Salute Your Shorts: Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy

Salute Your Shorts is a weekly column that looks at short films, music videos, commercials or any other short form visual media that generally gets ignored.

There are few figures more polarizing in comedy these days than Seth MacFarlane. Admittedly he’s no Dane Cook or Carlos Mencia, but unlike them, he’s not just controversial because he’s made a career out of ripping off other people’s jokes. Also unlike them, he’s actually funny. Perhaps Mencia actually has piles of short videos just begging for the essay treatment, but it won't happen in this space, mostly because his jokes engender a special level of hatred in me usually reserved for holocaust deniers, animal abusers and Michael Bay movies.

MacFarlane, on the other hand, seems to be extremely talented yet misguided. An executive producer at the age of 24, his work at Cartoon Network led to a pilot for Family Guy that made him American animation’s enfant terrible. Family Guy began strong and was able to break through to a cult audience despite limited critical success. But after its first season, the show began to transition away Simpsons-esque stories and, in the words of Futurama, became more about abstract weirdness than character-based humor. After the show returned to the air, it became more about throwaway gags than anything resembling plotlines.

With American Dad, MacFarlane’s work reached a nadir, at least judging from the first few episodes (after that, your correspondent simply couldn’t stomach the show anymore). Combined with South Park’s “Cartoon Wars” belly blow, MacFarlane seems to have lost much of the good will that brought his show back. Yet ratings are still there, and despite what anyone may say, every MacFarlane show has at least a few moments that are pretty damn hilarious. South Park may have shown exactly how the emperor had no clothes (not necessarily an original observation, either), but just because you know how those throwaway gags work doesn’t mean they’re any less effective.

Because of this, Seth McFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy is a smart move that capitalizes on MacFarlane’s strengths as a writer/producer. As far as stories go, he’s not as good as the talent behind South Park, and his characters’ depths aren’t even comparable to The Simpsons. And just because it has to be said: Every character he voices sounds exactly the same. What he is good at, though, is writing manatee jokes. In fact, he made a career on this.

 
Cavalcade is a collection of 50 animated shorts, many less than a minute long, which play out a simple, possibly manatee-written idea such as “Ted Nugent Is Visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past” or “Monkeys Talk About Religion.” Each of these is effectively the same as one of Family Guy's or American Dad’s throwaway gags, except here they don’t hijack the narrative of a show. It effectively strips out the most important part of his other shows and lets these shorts exist gloriously on their own.

The positioning of all of these shorts in a row ends up creating something of a sketch-comedy show. Most shorts stand alone well, and work through a simple idea with just enough development to still offer some sort of surprise. Even if the main joke of “The Frog Prince” is obvious, it still has some space to go to. MacFarlane does have impeccable comedic timing, and while not all shorts are created equally, they all function like well-greased comedy machines, offering reliable laughs and a surprising consistency for such a random assortment of gags.


Some of this is because the manatee joke really is a formula, so each short is heavily reliant on pop culture as if it was a sketch show written by Mark Leyner. But there’s a level of inventiveness and fun in these that isn’t just random images thrown together. “Backstage with Bob Dylan” is all about combining familiar incomprehensible mumblers, but the confrontation between the characters exists only because of able writing.


In a way, MacFarlane isn’t given enough credit for writing characters. All of the ones for his television shows are shallow, almost instantly stereotyping themselves in ways The Simpsons cast took decades to fall into. But his talent isn’t for depth or consistency, it’s for instant mimicry. He’s lucky that animation makes impressions a hell of a lot easier, but regardless of this crutch, his characters are instantly recognizable and hilarious versions of celebrities or pop-culture characters. And aside from this, there are also a lot of shorts in the collection that no manatees had a hand in. One of the best of these is “Beavers: Assholes of the Forest,” which almost instantly creates a recognizable personality in the beaver. The sketch relies on observational humor about the effects of beaver dams, but also upon the ability to instantly tap into this particular type of asshole, which happens so quickly its unnoticeable.

Another thing that connects Cavalcade so closely with sketch comedy is its runners. Like all good sketch shows, Cavalcade noticed that some of its sketches worked in a way that could be adapted and repeated, hopefully with a new joke, as a series. “A Scotsman Who Can’t Watch a Movie Without Shouting at the Screen” turns up later as “A Scotsman Who Still Can’t Watch a Movie Without Shouting at the Screen,”  which ends up even funnier than the original. There aren’t that many of these, but even Cavalcade’s few help add a level of coherence to things.

Some of the worst aspects of MacFarlane’s works are, still, sadly evident. As always, he insists on voicing every other character in Cavalcade himself, which makes them all sound exactly the same as all the characters in his shows. There’s also the issue of animation quality, which at this point, may be a lost battle as far as MacFarlane’s work is concerned. Still, it's worth noting that it’s pretty lousy. All that may be beside the point, which is obviously just the humor, but his stylization of characters always seemed mostly due to laziness.

Those caveats aside, Cavalcade offers MacFarlane’s fans more of what they want, but is also worth checking out for fans who’ve become bored with his shows’ normal schtick. Criticism applied to the rest of his works is still valid here, but the collection is also somewhat redemptive. While MacFarlane seems content not to push himself, what is here is still plenty enjoyable for quantity of laughter, if not necessarily quality.