Shows That Had Overly Offensive Characters

The creators of Looney Tunes, for reasons unknown to anyone, decided one day that it would be funny to have a horny male skunk sexually assault a female cat. Because rape makes great humor for kids between the ages of 3 and 7. These particular cartoons even featured the hilarity of attempted suicide — once when Pepe Le Pew was snubbed by his victim and threatened to shoot himself in the head, and again when his victim tried to jump out a window to get away from him. Do you suppose there's anything to be said for modeling appropriate behavior in children's television, or did turning sexual assault into a joke for kids maybe have something to do with the boys of yesterday who grew up to the just-got-fired-for-sexual-harassment men of today?

Let's face it, we could really fill an entire article with nothing but the offensive characters that have populated The Simpsons over it's long, long, long (etc.) history. The Simpsons offends without prejudice. Pick an ethnic group, age group, gender, or religion and The Simpsons either has offended it or probably plans to do so soon. But some of the characters on the Simpsons really do cross a line when it comes to being totally offensive. Even Homer Simpson is offensive, though we've gotten so used to him that we seem to have totally forgotten that overweight people are not all foolish idiots who eat like hyenas and drool because thinking is haaaaard. 

But perhaps the worst and longest-running is Apu. If introduced today, Apu would be considered so over the top that he'd never make it out of the Kwik-E-Mart and onto the small screen. Here's the deal with Apu: he's got a heavy Indian accent, he runs a corner store, and he has eight kids in an arranged marriage. He's every Indian stereotype rolled up into a neat little racist packet, and as a bonus he's played by a white guy. But he's still on TV anyway.

Neil Patrick Harris might be a brilliant actor, but his Barney Stinson character on How I Met Your Mother was pretty darned despicable. Barney spent most of his time using and demeaning women, and then spent the rest of his time fat-shaming the women he couldn't be bothered to use and demean. He flaunted his "playbook" to his friends, which was an actual book full of clever ways to get women into bed, most of which relied almost completely on the assumption that most women are stupid enough to be tricked into sleeping with a guy if he can successfully pretend to be someone really interesting. And no one ever called him out or questioned him, at least not seriously, which was really just the showrunners' way of saying, "We think using and demeaning women is funny and Barney should be able to do as much of it as he likes, because cheap laughs at the expense of others are just so much easier to write than smart, sophisticated humor."

Because Asian tiger moms are so overdone, sometimes showrunners like to mix it up with Jewish moms, who are equally tyrannical, also want their daughters to settle down and marry a nice [insert ethnicity] boy (preferably a doctor), and are shameless nags with grating voices. That's exactly what The Big Bang Theory gave us with Mrs. Wolowitz, a character we mostly never saw but who still managed to be a larger-than-life stereotype. Mrs. Wolowitz isn't the only stereotype in the show, but the others are at least directed at nerds, and poking fun at nerds is still socially acceptable because they can science their way out of feeling offended, or something. So yeah, scientists never have sex and don't actually like sex anyway because it can't be lab-tested and proven via the scientific method, and that's hilarious. Also, Jewish mothers.

Some shows seem to exist only for the purpose of pissing people off, and one of the most notorious examples of this is Family Guy. Pick a character and with only a few exceptions you'll probably be able to pinpoint something offensive in 30 seconds or less. But let's talk about the worst offender: Quagmire, who began his life as a sleazy playboy and pretty rapidly decomposed into a serial rapist because who doesn't love a wholesome rape joke? Sexual violence is so damn funny, ha ha ha. 

Let's take a look at some of the show's Quagmire-inspired hilarity: in one episode, he rapes Marge Simpson. In another episode, he gets maced by the woman he's trying to rape but doesn't feel a thing, implying that he's built up a tolerance to mace over his years of raping women. In another episode he drugs a woman and tries to drag her off set, presumably to rape her. And in another episode the bartender asks if he'd like his usual drink and one with a roofie in it for his date. But wait, Quagmire isn't the only source of rape humor in the series. In one episode, Peter Griffin gets raped by a bull. Stewie, the 1-year-old, prank calls someone with a rape joke. And so on. Truly, top-tier humor for the modern world.

Most modern shows (with a few notable exceptions) are at least smart enough to know that they shouldn't be overtly and obviously offensive — today, offensive stuff is usually subtle or in a form that can be defended as a "harmless" stereotypes. The WWE somehow failed to get that memo. In 2005 it debuted a tag team that called itself "The Mexicools" and entered the arena in matching coveralls, riding on a lawn tractor under the brand name "Juan Deer." That was in 2005, like 40 years after Cesar Chavez when humans really ought to know better. But wait, there's more ... there was also "Akeem the African Dream" (who spoke with a heavy, stereotypical black accent but was actually a white guy), a Native American "chief" called Tatanka (who came complete with a feathered headdress and war cry), and a terrorist called Muhammed Hassan. A terrorist. Classy.

Making fun of white, working-class rural America is still a-okay as far as most people are concerned. After all, there's practically no one left that you can make fun of now that fat-shaming is off the table and obesity is on the rise. And we have to make fun of someone, right? How else can we express our own sense of insecurity and limited self-worth to the rest of the world? But not everyone agrees that poverty is funny, even if it's white poverty. Nickelodeon's The Amanda Show (a program for tweens) begged to differ. It featured a regular bit called a "Hillbilly Moment" when two country bumpkins would tell stupid knock-knock jokes and then beat each other over the head with beavers, bowling pins, and other "redneck" paraphernalia. Because poor white folks are funny, especially if they're dumb and have bad teeth.

South Park is a bit of a conundrum because it doesn't really fit into any of the same categories as the other shows here do. Sometimes it's offensive just for the sake of offending, like Family Guy. Sometimes it's offensive just so it can point out the stupidity of people who are blatantly offensive, like All in the Family. But one thing is absolutely, irrefutably certain about South Park: it's offensive. Pretty much every character and every episode has offensive undertones, overtones, or everywhere-tones. 

Like that one episode where Steve Irwin showed up at a Halloween party with a giant stingray sticking out of his chest, just seven weeks after the death of the real Steve Irwin, which was so offensive that even the show's characters were offended. And that other episode where they almost broadcast an image of the prophet Muhammad but didn't because Comedy Central wouldn't let them. And then there was the whole Lemmiwinks thing, which you can Google if you're really desperate. Of all the offensive shows on TV now or on TV in the past, South Park has got to be up there at the top, although the real impact of its offensive storylines are hard to quantify because everyone takes it in a little differently.