If you’ve been anywhere around popular entertainment in the last 30 years, you know who Patrick Warburton is.
The iconic funnyman has been featured in some of the most culturally relevant television shows of recent memory (“Seinfeld” and “Family Guy”), as well as more niche, but no less beloved, shows (“The Tick”). If you’ve ever ridden Disney’s Soarin’ Over California/Around the World, Warburton is the “pilot” in the instructional video that precedes the ride. If you’re a new parent, you’ve definitely heard Warburton as he voices “Grandpa Shark” in the wildly popular “Baby Shark’s Big Show” series. If you’re a gamer, Warburton has lent his voice to multiple franchises, such as “Tales from the Borderlands,” “Call of Duty,” and “Skylanders.”
Which is all to say: The man is rather ubiquitous in entertainment — and has been for quite some time now. He’s seen some stuff.
So when Warburton joined Fox News Digital for a wide-ranging interview and decried the current cancel climate, his words carried some gravitas.
This isn’t some bitter C-lister lamenting that he hasn’t gotten some fair shake due to cancel culture.
This is a man who has had an incredibly successful career in spite of cancel culture.
“I used to apologize for being on ‘Family Guy,’ and I apologize no more because this world is a horrible native satire,” Warburton told Fox.
On “Family Guy,” Warburton provided the voice of recurring character Joe Swanson, a paraplegic police officer.
Swanson’s handicap is the frequent butt of jokes throughout the show, though it’s worth noting that the show skewers the other characters just as much.
Main character Peter Griffin is borderline mentally handicapped, and his girth is often derided. Glenn Quagmire is a sexual predator. Cleveland Brown is often the punchline of race-related jokes (Brown is black).
So clearly, there are no sacred cows on “Family Guy,” and Warburton thinks that’s an important factor.
“Everybody takes themselves too seriously, and … I think in many ways become an overwhelming mess,” Warburton said.
Warburton is hardly the only actor/comedian to lambaste the current way in which free speech, comedic free speech in particular, is being throttled by everybody who “takes themselves too seriously.”
“There’s this new, weird sort of fascism of people thinking they know what you can say and what you can’t, and it’s a really weird thing that there’s this new trendy myth that people who want free speech want it to say awful things all the time. It just isn’t true, [free speech] protects everyone,” legendary comedian Ricky Gervais said in a 2020 interview.
“And this new thing ‘hate speech’ — ‘oh, well that’s hate speech.’ And, well, the two catastrophic problems with the term ‘hate speech’ is one, what constitutes ‘hate speech’? Everyone disagrees. There’s no consensus on what ‘hate speech’ is,” Gervais added.
“And two, who decides? And there’s the real rub, because obviously the people who think they want to close down free speech because it’s bad are the fascists.”
Warburton and Gervais clearly share some similar sentiments, with the former summing up what he believes this world desperately needs.
“But we need humor in our lives, and we need love and humor, acceptance. It’s all rather simple.”
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.