Peter Griffin: Difference between revisions

Peter Lowenbrau Griffin is a fictional character in the American animated television series Family Guy. His voice, which has a thick-as-chowder Rhode Island accent, is produced by the show's creator and lead writer, Seth MacFarlane. Peter is the head of the Griffin household and the central character in the show. He is married to Lois, and is the father of Meg (although a throwaway joke in the episode Screwed the Pooch suggests that her biological father is a man named Stan Thompson), Chris, Stewie and Bertram, although he and the family (with the exception of Stewie and possibly Brian) are unaware of Bertram's existence, because he was the result of one of several "donations" Peter made to a sperm bank. His best friend is his dog, Brian.

 so heres hw it goes down im am currently sitting here with 1 wierdo in a colts jersey he likes men i cant controll nicksfeelings for me its actully kinda wierd he sucks balls

Personality

Peter's favorite pastime is watching TV. His favorite shows include Star Trek (deduced in Peter's Got Woods), Three's Company, Joan of Arcadia (both deduced in Fast Times at Buddy Cianci Jr. High), Happy Days, Gumbel 2 Gumbel, Who's the Boss, The A-Team (deduced in Brian Goes Back to College), Lost (deduced in Petergeist), and Diff'rent Strokes (deduced in Death Has a Shadow). Notably, one of his favorite episodes of Diff'rent Strokes is the "episode where Arnold and Dudley get sexually molested by the guy who owns the bike shop." In North By North Quahog, he also watches Passion of the Christ, but does not like it. Because of his obsession with television, Peter often has trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality, and will often assert that events that took place in television or films were his own experiences, inserting himself into them in humorous ways. Peter is otherwise very crude and lowbrow: He enjoys Pauly Shore movies and the Ricki Lake Show, and enjoys other activities such as going to up-market tailors and farting inside the suits.

Peter is insanely jealous of Lois' ex-boyfriends, and he will attack any man who expresses the slightest interest in her; he even punched an orca at Sea World after it "kissed" Lois, and his own reflection after Lois said, "Well, look at that handsome man!" Two notable exceptions to this include: upon learning that Lois had been sexually involved with Gene Simmons, a member of his favorite band, KISS, he was proud of her, even boasting, "my wife did KISS!" and that he "feels like [he] did KISS too". Also, when the Griffin's neighbor Quagmire was caught peeping at Lois, Peter sided with Quagmire and told Lois she should take peeping as a compliment and to forgive him.

Peter is often transformed by traumatic experiences, and then restored to "normal" by a simple, almost trivial experience. For example, after shock therapy administered by Brian, Peter became like a wealthy, snobbish socialite and bid too much money at an auction. To snap Peter back to reality and his "normal" self, Brian broke one of Peter's Star Wars collectibles. Another example of Peter's malleable persona is in the episode "I Am Peter, Hear Me Roar". After experiencing a pain as great as that of childbirth ("stretching your bottom lip to the back of your neck") at a women's retreat, Peter became extremely sensitive and effeminate, and tried to breastfeed Stewie. To bring him back, Lois accidentally got in a homoerotic fight with another woman, the same one who sent Peter on the women's retreat. Peter also reverted to childlike behavior in the episode "Mother Tucker;" learning to ride a kiddie bike, using a training toilet, and being carried around by surrogate father figure Tom Tucker.

File:Giant Chicken.JPG

Peter's nemesis: The Giant Chicken

Peter's arch-nemesis is a man-sized chicken who gave him an expired coupon. He fought him throughout Rhode Island in the episode "Da Boom" (although this conflict took place in flashback), and again in "Blind Ambition".

His ego can get inflated by the most minuscule of achievements. For instance, in "Petarded," he barely wins a game of "Trivial Pursuit" (in which he was unknowingly given questions from the Preschool Edition) and begins to talk down to everyone. He views a news program about the Middle East and observes one man commenting: "I find the President's plan for peace in the Middle East to be shallow and pedantic." He later tells Lois he finds her meatloaf shallow and pedantic.

His mental shortcomings and clumsiness have resulted in several human and animal deaths.

Peter is apparently a very capable musician in several different areas. In the episode "Fast Times at Buddy Cianci Jr. High," he plays a trombone and Lois remarks that he took lessons in junior college. Also, in the episode "Wasted Talent," he was revealed to be a concert-level pianist, but only when inebriated and only when playing the theme music to television shows (e.g. The "Lonely Man" theme from The Incredible Hulk, the main theme from The X-Files, and "Love is All Around" from The Mary Tyler Moore Show). Peter was also part of a barbershop quartet which sang at hospitals, delivering bad news to terminally-ill patients. He also sings solo in numerous other Family Guy episodes, plays other insturments like the guitar, and music in general is a major part of the series. While Stewie was watching Mr. Belvedere, Peter demonstrated that he has perfect pitch by tuning his guitar to B with no external reference. It is shown in one episode that he was incapable of conducting a tusken raider choir. However, this is not a surprise.

