Letter to Seth MacFarlane: Why Your Boob Song Was Worse Than The Onion Calling a Little Girl a Cunt

Dear Seth:

Just wanted to bang out a quick note (I know how busy we’ve both been!) to say hi, hope you’re doing well, and could you please apologize to my 6-year-old daughter for calling her a cunt.

OK, you didn’t technically call my daughter a cunt. *Technically* that was The Onion, which *technically* tweeted that Oscar nominee Quvenzhané Wallis, not my daughter, was a cunt — but it might as well have been you.

“Does this have to do with that whole boobs-song thing?” you’re probably eye-rolling. It does! You know me well enough to know I’m not generally offended by boobs or references to boobs or even people who act like boobs, if they mean well. Did I send you the picture my 8-year-old son recently drew? It’s one of my favorites:

“OK, so are you insinuating that my tongue-in-cheek song about breasts in Hollywood and a few off-color jokes were worse than that Onion tweet? You've got to be kidding me. They called that little girl a ‘cunt’! She was sitting right in front of me at the awards and I didn't call her a goddamn thing!” you must be sighing in exasperation right about now. You're so silly. I'm not insinuating anything — I’m giving it to you straight.

You have to examine intent and patterns and numbers with these types of things. Let's look at The Onion first. I’m not defending their tweet. There was obviously a judgment lapse somewhere along the production line, and in general I don’t advocate calling young ladies in the prime of their prepubescence the C-word.

But let’s look at precedence. The Onion has successfully harnessed its particular brand of dark, brilliant humor to steer us through some of our darkest moments. It kept us laughing while our hearts were breaking through bleak economic times and painful military conflicts and even 9/11. How the fuck do you make people laugh after 9/11?! I don’t know, but The Onion did an extraordinary job in this regard, and it did so by knowing just how far to tip the scales.

I'm not giving them a pass because of this. It's just that, because of The Onion's past ability to navigate these troubled waters so well, I’m inclined to consider a theory proposed by Wired’s Laura Hudson that says The Onion purposely made a “shocking, ugly comment to point out that the way the media talks about women is often quite shocking and ugly.” Extrapolate that to a famous 9-year-old girl, and you have classic Onion hyperbole used to frame a known societal issue. 

Of course, even if this was the case, it was a monumental misfire (someone should have had the savvy to know how the tweet would likely have been received) that was unacceptable. Children should be off-limits to the obscenities we sometimes use to sketch out our satire. That said, because it was a somewhat isolated incident in The Onion’s storied history, and because it issued a prompt, sincere-sounding mea culpa, I'll still be a customer. Lord knows I've said some stupid stuff and needed second chances.

You, on the other hand, Seth MacFarlane. You. Tim Grierson tried to rationalize your performance as an attempt to “[deflate] the night’s most high-minded pretensions and [remind us], in a giddy, old show-biz way, that movies are still, at bottom, about stroking the lower impulses of the audience.”

Oh boy. I’m all for stroking lower impulses. In fact, I’m as low-brow as they come: Set me up with a box of White Castle Sliders and a six-pack of PBR, fire up Freddy Got Fingered on the DVR, and that would be a pretty good Friday night to me. But a) that’s really not what movies are all about, and b) there’s a reason we left those “giddy” silent movies behind for the talkies, guys (I’M USING PSEUDO-FEMINIST METAPHOR HERE).

I’d almost buy Grierson’s argument that Hollywood is tacky, and so Seth MacFarlane purposely and shrewdly ramped up the tackiness of his performance to match — if he had limited it to that one number. But the pattern started to emerge very quickly before that song, and it continued long after it, and you didn’t have to be John Nash to see it. 

It takes more legwork to decipher this arrangement, to first parse its elements and then analyze them as they coagulate, but the payoff is worth it. It’s the type of pattern that permeates our daily lives, creeping into our workplaces and our schools, insidiously telling our daughters that they will never be more than a nice rack and a smile. If someone calls my daughter a cunt, I can tell her to punch them in the face (with her WORDS, of course). Breaking the code to that other puzzle and offering real-world solutions — that’s a harder war to wage.

I watch my daughter every night as she masters her math homework. This is a child who, just one year ago, came home from school and announced that she hated math and that she was terrible at it and that girls couldn’t do math and that she would never be as good as her older brother at it. And my heart sunk, because I couldn’t believe that a 5-year-old had already so readily absorbed gender-based concepts I had hoped to shelter her from completely, because I was enlightened about these subjects and therefore my children would be enlightened and how the hell did this happen?!

