10 Funniest Characters On Family Guy, Ranked

TVLine has taken many trips to Quahog over the years, and now, we're ranking who's had the most opportunities to leave us in stitches.

"Family Guy" has had no shortage of hilarious moments over the years. In many cases, those funny moments come courtesy of cutaway gags that have nothing to do with the plot. For some, the funniest characters ever might be someone who's only ever said a few lines. Looking at you, Peter O'Toole.

Naturally, when assembling this list, there are a lot of "Family Guy" episodes to pore over, and it's fascinating to see different styles emerge over the years. One character may get the short end of the stick for several years only to come out as a hysterical dynamo and steal every scene down the road. Everyone's list will look different, which comes with the territory of humor being subjective. But between the Griffin family and the vast supporting cast, you can't go wrong with any ranking, really.

We're kicking off this list with perhaps a surprising choice. Meg Griffin (voiced by Lacey Chabert, later Mila Kunis) started "Family Guy" as a pretty typical teenage girl before moving on to the family punching bag. Heck, Peter (Seth MacFarlane) wasn't above hitting Meg with a baseball bat just because. But in more recent seasons, the show's transitioned Meg into the show's wild card. Even if she only gets a few lines in an episode, they've always been highlights as of late. 

There is a cruel sense of humor in a lot of Meg-centric episodes. After all, "Shut up, Meg" practically became a catchphrase for Peter for a while. You may not realize it if you tuned out of "Family Guy" a while ago, but Meg's become downright dark in recent years, even permanently killing Ernie the chicken in Season 23's "The Chicken or the Meg."

Meg is funny because she's a versatile character. She can be the voice of reason and point out how absurd everyone else is acting. Or she can be the one taking things too far. It's clear the writers don't know what to do with her a lot of the time, but that just means they give her random jokes and gags to help fill out the runtime.

Lois Griffin (Alex Borstein) coming from a rich family allows for some great hijinks when Peter realizes he has access to great wealth. Or at least he would if he got along with Lois' father, Carter Pewterschmidt (Seth MacFarlane). He's often used as a stand-in for real-world billionaires and elites. In one episode, he's even sitting on the cure for cancer but won't release because there's more money to be made in treating the disease than curing it. 

That doesn't exactly sound like a barrel of laughs, but it's everything surrounding that idea that makes Carter hilarious. He has access to so much money and power, yet most of the time, he acts like a petulant child. He may hate Peter, but he'll still hang out with him when he's in trouble with his wife or lost his fortune. It makes for some stellar fish-out-of-water moments, like when Carter loses all his money in "Peterotica," so he and Peter create their own version of "Dawson's Creek" as a get-rich-quick scheme.

Peter and Carter honestly make for a great comedic duo and should be paired up more often. A billionaire acting like a child not only makes for awesome gags but may also be some subtle satire on how money can't buy you class. 

Does a lot of the humor from Dr. Hartman (Seth MacFarlane) stem from the fact that he also has the same funny voice as Carter Pewterschmidt? A little bit, yes. But Dr. Hartman is like the secret sauce in any episode. He'll rarely get a spotlight moment, but you can always count on him to offer some yucks when a member of the family winds up in the hospital. 

The writers clearly liked doing fake-out gags with Dr. Hartman at first. He was the king of misdirection in those early seasons, like saying, "You'll be dead within a month," to Peter, only to reveal he was actually talking about Hagar the Horrible. It's similar to Dr. Fishman (Ian Roberts) on "Arrested Development" where he would say one thing only to reveal he's referring to something else. But you know what? It's a good bit, and more shows should do it. 

After his initial appearances, Dr. Hartman morphed into a general incompetent doctor. He'll ask for monetary tips and look up basic information like what a "shoulder" is. Similar to how Carter is funny due to the contradiction between being a childish billionaire, Dr. Hartman is funny due to being a stupid doctor. It's simple, but it gets the job done. 

Like Meg, Chris Griffin (Seth Green) is another character who's gone through plenty of transformations over the years. At first, he was a pretty normal teenage boy who had trouble talking to girls but had a passion for art. At a certain point, the writers dropped the drawing angle and basically made him a mini-Peter. These days, Chris pretty much exists for masturbation jokes and not much else.

Personally, we prefer those early seasons for Chris. It's always been clear he's not the brightest bulb in the package, but he can display moments of profundity. Some of his best moments come when he has far too much situational awareness, like when he yells at Stewie, "Why are you so f***ing negative all the time?" It's great because it's calling Stewie (Seth MacFarlane) out while also breaking an unspoken rule that only Brian (also MacFarlane) can ever fully understand what Stewie's saying.

One improvement Chris has had over the years is with his voice. Early on, Green based Chris' voice on Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) from "Silence of the Lambs." It was a deeper, slower voice, but later on, Chris became more high-pitched. That allowed for snappier jokes and comebacks and really helped increase Chris' joke output. 

"Family Guy" has so many agents of chaos that occasionally you need someone who can play things a little more close to the chest. Enter: Tom Tucker, whom Seth MacFarlane has said is the easiest character for him to voice. He's the resident news anchor in Quahog who brings an old-timey, jovial cadence to even the darkest of news stories. That same cadence gets applied to his constant bickering with his co-anchor Diane Simmons (Lori Alan), as the two regularly get into it on the air.

One of Tom's best delivers comes when Brian and Stewie pay him a visit to inform him that his son Jake (also MacFarlane), who has an upside-down face, brought booze to a school dance that Chris got blamed for. Brian mentions how the whole thing has turned Chris' life "upside-down face," to which Tom nonchalantly responds, "It's no concern of mine if it's turned his life upside-down face."