Peter occasionally displays homosexual and bisexual tendencies. During the episode PTV, it is implied that Peter engaged in sexual activity with another male at his 16th birthday party (A parody of the ending of John Hughes' film Sixteen Candles. In the episode Patriot Games, a naked Peter jumps into the shower with Tom Brady and begins snapping him with a towel while saying, "Yeah, we're just a couple of guys messin' around, that's what we are." In the episode The Story on Page One, Peter expresses a willingness to have sex with Luke Perry to attempt to prove that Perry is gay. Peter has also engaged in homosexual activity against his will. In The Father, the Son, and the Holy Fonz, it is revealed that he lost his virginity after being tackled by an opposing player during a football game. The other player, while lying on Peter's back, asks Peter, "Want to get some breakfast?"

Peter sometimes seems to show that he hates Meg. This can be deduced by several episodes. Examples:

• In "Model Misbehavior", Peter assertively kicks Meg out of the house when she said she would pleasure herself to Lois' modeling photos with Peter and Chris. Then, later, she says, "How could you be okay with Mom parading herself around like this? I mean, she's half naked! It makes all women look bad!" Peter's only response to that is, "Meg...who let you back in the house?"
• In "Peter's Got Woods", Peter spits milk at Meg twice: when Brian tells Peter that he has a date and can't go to the Clam to play darts, and when Lois finds out that Brian's crush is Meg's teacher.
• In "PTV", when Lois tells Peter that he must see Meg's play instead of seeing the Emmys, he says, "But Lois, Meg sucks!" and a cutaway shows Meg in a 1st grade play portraying Robin Hood, and Peter says, "Uh, just so you know, you guys are NOT sucking me into the story at all. I, I'm very aware that I'm watching a play right now."
• In "Petergeist", when the family is in the car ready to escape their haunted house, Lois realizes they forgot Meg. Peter says, "Yeah, right, like I'm going back for Meg." They argue until she comes into the car and screams, "YOU BASTARD! HOW COULD YOU LEAVE ME IN THERE!?" followed by Peter saying, "Okay, see? It resolved itself." And at the very end of the episode, after Lois rolls the TV outside, Peter puts it back in and replaces it with Meg.
• In "Untitled Griffin Family History", after Lois tells the burglars that Meg is their daughter, not their son, Peter turns the screen of Meg in the kitchen off, saying it is distracting.
• In "Hell Comes to Quahog", Peter says "I can't believe this is coming out of my mouth..." and says "I love..." but before he can finish, Stewie and Brian use the tank to destroy the Superstore USA. Back at home, Meg says that he was going to say something in the store. Peter doesn't think so until she tells him that he was going to tell her that he loves her, and Peter tells her to not get cocky. He also threw eggs at Meg "for stealing jobs from hard working people", giving her a message: "We're here, we're queer, get used to it!"
• In "Saving Private Brian", a cutaway showing Peter in therapy has him telling Dr. Katz, "Every time my daughter opens her mouth, I just wanna punch her in the face; she's really annoying."

These could all be signs of Peter hating Meg, or at least having a love-hate relationship with her.

Peter's need for television can be extreme to the point of near physical dependency. When the broadcasting dish supplying TV to Quahog was accidentally destroyed, resulting in a town-wide television blackout, Peter constructed a cardboard cutout of the front of a TV screen, held up at eye-level with a brace around his waist, to simulate looking at a TV screen. Despite his obsession with TV, he doesn't seem to grasp several concepts. Whilst the family were the subject a reality TV show, he complained that the replacement Meg was taking all the screen time so he wouldn't be able to get his spin-off where he's a retired baseball umpire running a bar... at the center of the Earth. Not only is the idea utterly ridiculous and something Peter would no doubt complain about being on air, but he doesn't seem to grasp what the concept of a "spin-off" is.

Peter can be sentimental at times as well. For example, he cries when hearing the song "Up Where We Belong". After he reluctantly agrees to take Lois to a chick flick, he cries and becomes obsessed with chick flicks to the point of trying to make one himself. He seems to not know that anyone can become fat. Evidence of this fact is a quote in "Sibling Rivalry"; "Men aren't fat; only fat women are fat."

Peter is also noted to be a big fan of New England sports teams. As shown in Mr. Griffin Goes to Washington, Peter sneaks his family off to the Red Sox opening game at Fenway Park. Also, when Peter tries to bond with Stewie, Peter and Brian go to see a Red Sox game, but accidentally leave Stewie in the car. Peter claimed that when he was drafted by the New England Patriots that he always dreamed of playing for the Patriots.

Health

Physically, Peter is in very good health, despite being fat and accident-prone. He successfully played pro football for the New England Patriots, can run down and beat up a mugger, and can sustain a lengthy and destructive fistfight with his nemesis, the giant chicken. He also ran surprisingly well in one episode while trying to catch Max Weinstein. It has been suggested that both he and Lois may have contracted one or more STDs, but a lump in his chest turned out to be just a fatty corpuscle (which he at first confused with the late Fatty Arbuckle).

