One afternoon in August, MacFarlane and two sound engineers are in the tiny control room outside the recording booths in the Family Guy offices. In strolls the actor Gary Cole wearing shorts and sunglasses. For a show that likes to pick on celebrities, Family Guy has little trouble attracting them, especially those whose resumes include the kind of wonderfully awful performances that ultimately get embraced as cult in-jokes: Drew Barrymore, Haley Joel Osment, Gene Simmons, Bob Costas, Phyllis Diller... Michael Clarke Duncan was in earlier this morning. Richard Dreyfuss is due to arrive this evening.
Cole has done the show 23 times. Today, he's doing Mike Brady, reprising a role he played in The Brady Bunch Movie. In this script, Mr Brady is verbally abusing Mrs Brady in one of those trademark pop-culture tangents.
"You know, you can really go as loud as you want," MacFarlane says in director mode. "We've never heard Mike Brady yell before, so this is new territory." He then assumes the role of Carol Brady.
"Huh, I don't remember asking for a warm beer," Cole says, his voice quiet but seething.
MacFarlane, as Carol, flips out: "I didn't want to quit working -- you made me!"
Five minutes later, Cole exits and MacFarlane is off to the next thing, laying down lines in furious fashion, typically in three or four takes, which he then selects from on the fly. His sound engineers tag his favorite takes and move on. He swaps from voicing Stewie to Peter to Quagmire to various odd parts, including a bit as Paul McCartney and another as Vince Vaughn.
Next up: A writer is doing Patrick Swayze, who is not, as you might expect, the butt of a cancer joke, but rather a tight-jeans joke followed by repeated takes of the writer growling, as throaty redneck Swayze, "Roadhouse!" It's another one of those cult jokes, a little snippet of Dada theater.
"Even a hair more badass," MacFarlane directs, and over and over they go until that one simple word becomes absurd in its own right. You can already hear it as a ring tone.
Josh Dean wrote about the legal woes of Bodog CEO Calvin Ayre in July/August.
Image: A still from Family Guy
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