And so we started switching up that paradigm. She received just as many math problems on the back of the paper Friendly’s menus as her brother. Every Saturday morning when she went to Grandma’s, she came back home with a stack of worksheets that she couldn’t wait to complete because hey, Grandma printed them out! I told her how good I was at math when I was in school. Her confidence increased, her skills grew exponentially, and she learned not only that girls could be good at math, but that SHE could be good at math and that she could love it (to me, the bigger accomplishment). She started telling everyone how she wanted to be an artist and a chef and a veterinarian when she grew up, and how veterinarians needed to be good at math and she was good at math, so she could be a veterinarian!

And then you came along. You glided onstage at the Academy Awards, resplendent in your Gucci tuxedo and accompanied by a big-band soundtrack. And you sang a song about boobs. And called Jennifer Aniston a stripper. And made reference to Adele being fat. And ha-ha’d about Chris Brown beating the shit out of Rihanna. And rehashed some tired old jokes about women starving themselves and never letting things go. There was some racist banter thrown in there, too, but I want to stay on point because I know when women get too distracted and lose focus they end up heading to the mall and spending all your money and I don’t want to do that to you.

I know you didn’t call Quvenzhané Wallis a cunt, either. But there she was in the audience during your song and dance, all dolled up in probably the most glamorous outfit she’s ever worn, complete with a sparkly tiara and puppy purse, basking in the well-deserved attention for a performance that actresses decades older than her would kill for. She got to experience all of that AND try to make sense of the hilarious man on stage singing about boobs and making references to her sleeping with George Clooney. If she didn’t feel like a cunt, she must have felt kind of like a whore — probably without fully understanding what those feelings were or why she was having them.

These are the hieroglyphics my 6-year-old daughter has to begin to muddle through and decipher and reconcile with her blue ribbon in math and the 10/10 on her spelling test and the Jackson Pollock-esque piece she painted during art class and her dreams of being a veterinarian. This is a riddle that’s only just begun for her. This is what you've given her to look forward to.

I didn’t go into the Oscars with a bone to pick with you, MacFarlane. I’ve watched “Family Guy,” and I’ve laughed at it. I do a pretty mean Lois imitation. But I do have to confess I’ve never laughed at it quite as much as I’ve laughed at The Simpsons, and I’ve never thought hard enough about it to fully articulate why. Then I realized that, if you killed off the Griffin family, those dead-behind-the-eyes zombie vessels for your fast-twitch pop-culture references, I don’t think I’d feel a thing. However, if Matt Groening killed off Homer and Marge and Bart and Lisa and Maggie, I’d probably cry. You tell me why that is (and tell your schadenfreude to simmer down, while you're at it).

Comedy is supposed to break the rules, and all the best comedians do. Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Tina Fey, Chris Rock, Roseanne Barr, Louis CK, Ellen DeGeneres, Patton Oswalt — they’ve all stretched the boundaries of what’s expected from the genre, often running blue, occasionally inciting controversy.

But, unlike the Andrew Dice Clays and the Dane Cooks and the Seth MacFarlanes, their humor comes from a more honest place, born of real experiences and encounters and memories. The way in which they choose to reveal these experiences and encounters and memories may be scatalogical or vulgar or crass, but they’re authentic — and audiences connect with authenticity. When Louis CK talks about receiving the saddest handjob in the world from his (now ex) wife, you know it really was pretty fucking sad, and that he's sharing it with us for a reason, even though we may not fully know what that reason is. 

When you “performed” on Sunday night, that personal connection didn’t exist. Instead, you pandered to the lowest common denominator like you were at a Bowery bringer show. You offended not only my womanly sensibilities, but also (and probably even worse) my comedic ones. Your laziness was epic.

I wouldn’t be a good friend if I didn’t end this correspondence with a recommendation of one of my favorite flicks, “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” even though I’ve heard you don’t go to the movies much. In this existential Woody Allen gem, sleazy television producer Lester, as portrayed by Alan Alda, shares the basic tenet behind all successful humor: “If it bends, it’s funny. If it breaks, it isn’t.”

You broke it, Seth MacFarlane. You can start to fix it by apologizing to Quvenzhané Wallis, who had to sit through that nonsense. And you can apologize to my daughter. Besides math, she also enjoys art, music, and reading (in case you’re stumped for a conversation-starter because she doesn’t have boobs yet). She will have boobs someday, and there will be people who will see them (with her permission), but I’m hoping that’s not what defines her — unless that’s what she (not some smarmy awards-show host desperate for a cheap laugh) chooses.