peter griffin

Life

Because of the humor style of the show, snippets of Peter's history prior to the start of the series are extremely ambiguous, simply because events are often shown simply for their humor value, with no thought put into whether or not it fit into continuity (ranging from Peter loitering for an extended period of time, to Peter having received a sex change, working at jobs in foreign countries,and even several with his apparent death).

Peter Griffin was born in Quahog, Rhode Island, in 1964 (deduced from the doctor stating, "You're 42 and haven't had a prostate exam," in episode "Stewie Loves Lois), to Francis and Thelma Griffin. He was baptized in the Roman Catholic faith as a baby, but did not grow up to be very devout.

According to Peter's doctor, Peter is a Cancer; more specifically he was born in July, meaning he was born between July 1 to July 22.

He was a member of the folk-singing group Simon & Garfunkel, where he pitched ideas for "Here's To You Mrs. Fleckenstein" (the last name of a Family Guy writer's assistant) and "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Lawry's Seasoning Salt". When Simon & Garfunkel turned down these ideas he said "Screw you guys, I'm goin' to 'Nam".

Around 1980, Peter worked at a country club/resort in Newport, RI, as a towel boy, where he met Lois Pewterschmidt, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. Lois and Peter got to know each other better at a party for the resort employees that Lois sneaked off to. Peter dropped the girl he was dancing with to the floor and started dancing with Lois to "Do You Love Me?" by the Contours.

Her father, Carter, objected to Peter because he considered him to be of a lower social class, while Peter's father objected to Lois because of her religion. Carter tried to keep Lois and Peter apart by having his servants toss Peter out into the ocean. Unfortunately for Carter, Peter was rescued by a nearby Navy ship, aboard which Peter met his future neighbor, Glenn Quagmire. Glenn helped Peter pull into a port in Florida. There he met Cleveland Brown, another future neighbor, who gave him a ride back to Newport to Lois. However they soon are chased by the Klu Klux Klan which Peter believes to be ghosts. Upon returning, Carter Pewterschmidt offered Peter a check for $1 million to not marry Lois, but Peter turned it down. When Peter and Lois got married, Francis Griffin (Peter's father) amended the "Just Married" banner to read "Just Married - to a Protestant whore."

Peter worked as a production line worker at the Happy-Go-Lucky Toy Factory since at least 1977, until the plant was torn down a couple of decades later, after owner Mr. Weed died.

When a toad-licking drug trend started at Meg's school, Peter went "undercover" as a Fonzie-inspired high school student under the name Lando Griffin (in part an homage to Lando Calrissian from Star Wars). Meg was at first mortified, but when Lando became cool by single-handedly turning the entire school off drugs, Meg asked him to the dance. Lando took Connie D'Amico to the dance instead, but declared that he had been rejected by Meg, and promised to kill himself by driving his motorcycle off a cliff. Peter has himself tried a number of drugs, including LSD, marijuana, anabolic steroids, cocaine, ecstasy and opium.

After being laid off from the toy factory, Peter bought a boat and became a fisherman. When his boat sank during a trip to Pelican's Reef, Peter and his drinking buddies were stranded on an island for a number of months. After being lonely for a long time Peter and his friends decide to have a gay sex orgy which is sighted by a cruise ship. Upon their rescue by the cruise ship, Peter returned to Quahog to find that Lois had married Brian following his disappearance. Showing up naked at the Spooner Street house one day, he managed to win back the affections of Lois, who reached a mutual agreement to divorce Brian and remarry Peter.

Peter worked at the Pawtucket Patriot brewery for a few months, during which time he drank himself into a stupor in his first five minutes of working there. However, in an earlier episode, "Wasted Talent", the brewery was presented as a 'Willy Wonka' type factory, complete with 'Oompa Loompas' (Called 'Chumba Wumbas' in this episode). In the episode 'Wasted Talent' the brewery has restricted access, and Peter was thrown out.

Peter once played as a center in the New England Patriots as the number 68. He got chose when he bulldozed at least eighty people trying to go to the bathroom. He was fired for his end-zone showboating at a game and was traded to the London Silly Nannies. Peter decided to get back at Brady, and called him to schedule a football game. As the kickoff started the whole London Silly Nannies left except for Peter who Tom Brady thought was a man to stand up to the entire New England Patriots.

In the movie, Peter became a local celebrity when he hosted an Action 5 News segment titled "What Really Grinds My Gears" (a reference to a line from Planes, Trains and Automobiles) in which he ranted on topics such as the lack of new priest and rabbi jokes, Lindsay Lohan's teasing, parents who don't control their children, not being able to find droids you're looking for (like the Imperial Stormtroopers in Star Wars), and people in the 19th century. He lost the job when Tom Tucker brought to the station a tape of Stewie driving while intoxicated.

Like Homer Simpson, Peter has had a wide variety of jobs. See List of Peter Griffin's jobs.

During the 2004 Presidential Elcetions, Peter Griffin voted for write in Canidate A. Hitler.

Personality

Peter's favorite pastime is watching television. His favorite shows include Star Trek, Three's Company, Happy Days, Joan of Arcadia, Gumbel 2 Gumbel, Who's the Boss and Lost.

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 behaviour 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.

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" (which he did not know was a 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.

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 centre of the Earth. Not only is the idea utterly ridiculous & 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." 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 woman are fat."

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.

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).

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. Finally, it took him well over a minute for him to answer his Trival Pursuit (child edition) questions in "Petarded", while he unintentionally gave himself hints to the answers. On another occasion it took Peter lots of time to figure out that if there were four silver scrolls and one was gone, how many there would be left.

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.

In one flashback, it is shown that Lois unwittingly shot Peter dead on a rooftop during an apparent face-off between Peter and his evil twin. However, this flashback is out of the continuity of the series, just like many other flashbacks in Family Guy.

Ancestry

Main article: List of characters from Family Guy

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. O'cyrus Griffin, one of Peter's ancestors, owned one of the first telephones.

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.

Sexuality

Although heterosexual, there have been a few throwaway jokes over the course of the series implying Peter is gay (Also the case of his wife, Lois. However, it's possible that the fact of Peter's retardation as stated in the episode "Petarded" that plays a role in homosexual acts).

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