Seth MacFarlane came in 74th on this year’s Celebrity 100 by making people laugh. But sitting in a booth at the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills, the 38-year-old creator of the hit Fox cartoon Family Guy is surprisingly distracted by the cackles emanating from a nearby table. “What I wouldn’t give for a sack of manure,” he says in a dead-on Woody Allen impersonation.

Usually it’s MacFarlane who is getting the yucks. His animation empire, which includes American Dad and The Cleveland Show, generates more ad revenue for Fox than the venerable Simpsons. (All four shows are bundled on Sunday night for what Fox accurately calls Animation *Domination.) Family Guy alone has earned more than $200 million for Fox.


MacFarlane’s sense of humor spares no sacred cows--abortion, diarrhea and matricide represent some of his lighter fare. A typical gag: Stephen Hawking having sex with his similarly disabled wife. The biggest part of MacFarlane’s genius, however, might be his business model. As the creators of the The Simpsons have learned over the past 20 years, channeling racy humor through the prism of animation means the cast never has to age, and MacFarlane is able to keep an outsize share of the profits--$36 million over the past 12 months, FORBES estimates--for himself.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2012/0604/celebrity-100-12-family-guy-seth-macfarlane-gets-serious.html

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