Patrick Warburton Won’t Apologize for ‘Family Guy’ Unless There’s A Joke About Jesus
This week’s installment of “comedians refuse to give apologies that no one asked for” featured Family Guy voice actor Patrick Warburton proudly proclaiming that he will no longer ask for forgiveness for providing “love, humor (and) acceptance” through his performance as Joe Swanson — but he’s still waiting for Seth MacFarlane to say sorry for all the Jesus jokes.
In a recent Fox News interview, the self-proclaimed conservative comedian answered the invisible outrage over Family Guy and addressed the countless inaudible cries for the show to be canceled over Warburton’s performance in the series. “I used to apologize for being on Family Guy, and I apologize no more because this world is a horrible native satire,” he explained.
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“Everybody takes themselves too seriously,” Warburton continued. “But we need humor in our lives, and we need love and humor, acceptance. It’s all rather simple.” Somehow, despite Warburton’s posturing on the conservative news outlet, the loudest complaints we’ve heard about “offensive” content on Family Guy in relation to the voice actor have come from Warburton himself — and from his mother.
Barbara Lord, Warburton’s mom, is a retired actress and a member of a conservative Christian media advocacy group called The Parents Television and Media Council. The organization made enemies of MacFarlane and his media empire for years as they lobbied the FCC and the show’s advertisers to condemn the series, once outrageously asking, “Whatever would America’s sex-crazed, adolescent potheads do without Seth MacFarlane to amuse them?” In 2011, Lord said of her son’s work, “Shows like these are leading toward the destruction of morality. … Nothing seems sacred any more.”
Warburton seemed to echo his mother’s disapproval when Family Guy made one of their roughly 10,000 jokes about Jesus Christ in 2015. Though Warburton wouldn’t specify exactly what was said in the sacrilegious joke that he considered to be “the most offensive thing I’d ever seen ever in any form of media towards Christians,” he did tell The Huffington Post that, “It was something that was so offensive that I said, ‘If that’s in the show, I can’t do this episode. … Put it in another fucking episode that I’m not in.’” Seemingly eschewing the “love, humor and acceptance” that he claims to champion through the series, Warburton grumbled, “We all wonder if we have a line that can be crossed, and I just discovered there is actually a line with me.”
In his recent comments, Warburton seems to be suggesting that there is some invisible campaign of cancel-culture warriors to shame him for Family Guy’s irreverence on social issues, but the only people who have tried to get the series taken off the air are Warburton’s mother and her fanatical friends in the conservative Christian finger-wagging community. Warburton’s own objections to jokes about Jesus are far more strongly-worded than anything we’ve seen from the snowflake left on “problematic” content in Family Guy.
Maybe Warburton was actually throwing shade at his own mom when he claimed that will “apologize no more” for Family Guy — or maybe the guy’s brains are Puddy.
