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Why ‘F is for Family’ is Funny
Studying the humor in one of America’s most compelling (and subversive) family sitcoms
Every character in F is for Family occupies a room inside America’s tragicomic psych ward of gap-toothed bullies, racist pancake houses, chauvinistic action stars, and dads with enough emotional baggage to crash airplanes.
The result is absurdist humor that revisits the sewage that once spewed across suburbia’s fumigated landscapes. Like one of its progenitors, Married… With Children, F is for Family’s audacious willingness to turn trauma into satire produces the effect of looking at the funny pages during Bible study, or recalling your abusive father living vicariously through the faux-mojo of action TV stars. This sort of colorful incongruity flickers throughout every episode of F is for Family.
The comically masculine fantasy in F is for Family is Colt Luger, an outlandish caricature of ’70s Robert Mitchum blended with all the right-wing propaganda of Dragnet’s “Blue Boy” episode. Like a pudgy, wheezing John Wayne abusing rippled Apache warriors in Hondo (1953), Al Bundy’s favorite flick, Colt Luger is the American dad’s wish-fulfillment vehicle—the person they wish they were—which has eroded over the years into a laughably chauvinistic punchline: “Sometimes a man’s gotta do, what a man does,”…
