A 2005 joke on “Family Guy” got a lot of attention in November when Kevin Spacey was accused of molesting young men, but show creator Seth MacFarlane has no idea where it came from, according to Fox News.
Here it is:
The joke shows Stewie, an infant character on the show, running through a crowd naked screaming that he had just escaped from Kevin Spacey's basement.
Now, MacFarlane claims he not only did not pitch the joke for that episode, but he had no idea about the rumors of Spacey’s sexual misconduct at the time.
MacFarlane, perhaps conveniently, doesn’t remember where the joke about Spacey came from.
“I don’t remember who pitched the joke,” MacFarlane said Thursday at the Television Critics Association’s Winter Press Tour. “I remember when it was pitched that was a rumor that I had actually not heard, and other writers in the writers’ room had. It had to be explained to me.”
Showrunner Alec Sulkin offered an even more vague explanation for the origin of the joke, relating it to a claim by Spacey that he had been attacked in London by a young person in 2004.
“I think he had sort of been sort of beaten up in a London park, and he claimed he was walking his dog and fell and I think that sort of raised a lot of eyebrows,” Sulkin said.
Still, MacFarlane admitted that the show is willing to run with jokes about both facts and rumors, meaning that hearing about an actor potentially having sexually abused a teenager is simply fodder for the next joke, rather than a reason to shed some light on the issue.
“We write our show the same way as everyone else,” MacFarlane said. “We make the same kind of topical jokes that ‘The Simpsons’ does, ‘South Park’ does. And you work with what you have whether that be swirling rumors or political material.”
