[Enjoy this D'OHverthinking It guest post from Trevor Seigler]

There’s an entire school of debate about which is better, The Simpsons or Family Guy. In my mind, it’s no contest; Homer and his yellow-skinned brood smoke the competition when it comes to comedy that comes from plots and not hilarious-yet-distracting cutaway gags. But the ultimate triumph of Groening and company comes from one simple fact: you have no clue where Springfield is.

The battle over the manatee rages on!

South Park and Family Guy don’t get along. In 2006, the two-part South Park episode “Cartoon Wars” characterized the writers of Family Guy as an a tank full of manatees randomly manipulating beach balls to generate the show’s scripts. Cartman (who is often depicted as a comedy writer) voices his (and according to the commentary track, the show’s) complaint thus:

“I am nothing like Family Guy! When I make jokes they are inherent to a story! Deep situational and emotional jokes based on what is relevant and has a point, not just one random interchangable joke after another!” —Eric Cartman, “Cartoon Wars I,” South Park

Family Guy made no immediate response, but this season produced the episode “Spies Reminiscent of Us,” which featured a dig at South Park’s argument.

The “Family Guy” Windows 7 promo episode has undergone a strange journey. First, on October 13th, Fox announced that they were going to devote an entire “Family Guy”/Seth McFarlane variety show to promoting Windows 7 and released this underwhelming promo clip (which was actually just a redub of a previous episode):

The reaction from the idiot savants on the internet was almost universally negative. Then came the October 16th debut of the “Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show.” According to media reports, it wasn’t until the airing of this episode that someone at Microsoft realized that their new flagship product was going to share air time with fart jokes and racial stereotypes and subsequently pulled the plug on the special episode. “Not a fit with the Windows brand” was the official line from corporate.

There’s so much fail going on here, but neither should have been particularly surprising. Both “Family Guy” and Microsoft’s respective fails were in fact years in the making.

It has been a rough week for Kanye West.  First, South Park eviscerated him by skewering his egocentrism (and excessive use of autotune), then he went and proved them right by emptying his soul on his blog about his hurt feelings and sincere desire to be a better person.   Although I don’t usually like to kick a guy while he is down, the whole series of events reminded me of a lingering complaint that I have had ever since Kanye’s most recent album, 808s and Heartbreaks, dropped back in November:  I am fairly certain that Kanye West has never ever seen any of the three RoboCop movies, even though one of the songs on the album is named after the film franchise’s titular character.

“More people will come if they think we’ll have punch and pie!”

Many have colloquially known that punch and pie is an effective marketing/publicity tool to incentivize attendance at events, but its precise quantitative effect on attendance has largely been left to conjecture…until now, that is.

Here, we shall use the case study opportunity presented in South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut as a basis for extrapolating a general statistical model to demonstrate the effect of offering punch and pie as an attendance incentive.

• Seeing Movies Alone (and being a dick)
• Mocking the Afflicted
• Tyler Perry, Entrepreneur
• The Nature of Spoilers
• The South Park Indy Rape Episode

Email questions and comments to podcast AT overthinkingit DOT com or leave a voicemail to be played back on the show at (203) 285-6401 (include your name — or pseudonym! — and location). And come on, give us some ratings on iTunes!

Download Episode 15 (MP3)