However, he does occasionally suffer from incontinence and flatulence at socially awkward moments and premature ejaculation with his wife. Peter's fertility was lowered (temporarily) when Stewie went in a microscopic ship into Peter's body and destroyed many of Peter's sperm in the episode "Emission Impossible." In "Sibling Rivalry" he had a vasectomy. Excessive consumption of alcohol has damaged most of his brain cells. (He has one left, whose glasses break in a reference to an episode of the Twilight Zone.) In the episode "Petarded" he was officially declared to be mentally retarded.

Despite earning the 1965 trophy for Most Ticks, Peter does not appear to have suffered Lyme disease or related ailments. He claims to have been unable to use the toilet until sometime before the episode "Brian in Love", not to have passed gas until he was thirty years old, and in the episode "The King is Dead", he ripped the longest fart ever recorded on television. (He later tops himself in PTV). In the episode Death Lives, Peter got struck by lightning and he is told by Death that when he was struck by the lightning, he soiled himself. This has also occured in an episode called "When You Wish Upon a Weinstein" Brian mentions that Peter soiled himself at the dinner party and it shows a flashback when the incident occurs and later at the church he does it again, then later on he doesn't seem to notice it happening because he acts normal.

Peter lacks some very basic general knowledge. For a long time he thought dogs laid eggs, the plural of goose was sheep and (perhaps only said as a joke) for four years he thought that Meg was a housecat. However, his knowledge of some topics, including TV shows and KISS, is nearly encyclopedic.

Although capable of deductive reasoning, it sometimes takes Peter a long time to draw simple conclusions. For example, after watching an advertisement for the KISS-Stock tour passing through New England, as seen in the episode "Road to Europe," it wasn't until later at the dentist that he figured out that he could go to KISS-Stock. In the episode "Brian in Love", Peter suddenly realized that Brian could talk as he was telling Peter that he was in love with a girl (who was in fact Lois). On another occasion, it took him three days to figure out a single-panel cartoon in The New Yorker. On another occasion, Peter was taking a long time to decide between two Ernest movies where Ernest goes to the beach and one in which he doesn't go to the beach and panicked when it was announced that the video store was closing soon.

In the episode "Blind Ambition," Peter went blind after eating nickels and suffering nickel poisoning; he said he was aiming for the world record of the most nickels swallowed. After unwittingly saving Horace from a fire, a dead hobo's eyes were transplanted into him (ironically, Peter himself had accidentally killed the hobo).

He denied several times that his prostate was tested in Stewie Loves Lois, believing Dr. Hartman to have raped him when he tried to reach into his butt.

After handling several M80s strung together, Peter lost all his right hand fingers (in the episode "Whistle While Your Wife Works"). He was able to retrieve all his fingers and get them all re-attached, and appeared through the rest of the episode with his right hand bandaged.

Ancestry

In the episode "Peter Griffin: Husband, Father...Brother?," Peter discovered that he had a pre-Civil War era black ancestor named Nate Griffin. Furthermore, Nate was a slave owned by a Pewterschmidt (Lois' family) ancestor. After learning this, Peter very briefly went by the name Kichwa-Tembo until his father-in-law, Carter Pewterschmidt, wrote him a $20,000 reparations check.

Peter has an evil brother named Thaddeus, who is basically a pantomime-villain version of Peter who talks like Snidely Whiplash.

In the episode "The Son Also Draws," Peter falsely claimed to be Native American, with an ancestor named Chief Grand Cherokee, in order to regain Lois' gambling losses at a casino. The casino managers told Peter to go on a vision quest to prove his claim. He did, and his spirit guide turned out to be Fonzie.

In Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story, he seems to be the descendant of an African American singer, Ella Fitzgriffin, who performed with young Ray Charles. Her high notes caused glass to shatter and embed itself in his eyes, resulting in his blindness.

Peter has many strange ancestors, some of whom were involved in important historical events, and who usually show up in throwaway gags. Silas Griffin, one of Peter's ancestors, owned one of the first dozen telephones (the third telephone, to be specific).

Also in one episode Peter says most of his family is husky and is descended from Jabba the Griffin, who resembles Jabba the Hutt from Star Wars but with Peter's likeness.

Peter also mentioned once, that he has two in-direct ancestors who were both siamese twins, and both fought on opposite sides of the American Civil War.

He also mentions he's related to Adolf Hitler's brother, Peter Hitler (which would make him also related to Adolf Hitler as well).

In one episode Peter says he had a relative who was one of the inventors of golf, going to a flashback of an Irish man of Peter's likeness, saying "So we're all clear on the rules, no blacks and no Jews".

Peter is also related to Moses, or "Moses Griffin".

References

• S. Callaghan Family Guy: The Official Episode Guide : Seasons 1 - 3 New York: Harper Paperbacks, 2005
• A. Delarte, "Nitpicking Family Guy: Season 4" in Bob's Poetry Magazine, 3.January 2006: 10 - 26 http://bobspoetry.com/Bobs03Ja.pdf