Boring Ahh Family Guy Episode

Submission 36,145

Part of a series on Overstimulation Videos / Sludge Content. [View Related Entries]

About

Boring Ahh Family Guy Episode, originally known as Movie Long Ah Hell, is a participatory trend in which meme creators take a photo of themselves doing an activity while watching Family Guy on their phone. They then write in text overlay that the activity is "boring ahh" (akin to the slang "goofy ahh"), essentially implying that they are enacting Family Guy overstimulation content (prevalent on TikTok) in real life. The trend started on Instagram in late 2022 with a photo showing Family Guy on a phone in a movie theater playing Avatar: The Way of Water in the background. Going into 2023, the "movie long ah hell" photo inspired photoshops and ultimately led to different photos with the same premise but in different settings.

Origin

On December 29th, 2022, Instagram^[1] user familyguyepictime posted a photograph of a person watching Family Guy on their cellphone while at a showing of Avatar: The Way of Water, captioned, "Movie long ah hell," suggesting Avatar lost his attention and now he's watching Family Guy instead (shown below). The post gained over 18,700 views in six days. Avatar 2 notably has a runtime of three hours and 12 minutes.

Spread

Over the following week, the meme was reposted numerous times, including by the Facebook^[2] page Memes Ruined My Life on December 29th, 2022, garnering over 6,100 shares and 7,900 reactions in six days. The meme also inspired photoshops that replaced the Family Guy image with other media. On January 1st, 2023, Instagram^[3] user chainsaw.man.memes posted a version showing Chainsaw Man on the phone, garnering over 1,700 likes in three days (shown below, left). That same day, a Redditor then posted a version to /r/andor^[4] replacing the image with one from the Star Wars series Andor, garnering over 280 upvotes in three days.

On January 3rd, 2023, Twitter^[5] user @keatonmerrell posted a version of the meme with Anthony Fantano on the phone, garnering over 11,000 likes and 470 retweets in a day (shown below, right). That day, Instagram^[6] user scoobydoofruitsnacks then reposted the original meme, garnering over 114,000 likes in a day.

On December 31st, 2022, Twitter^[7] user delilurs tweeted a screenshot of Instagram^[8] user forcetraumabluntt's story showing fireworks going off on New Year Year's Eve with a phone watching Family Guy visible in the bottom half. The text overlay read, "boring ahh fireworks." The tweet garnered over 8,100 likes in two months (shown below, left). Going into early 2023, similar iterations surfaced across social media. For instance, on January 29th, 2023, Twitter^[9] user maidenprincesss tweeted a photo stating, "boring ahh book," garnering roughly 11,800 likes in five days (shown below, right).

Various iterations surfaced on Twitter and Instagram going into February 2023, creating a series of photos that included each prior meme on at least one screen in the new image.

Family Guy and Subway Surfers Overstimulation Videos

Family Guy and Subway Surfers Overstimulation Videos, also known as Family Guy and Mobile Games Overstimulation Videos or Family Guy ADHD Videos, refers to split-screen videos (primarily posted to TikTok) that show a Family Guy clip in the top part of the screen and mobile app gameplay in the bottom half of the screen (among other oddly satisfying content such as DIY repair videos) in order to avoid copyright strikes as well as keep the viewer's attention via multiple competing visuals, alluding to a low attention span in the viewer akin to ADHD. The most common mobile app games present in the Family Guy clips are Subway Surfers and nameless Chinese video games. Family Guy clips channels garnered many parodies that played with the visual format, leading to the Family Guy Pipeline Incident and jumpscares in late 2022. Going into early 2023, Family Guy clips and mobile games overstimulation content led to discourse and memes on Twitter and elsewhere as many highlighted the content's absurdity and likened the genre to Gen Alpha and iPad kids.