With a lot of "Family Guy" characters, it can often feel as though the characters (and by proxy, the writers) are trying too hard to make a joke land. With Tom, pretty much everything comes off effortlessly. Just give him something horrific or off-putting to say, and just wait for MacFarlane to say it like a 1940s cigarette spokesperson. 

Out of all of Peter's friends, Cleveland Brown (Mike Henry, later Arif Zahir) is hands-down the funniest. Joe (Patrick Warburton) almost goes out of his way to be intentionally unfunny in recent seasons. And Quagmire (Seth MacFarlane) has a tendency to leave a bad taste in the mouth. But Cleveland is one of the unsung heroes on the show who even got his own spinoff for a while. Yes, it's often considered one of the worst spinoffs ever, but that's hardly Cleveland's fault. 

Cleveland is as close to a normal person you can get on "Family Guy." He's a bit humbler and more mild-mannered, often functioning as a voice of reason. But him often playing the straight man leads to some brilliantly subdued reactions to the chaos happening around him. Easily, Cleveland's best running gag is when part of his house gets blown off due to one of Peter's shenanigans. Cleveland will be in the tub, and he'll shout, "No, no, no, no, no," as it slowly falls to the ground.

And since Cleveland often acts more deadpan compared to his friends, it makes the moments where he shows some emotion all the better. When Henry was voicing the character, one of his best line deliveries is, "A balloon tied to a mailbox is the international symbol for party over here!" Cleveland is as close to a straight man as you can get on "Family Guy," which may not have worked as well when he was the main character on his own show but is an essential ingredient within a greater ensemble. 

We've talked a lot about character evolutions throughout "Family Guy." Flanderization is inevitable when dealing with TV shows that run for multiple decades. And Brian has suffered the worst. Early on in the show, he was the intellectual voice of reason, usually offering counterpoints to Peter's reckless shenanigans. But lately, he's transformed into a pompous jerk who rarely even follows his own belief system. Through it all, he's never stopped bringing boundless laughs to the series.

Easily, the best Brian jokes come from when he's paired with Stewie. Several of the best "Family Guy" episodes of all time are the "Road To..." installments where the duo embarks on some kind of epic journey. They learn some valuable lessons and get a chance to break out of their usual routines in the Griffin household. These are the moments that typically lead to Brian becoming his most unhinged.

With almost everyone else on the show, Brian has to be the mature one, but Stewie often has to be the voice of reason toward him. It's led to some surprisingly deep conversations between the two. But they can also joke and pal around. Granted, Brian can also have some pretty cringey comedy. Sometimes, he tries so hard to be intellectual that he circles back around to being dumb, but that's just an extra layer to the character where you never know what kind of Brian you're going to get from one episode to the next.

If there was a single character on "Family Guy" who had the highest ratio of great jokes compared to overall screen time, it would be Mayor Adam West. "Batman" star Adam West skewered himself wonderfully on the series. Sure, he would appear on other animated series, like "The Simpsons" and "The Fairly Odd Parents," to make fun of himself, but he was a recurring character in Quahog. As mayor, he could be used in any number of scenarios, drop a quick gem, and then leave without ever overstaying his welcome. 

What's great about Mayor West's character is how he doesn't really rely on "Batman" nostalgia. They absolutely could've created an original character to be the mayor who's similarly dim-witted. But the fact that it's actually Adam West saying all these things just make the jokes land harder. Whether he's going to stab the ocean or refers to himself as "Adam We" because he ran out of pieces on his Lite-Brite, the absurdity just kept on coming.

Sadly, Adam West passed away in 2017, and Mayor West was retired from "Family Guy." In his place came Mayor Wild West, voiced by Sam Elliott. He's more of a cowboy and has more of a stoic disposition compared to the previous Mayor West. All due respect to the character and Elliott's performance, but there's just something missing with Adam West now gone from the show. It hasn't been the same since. 

Peter Griffin is the eponymous "family guy," and the show just wouldn't work without him. He's responsible for many of the show's greatest jokes. He's often the one who kickstarts the cutaway gags with a random observation before transitioning into a total non-sequitur. Sometimes, Peter's even the star of these cutaways, which gives him the opportunity to get multiple jokes in quick succession.

Many of Peter's jokes stem from the fact that he's just plain ol' dumb. Sometimes, this is an endearing quality, like in the early seasons where he clearly means well but just doesn't understand the world around him. Peter's intelligence declines in the later seasons where he's pretty much just doing silly things for the sake of doing silly things. But that's still solid comedy in our book. 

Peter Griffin has become such an iconic sitcom character because he's the perfect everyman for any situation. He can get into a rivalry with the FCC or become a leader of a new country. He's pliable enough to where any passing fancy can catch his interest, and he'll take it to its logical extreme. 

Peter Griffin may be the main character of "Family Guy," but the most consistently funny character throughout its long run is clearly Stewie. As you've undoubtedly noticed throughout this list, we've tried to talk about how characters have changed over the years and how that's impacted the kind of jokes they get. Some iterations are funnier than others, but with Stewie, every era of him has something great to offer. 

In the early episodes, Stewie was a homicidal maniac, always trying to find ways to kill Lois. The humor came from this hyper-intelligent baby who could devise all sorts of weapons and desperately wanted his mother dead. As the years went on, Stewie abandoned his murderous dreams, and now, he pretty much does whatever. He can talk Brian into some wacky scenarios but also be the voice of reason when it's called for. He has trouble fitting in at daycare, like when he misunderstands the low-key style of Duck, Duck, Goose.

More than anything, the fact that he's a baby makes his jokes land harder. He might swear or say something completely off the cuff. If it was coming from any other character, it would be funny enough. But from Stewie, it turns a solid joke into an amazing one.