The folks behind Family Guy are getting the last laugh in a legal tussle with Carol Burnett after a federal judge tossed a lawsuit by the famous funnylady over an episode that parodied her.
As Stewie Griffin might proclaim, "Victory is mine!"
In her suit, filed in March in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, Burnett claimed that after she refused to grant Fox and Family Guy mastermind Seth MacFarlane consent to use the theme music from The Carol Burnett Show, they "knowingly and deliberately" rewrote the episode to disparage Burnett's famous cleaning-lady character.
The 74-year-old comedian says the Apr. 23, 2006 episode, titled "Peterotica," wound up including the music for a segment. The bit also featured a 'toon character giving the signature ear tug of Burnett's "Charwoman," popularized during skits on her hit variety show, which ran for 11 seasons on CBS from 1967 to 1978.
In his ruling signed Friday and made public Monday, U.S. District Judge Dean Pregerson saw little if any harm done to Burnett. While he "fully appreciates how distasteful and offensive the segment is to Ms. Burnett," Pregerson noted that parody is protected by the freedom of speech rights guaranteed under the First Amendment.
"In the new media, any self-imposed restraint essentially has been eliminated. Public figures, such as Ms. Burnett, are frequent targets of parodies and crude innuendo," the judge continued. "As Ms. Burnett well knows, it takes far more creative talent to create a character such as the 'Charwoman' than to use such characters in crude parody. Perhaps Ms. Burnett can take some solace in that fact."
In the episode, Family Guy's bumbling patriarch, Peter Griffin, tries to pen an erotic novel only to bankrupt his father-in-law when a man who listens to one of Peter's audiobooks (narrated by Betty White) gets turned on to the point that he crashes his car and ends up suing.
An animated version of Charwoman pops up at a porn shop that Peter visits with pal Quagmire, who comments that the store is so clean because "Carol Burnett works part-time as a janitor." As he's saying that, a variation of the Carol Burnett Show theme plays in the background.
Another character observes, "You know when she tugged her ear at the end of that show, she was really saying goodnight to her mom." To which Quagmire replies, "I wonder what she tugged to say goodnight to her dad."
Burnett hatched the English cleaning-lady character in the late 1950s while working as a regular player on the popular early-'60s CBS variety series The Gary Moore Show, for which she won an Emmy.
Along with copyright infringement, her suit also alleged a violation of the Lanham Act (which governs trademark registration), statutory violation of right of publicity and common law misappropriation of name and likeness. The complaint also implored the court to order Fox to re-edit the segment to strip out all references to "Burnett, her likeness, the Charwoman character and theme music."
Reps for 20th Century Fox and a lawyer for Burnett could not be reached for comment. However, the studio previously released a statement saying "it was surprised" that the comic actress took legal action based on a segment that lasted no more than 18 seconds and was one of many parodies featured in the episode.