Family Guy has been on the air for over 20 years. This basically means Seth MacFarlane and his writers have been making their trademark cutaway gags and savage parodies about pretty much every celebrity on the planet. Most targets laughed it off, or ignored it completely, knowing that punching back only fuels the trolls or increases the shelf life of a joke. There were, however, a few who didn’t.
These five celebrities showed the writers exactly what happens when they pick on the wrong person. Some answered with the kind of class that took the sting out of the insult. A few got on the phone and screamed their displeasure. One took it so far as to bite back with a federal lawsuit over a mop and a bucket.
Cary Elwes
In the season 11 episode, “Ratings Guy,” Peter Griffin (voiced by Seth MacFarlane) sends Cary Elwes a fan letter that isn’t really a fan letter. It’s a list of insults disguised as questions, basically asking whether The Princess Bride and Robin Hood: Men in Tights really count as a career. Most celebrities had been on the receiving end of worse jabs and let it go. But Elwes is the guy who spent an entire movie saying “as you wish,” so of course he had something classier in mind. He showed up at the Family Guy offices the next day with a letter addressed to Peter Griffin, written entirely in character. He read the whole thing out loud to the writers’ room, and it reportedly charmed everyone in it.
Marlee Matlin
Alex Borstein (Lois Griffin) learned the panic that sets in when you make fun of someone’s disabilities, and then they show up to settle the score in person. Family Guy ran a Moviefone bit that mocked Marlee Matlin’s deafness, garbling her attempts to order movie tickets. They dusted it off again in a 2009 comedy special built around a Marlee Matlin impression, complete with a “Poker Face” karaoke number. Mid-song, the real Matlin walked out on stage, scolded Borstein for mocking her without letting her voice herself, and turned the joke around with an impression of Borstein’s own physique.
Afterward, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Matlin drove the point home, noting that she, not Borstein, was the one with an Oscar for Children of a Lesser God. By the end of the night, Borstein was the one being roasted while Matlin looked like she was having the time of her life. A true beef was never formed as Matlin later voiced the character of Stella in multiple episodes.
Adrien Brody
Some people, celebrities included, can take a joke. Some can’t. It’s just what it is, and Adrien Brody certainly belongs to the latter category. For years, Family Guy kept going back to the same cheap bit about his nose. At one point, they turned it into a 3D gag where his profile practically attacks a movie audience. It was a funny bit, but Brody clearly wasn’t amused in the slightest.
Years later, MacFarlane ran into him at a party and tried to smooth things over by praising Brody’s performance in Splice. The actor’s response made it quite clear that he was still holding a grudge. It’s somewhat ironic because Brody is the same guy who dipped Halle Berry for an unplanned kiss during his Oscar win, so one would assume he’d have a sense of humor about big moments. MacFarlane has since owned up to the joke going too far, saying a jab at anyone, even a celebrity, can’t just be mean; it has to be funny, or the target has to really deserve it.
Jon Stewart
Celebrity feuds usually play out over interviews or social media, but this one happened the good old-fashioned way. Nearly two decades later, it’s still one of the strangest phone calls in TV history. During the 2007-2008 writers’ strike, Family Guy mocked Jon Stewart for keeping The Daily Show on air without his writers. It basically called him a hypocrite for crossing a line MacFarlane himself refused to cross.
Stewart didn’t let that dig slide. He found MacFarlane’s phone number, called him directly, and reportedly asked who made him “the moral arbiter of Hollywood.” MacFarlane later told Piers Morgan that Stewart completely out-debated him and he lost badly on points, which is not surprising because Stewart’s the same guy who would later tear Jim Cramer apart on live TV in 2009. The strange thing is that a joke that accused Stewart of betraying his own writers ended with MacFarlane admitting he was the one in the wrong.
Carol Burnett
Carol Burnett took things a step further by getting a lawyer. The 2006 episode, “Peterotica,” turned her into a foul-mouthed janitor who worked at a porn shop. They even dressed the character up with the mop, blue bonnet and all, complete with a mocking version of Burnett’s famous ear tug. The thing about that ear tug, though, is that it was Burnett’s weekly signal to say hello to the grandmother who raised her, not the crude joke Family Guy made it out to be. So the gag wasn’t just rude; it was mean in a way the writers probably didn’t think through.
Burnett sued 20th Century Fox for over $6 million, claiming they used her Charwoman character and her theme song without permission after she’d already said no to them. A federal judge eventually threw the case out, ruling that the bit was a protected parody under the First Amendment. He did admit, on record for that matter, that creating the Charwoman character took a lot more talent than mocking her. She lost the case. But nobody forgets a woman who sues a cartoon and nearly wins.
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