Improve your English with Family Guy - Learn English with Tommy

It’s the time for being with your family. What better time then to improve your English with Family Guy. Let’s have a look at what is coming up in this Christmas special.

What is Family Guy about?
Happy Freakin’ Christmas – improve your English with Family Guy

What is Family Guy about?

Family Guy is an American animated comedy series on Fox. It follows the story of a normal-looking family in the fictional town of Quahog. In every episode, the series tries to laugh at something, which is in current American society. This might be the reaction to Covid-19 or the Americans love of guns. It’s apolitical, but it wants to show Americans that there is another way of thinking about different topics.

The characters

Family Guy has a long cast of characters, but here are the main characters you should look out for, while watching the series:

Peter Griffin. Peter Griffin is the head of the family. He’s the Family Guy. He’s father to three children. Peter is a lazy man with numerous jobs. Furthermore, he’s unintelligent and outspoken. He’s incredibly overweight as well. Additionally, he’s seen as childish, which makes it really hard to believe he says.
Lois Griffin. She’s the wife of Peter and the mother of Peter’s children. Lois is a housewife, who loves her children a lot and will do anything for them. She’s a piano instructor
Meg Griffin. Meg is the oldest of the three children. She’s a teenager going through puberty. She’s got problems fitting in with her friends at school. Since this series began, she has been in love with many different characters, including the family’s dog: Brian
Chris Griffin. Chris the second child in the family. He’s around 14 years old. Physically he looks like his dad Peter. Nevertheless, he is much more intelligent than his dad. Sometimes, though, he loses track of what he’s doing or saying, which doesn’t always help his situation.
Stewie Griffin. Stewie may be a 1 year old, but he’s seen as a child genius. He speaks in an upper-class British accent to make up for the fact he hasn’t aged since his 1st birthday. In the past he has wanted to kill his mother, Lois, and also take over the world, but these ideas have long since disappeared from his mind.
Brian Griffin. He’s a speaking Labrador retriever. Yes, you saw that correctly! He’s an intellectual, who visited Brown University, in the USA. Brian is usually the one, who says that Peter’s plans are stupid. He’s in love with Lois and is an unsuccessful writer.

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Happy Freakin’ Christmas – improve your English with Family Guy

As we can see from these scenes, Family Guy is a programme, which tries to see the funny side of things. But what can we learn from this Christmas episodes of Family Guy.

Fast-talking Americans

Many native speakers are fast speakers and we see this in Lois’s complaint to the family. She says, “you all think Christmas just happens, you think all this goodwill falls from the freakin’ sky? Well, it doesn’t, it falls out of the hell- like…. butt”. Even for a native speaker the last part of the complaint is not understandable. If you need help with fast-speaking native speakers, then look at my previous post about fast-speaking natives.

Humour

In these scenes, we see two elements of irony and sarcasm. Despite this being a feature of British humour, the Americans try to use it as well. First we see Meg (the daughter) say ‘well, here’s the paper towels’ after her mum throws a chair out of the window. A second element of sarcasm is used when Peter tells the police to fire a tranquilliser at Lois. This is despite her reaction to Stewie’s speech in the nativity scene. If you would like to improve your English, it is important understand and use humour correctly. Here is another article I wrote about British humour.