, Toronto Blue Jays pitcher J. A. Happ was seriously injured under very similar circumstances.
  • "Road to the Multiverse" ended with Human Brian getting hit by a car and killed. This happens to the main universe Brian in "Life of Brian", killing him off for all but two episodes... and even those were retconned.
  • In "Stuck Together, Torn Apart", when Joe is showcasing the police van's technologies, the robotic arms simply cuff Peter, but when Cleveland steps in, he gets beaten by clubs and a gun is planted beside him. A similar incident occurs in "He's Bla-ack!", when Peter pretends to be a cop pulling Cleveland over so he can see the latter. Peter goes a little far on the brutality, even saying "He's trying to grab my gun." These scenes would become less funny following the shooting of Michael Brown, who allegedly tried to grab Officer Darren Wilson's gun.
  • "The Courtship of Stewie's Father" contains a scene in which Michael Eisner falls in a river and is eaten by a swarm of alligators while Peter and Stewie are on vacation at Disney World. Although the episode aired in 2005, it would feel pretty uncomfortable to watch the episode now, considering that 2-year-old Lane Graves drowned and was killed by alligators while playing near a lake at Disney World.
  • In "Family Guy Viewer Mail #1":
  • In "Family Guy Viewer Mail #2":
    • In the second segment, Peter is given the power where everything he touches turns into Robin Williams. Peter is initially happy about this until it overwhelms him to the point where he attempts to commit suicide. On August 11, 2014, Williams committed suicide. As a double whammy, at the end of the segment, in order to prevent anything else from turning into Robin Williams, Peter cuts his hands off. When Williams' body was discovered, it was reported that he'd slit his wrists before hanging himself.
      • Coincidentally, BBC Three was broadcasting this very episode around the time that news broke of his suicide.
      • [adult swim] had the misfortune of scheduling a repeat a day after news of the suicide broke out. At the last minute, they replaced it with "Chitty Chitty Death Bang" and pulled the episode from regular rotation for a while.
    • Earlier in that same episode, in "Chap of the Manor", Clive Crowley, the British Tom Tucker, reports about a man with a gun and two bullets attacking Manchester. On May 22, 2017, Manchester was hit with a terrorist attack at an Ariana Grande concert. In light of that attack along with similar ones in London, the episode seems pretty uncomfortable to watch.
  • In "Brian Griffin's House of Payne", the show's parody of James Woods implies he has had sex with an underage girl. Seven years later, in real life, Woods was accused by Amber Tamblyn of trying to hit on her while she was only 16.
  • In season 4's "Don't Make Me Over", Stewie causes a diversion by running naked in the mall screaming, "Help, I've just escaped from Kevin Spacey's basement!". In light of a real-life revelation from Anthony Rapp that he was molested at age 14 by Kevin Spacey, the scene would become cringworthy to watch.
  • In "Foreign Affairs", Peter talks about trying out gymnastics for the Olympics with a cutaway of him with a perverted coach who offers Peter to have an inappropriate shower and barring him from seeing his parents, Peter later turns to the camera and says that someone should look into the sport. Watching the episode now would feel uncomfortable, considering that by then a real-life Olympic doctor was recently convicted of child sexual abuse of several gymnasts including McKayla Maroney and Gabby Douglas.
  • In season 14's "The New Adventures of Old Tom", Peter attempts to reinvent Tom when a younger reporter replaces him. He says that Tom is falling further than Charlie Rose, leading to a cutaway of Rose after a night out with an inappropriate news report. Two years later, Rose faced accusations of sexual misconduct by numerous women.
  • The ending to "Brian Sings and Swings" is a Brick Joke in which Frank Sinatra Jr.'s "mother" Mia Farrow shows up to give him a spanking (thanks to Peter calling her earlier). In 2018, Farrow's real son Moses accused her of abusive behavior.
  • In "E. Peterbus Unum", when at the I.R.S. and learning that he is going to be audited, Peter cries out over the agent trying to tell him the bad news, first over the cancellation of Party of Five and then over the actual news, with him then asking, "What the hell is Party of Five?" It's not quite as funny anymore since the original 90s version has fallen out of popularity and is rarely seen in syndication; with the 2019 reboot being canceled after one season due to lackluster ratings.
  • In "Emmy-Winning Episode", Shonda Rhimes calls out Family Guy for having characters of color voiced by white actors. In June 2020, Mike Henry, the voice of Cleveland, announced he'd be stepping down from the role in response to nationwide protests against systemic racism.
  • "Mr. Griffin Goes to Washington" has Bob Dole announce that he's a friend of the tobacco industry. This takes a much darker turn in 2020 when Mr. Dole was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer and later died in December 2021.
  • In "Boys Do Cry", one of the ways Texas is shown to be socially backward is that every purchase comes with a free gun. In 2021, the state controversially passed a bill allowing the open carry of guns without the need for a license or training.
  • A cutaway referencing how [adult swim] keeps the show's funnier jokes intact in the style of its bumps in "Big Man on Hippocampus" became this in September 2021, as Turner Broadcasting lost the cable rights to air the first 15 seasons of the show and moved to FX, FXX and Freeform, which use the syndicated versions and the versions that aired on Fox instead of what is on DVD.
  • These two particular lines are gut-wrenchingly prophetic, considering how quickly the Griffins replaced their dog in "Life of Brian":
    • From "Wasted Talent":
    Peter: Beer that never goes flat. Do you know what that means, Brian? This beer will still be carbonated long after you die of old age and we buy another dog to help the kids...you know, forget about you.
    • This quote from Chris in "Livin' on a Prayer":
      Chris: If you died tomorrow, you think we're gonna be devastated, but ya know what? We're just gonna go out and buy another dog, and maybe this dog will fetch a stick and bring me my slippers instead of prattling on about the pros and cons of various religions!
  • This cutaway gag featuring a sex tape with Bill Cosby, considering Cosby's eventual arrest and indictment for sexual assault.
  • In "Saving Private Brian", Peter and Lois hire Marilyn Manson to talk sense into Chris and teach him how to be a responsible citizen, which ends up being more uncomfortable when fifteen years later, Manson himself would be accused of sexual misconduct and abuse by Evan Rachel Wood and several other women.
  • A gag from "Livin' on a Prayer" has the family watching a "post-Roe v. Wade episode" of The Brady Bunch, which depicts Mike and Carol living an affluent life with no children. That term gained a different meaning after the Roe case was overruled in June 2022.
  • “Turkey Guys” had a joke about Nickelodeon’s live-action shows having uncomfortably hot 18-year-olds. In light of Jennette McCurdy’s book revealing how much Nickelodeon sexualized their starlets, it’s much more uncomfortable nowadays.
  • In the Fatal Attraction segment of the episode "Heart Burn," Peter notes that they won't outlaw abortion until 2019. He was only 3 years off, as the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and many states outlawed abortion soon after in 2022.
  • The ending of "Screams of Silence: The Story of Brenda Q" becomes this; after Quagmire murders his sister's violent boyfriend, it's painted as happy as she is free from his abuse; we then go eight seasons without hearing what happened to Brenda, until the episode "Coma Guy", which reveals she apparently died; given that Brenda never got closure over Jeff's murder, and with her having to raise their baby, it's heavily implied her life never got better afterwards, and she killed herself.

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