New interview with Seth MacFarlane

There’s a great new interview with Seth MacFarlane in the Boston Herald. Here are the good bits:

On the show’s humor: “The thing that I try to do with ‘Family Guy’ is to have this balance between the classic and the edgy. We do a lot of poop jokes, but at the same time, we use a 45-piece orchestra every week with a full string section. And, you know, we don’t try to shock for shock’s sake. If something is just shocking and not funny, then we’ll cut it out. And we have these table reads every week, which we do for each episode, in which we have a very good cross-section of artists and people from the outside and writers, and the studio network is there. And no one is shy about gasping in horror if we have crossed the line, and so it’s a very good barometer.”

On the show’s cutaway scenes: “We see them as, in a weird way, these animated versions of one-frame ‘Far Side’ cartoons that are something you can only do really, I think, effectively in the animation medium. And they’re just laughs for laughs’ sake. You don’t have to know what’s going on with the plot. You don’t have to know what’s going on with character drive. It’s just pure comedy, we hope.”

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