Seth MacFarlane got paid $100 million to make jokes about 'Star Wars,' Nazi goldfish, and gigantic fighting chickens

Photograph by Jeff Minton

A few years ago, Seth MacFarlane had to endure the indignity of having Fox Television cancel his cartoon Family Guy not once but twice. And we all know how that turned out: In 2008 the network oered him one freakin’ sweet apology—a nine-
gure deal that will keep the 35-year-old working until 2012 as a voice-over artist and creative overseer on Family Guy (currently thriving in its seventh season), the upcoming midseason spin-off The Cleveland Show, and the political spoof American Dad! And then there’s that deal with Google, which puts his Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy on every dude Web site in the land. GQ rang up the highest-paid writer of fart jokes in television history.—mark harris

What do you do to celebrate a $100 million contract?
I had drinks with my representatives at a Chinese restaurant.

Did you buy?
They wouldn’t allow it! [laughs]

What’s the lag time between when you conceive a joke and when people see it?
Nine months to a year. But there are instances where we put something in at the last minute. Like the one where Brian and Stewie find themselves in 1939 Germany, steal a couple of SS uniforms, and on one of them they find a McCain/Palin button.

It feels like you’ve outed your lefty politics a lot more lately than you did at the start.
I think it’s necessary—

The phone line goes dead. MacFarlane calls back.

The government?
[laughs] Well, look. If you watch 24, you’re gonna get a conservative viewpoint. If you watch Bill O’Reilly, you’ll get an insane viewpoint. If you watch Family Guy, you’ll get a liberal viewpoint.

Have you ever gone too far?
Sure. There was an abortion joke that was not intended to sound pro-life but came off that way. Something about Jessica Fletcher on Murder, She Wrote having gotten an abortion. And Peter goes, “Aha, so she’s the killer!” It wasn’t even that funny. But for the most part, there’s a self-policing system that works pretty well.

How much of an issue is the FCC?
It’s been a huge issue ever since Janet Jackson showed her sixty-five-year-old nipple on television. I sound like my grandfather here, using the phrase “John Q. Taxpayer,” but it’s John Q. Taxpayer who’s paying the bill for those guys in Congress to sit there watching an episode of That ’70s Show to make sure a masturbation joke is not unacceptable. Fucking ridiculous.

Next year you’ll debut a Family Guy spin-off, The Cleveland Show. Are you on solid ground, being a white guy at the head of a black cartoon sitcom?
I suppose no more or less than Norman Lear was with The Jeffersons. Let me put it this way: Cleveland isn’t gonna sound like he’s on a UPN show. We’re writing real characters.

Could Family Guy run ten, fifteen, eighteen years, like The Simpsons?
I would rather wrap it up before it gets stale. That’s going to be an issue in the not-too-distant future.

Do you run into stars Family Guy has made fun of?
Uh…yeah. From time to time, we’ll offer a part to a celebrity in which they’d be doing their own voice. And we’ll get the word back from the agent or manager that that person is not interested. And we’ll then run into aforementioned celebrity at a party, and they’ll say, “Oh, my agent didn’t tell me! If I’d known about it, I would have done it!” And then we’ll find out from the agent, after that: “No, no. They knew.”