Bellying Up to the Bar in Fox’s ‘Toonville World

“Now, son, you don’t want to drink beer. That’s for daddies and kids with fake IDs.”

--Homer Simpson to Bart

The funny drunk is back.

After being largely banished under pressure from Mothers Against Drunk Driving and others--on the premise that getting potted wasn’t quite the howl it was made out to be--big-time boozing is making a comeback in prime time.

The happy hour is animation.

The forerunner was “The Simpsons,” a Fox series to toast. But also one in which, for nearly a decade, Duff Beer has remained the medication of choice at Moe’s Tavern, pit stop for Springfield’s most dedicated sloshers, including Homer Simpson and his ever-plastered pal Barney. In 1993, Homer was arrested for drunk driving, and after a night with Al-Anon stopped drinking Duff for a month. But it didn’t take. Only recently, he and his buddies went on a drunken binge, driving his car through a school without repercussions.

Years after Homer raised his first Duff came Fox’s twangy “King of the Hill,” where drinking beer around the barbecue is a birthright for genial Texan Hank Hill and his circle of good ol’ boys.

Earlier this month, another animated comedy began making booze a punch line, again on Fox. It’s “The PJs,” which finds the superintendent of a crumbling black housing project regularly joining his pontificating friends around a table with their individual bottles.

And now it’s Fox setting ‘em up again on Sunday night following the Super Bowl when unveiling oft-funny but problematic “Family Guy,” which isn’t scheduled to return until March.

Its cartoon hero is a dumpling of a patriarch, Peter Griffin, who in the premiere loses his job overseeing a toy assembly line because of an epic hangover. Somehow getting home after a bender, he spends the night on the kitchen table, to be awakened in the morning by his family as they eat breakfast around him.

Although job loss is the consequence of his behavior, Peter’s guzzling of 37 beers at a stag party is played entirely for laughs, as are his inebriated pals, one of whom relieves himself on a grandfather clock that he mistakes for a urinal, as Peter tops everyone in a game called Drink the Beer.

He asks what he’s won. Answer: “Another beer.”

Peter is hardly the first protagonist to have another . . . and another . . . and another. In the 1930s and ‘40s, for example, William Powell and Myrna Loy saw life from a tilt in “The Thin Man” series as the big screen’s most engaging, most smashed pair of detectives.

It seems now, though, that television has come almost full cycle--”Days of Wine and Roses” with a laugh track--since its callower days when drinking was an ever-present crutch of both drama and comedy. Time was that characters in TV went to the bar (either the one in the living room or on the corner) at the first sign of stress or a problem that seemed too large to handle sober, early “Dallas” being a series, for example, where bourbon and ten-gallon hats were interchangeable.

Much earlier, in an era when a drunk falling off a bar stool was an automatic guffaw, the great Jackie Gleason gave the gift of intoxication to one of his most memorable TV characters: Reginald Van Gleason III, a spoiled society playboy for whom standing erect amid his bubbly haze was a huge challenge. In reality, top-hatted Reggie’s life might have been as jagged as the broken edge of a whiskey bottle. Stripped of his comedy armor, he probably would have started each morning as a coughing, choking, sputtering, red-eyed wreck of a gutter bum waiting to happen.

As someone whose own life had been visited by the horrors of heavy drinking, Gleason might have infused some awareness in Reggie, his biographer, William Henry III, noted. But Gleason was a “happy endings man,” Henry wrote. And so it was Gleason, too, as Joe the Bartender, who listened to the gibberish of Frank Fontaine as thoroughly bombed Crazy Guggenheim leaning against the bar with his hat pulled down over his ears, the happy ending in this case being Crazy sobering up long enough to croon a syrupy ballad.

But how was funny old Crazy supposed to get home after friendly old Joe closed the bar? And how did another famous drinker, funny old Norm, get home after hours of melding with his bar stool on NBC’s “Cheers”? If he drove, like Homer Simpson, whom or what did he hit?

“Duffy’s Tavern” was a successful radio comedy that was briefly brought to TV in 1954. For some reason, contemporary sitcoms also have made bars benign hangouts for their characters, usually without having them ever raise their glasses.

Nowhere on TV has booze flowed as freely or destructively, though, as on “Rude Awakening,” the compelling new Showtime comedy whose flawed heroine began the season as a falling-down drunk whose toots with the bottle drove her into the bed of just about anyone who showed an interest. She is now a tenuously recovering alcoholic having to put up with her ever-tipsy mother, a close cousin to the drinking-and-drugging pair of cutups on the former British sitcom “Absolutely Fabulous.”

It is stunning how successful each of these comedies has been at finding genuine levity in characters who get looped, affirming that when it comes to making TV, creativity and wittiness do not necessarily equal social responsibility. Happily, however, the drunk’s-eye view of the world typifying much of “Rude Awakening” has been only superficially humorous, giving way to an underlying sadness befitting a character who has been an out-of-control lush.

You’d have to bet against “Family Guy” reaching that level of insight based on an uneven premiere whose humor ranges from inspired to cheap and sophomoric. The opening plot finds the jobless Peter (voiced by 25-year-old series creator Seth MacFarlane) coming into unearned money that gets him into trouble with his unflappable wife, Lois (Alex Borstein), who is targeted for death by their homicidal, power-mad infant son, Stewie (also MacFarlane). “Damn you, vile woman,” he says pretentiously from his high chair, “you’ve impeded my work from the day I escaped your wretched womb.”

“Family Guy” weaves in Sunday’s Super Bowl XXXIII and takes some shots at Fox itself, as in a newscast whose breathless lead story is, “When toys attack!” Much like UPN’s new “Dilbert,” the brainiest character here is the family dog (MacFarlane again), and like “The Simpsons,” the dumbest is the father, who laughs out loud at “Philadelphia” in a movie theater when Tom Hanks’ character says he has AIDS.

Despite heavy cursing and a fleeting depiction of pedophilia, “Family Guy” is scheduled to premiere at 7 p.m. on the West Coast (its regular time slot is undetermined) following a cosmic sports event whose expected enormous audience will make it the ultimate in family viewing.

How lucky for “Family Guy” that it should follow the Super Bowl, and ironic that Peter Griffin should be introduced after an event famous for its beer commercials and cultural emphasis on drinking. After the giddiness of the moment, however, will America love him the morning after?

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* “Family Guy” airs Sunday at 7 p.m. on Fox. The network has rated the premiere episode TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children).