There's so many necessities that a college student needs. Food, clothes, shelter, Facebook and books are all givens. Based on the person, there could be a multitude of various other items that one needs in order to sleep, eat, shit, and function during the day.

I guess you could throw television viewing in there as one of those necessities. It's a downtime activity--a hobby--a definite get-a-way from the skull numbing and sterilizing effects of hours of homework and studying. It's a well documented fact that hours of The Office and Sportscenter lead to higher test scores--and procrastinating. But more often than not higher test scores.

So while enjoying my break from my constant neutering of Journalism 133A and Spanish 213 homework, I flipped between channels and eventually settled on Family Guy. And to be honest, I just couldn't watch it. Which I find surprising because I'm going to make a guesstimate and assume that about 76.4% of Family Guy's audience is probably made up of 18-24 year old males from typically suburban communities (and I can only assume that the other 23.6% of Family Guy's viewing population consists of lepers, Marxists, and Cuban defects).

Granted, there have been a few episodes of Family Guy where I have caught myself emitting that girlish, incessant giggle that I possess, but those have been few and far between. But there's something about Family Guy that somehow doesn't translate to me. How is that every other freshman guy I know can quote any random Peter Griffin tangent present in any episode, yet I can't?

While this definitely isn't a case of one person having a better sense of humor than another, or even a case of one person being better than another,  it just seems like American young adults--or maybe the American population in general--just don't have the attention span to watch something that's coherent and uniform in nature; a show that actually has a PLOT behind it.

South Park is equally as crude and liked as Family Guy by twenty-somethings and pimple covered teens, yet the two shows couldn't be more opposite. Family Guy is almost a slapstick show, in so much as it moves from bit to bit, satirizing every bit of American pop-culture and life. The actual story of the episode takes a backseat to whatever random event occurs after a character brings up some odd, perverse, anecdotal allusion (example: the five minute fight Peter had with a chicken in the episode, "Death Is a Bitch"). 

South Park is equally as scathingly satirizing in its writing, but all of the satirization takes place around and in support of the main theme of the story. You can laugh as much as you want at the episode of South Park where Cartman is empowered by Mel Gibson's movie, The Passion of the Christ, to exterminate the Jews, but all the criticism of society, all the humor within the episode is conducive to the plot. Everything is tied together into one little ball of filth and laughs.

 But it still remains a mystery to me how South Park is even rivaled by a show like Family Guy, and how people can still sit and watch a show that would cause one to have a seizure from jumping around so much. 

But maybe it's something that is the result of how our society is rapidly changing, and how the media and entertainment no longer rewards the tangible and thought-out, but the quick and abbreviated. Newspaper readership is down in the United States in Europe, quickly being replaced by video, and entertainment seeks money by producing content merely to be "that next big hit." Family Guy is merely following suit here. It's only exacerbating the fact that we cannot merely sit and read a book or newspaper, or even take in anything with a bit of logic and organization. We are being spoon-fed bits and pieces of information until we vomit up money and our attention spans.

However, I'm definitely being patronizing here, and I probably shouldn't be. The world's just a changin' and...oh, look, a bird!