Peter Griffin

	Family Guy character
	File:PeterGriffin.jpg
Peter Lowenbrau Griffin
Hometown:	Quahog, Rhode Island
Species:	Human
Gender:	Male
Height:	5 ft 8.5 in (174 cm)
Weight:	300 lb.
Age:	42 (as of the third season episode "Brian Does Hollywood")
Favorite beer:	Pawtucket Patriot Ale
Religion:	Catholic, Makes his own church for the Fonz
Heritage:	Irish, plus partially African and German
Favorite Band:	KISS
Favorite Sports Team:	All Boston teams
Least Favorite Sports Team:	All New York teams
First Episode Appearance:	"Death Has a Shadow"
Voice Actor:	Seth MacFarlane

Peter Lowenbrau Griffin (born in 1959) is a fictional character in the American animated television series Family Guy. He is voiced by the show's creator and lead writer, Seth MacFarlane. Peter is the head of the Griffin household and the central character in the show. He is married to Lois, and is the father of Meg (although it is revealed in the episode Screwed the Pooch that her biological father is apparently a man named Stan Thompson), Chris, Stewie and Bertram, although he and the family (with the exception of Stewie) are unaware of Bertram's existence, because he was the result of one of several "donations" Peter made to a sperm bank. His best friend is his dog, Brian.

Life

Peter Griffin was born in Quahog, Rhode Island, around 1960, to Francis and Rose 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 June 21 to July 22.

He was a member of the pete singing group Simon & Garfunkel where he pitched ideas for "Here's to you Mrs. Fleckenstein" 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"

During the Vietnam War, Peter participated on the American side. Instead of camouflage, he wore a bright clown's get-up, reasoning that "they're gonna be looking for Army guys." (Though this may have been a joke and not a real occurrence.) Despite actually fighting in the war, he believes the Walter Cronkite hoax of the war never actually happened.

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 long time friend and 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. 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 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.

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 revealed he has an illegitimate second daughter whom he mistook Meg for after a makeover.

Ironically, Peter has himself tried a number of drugs, including LSD, marijuana, anabolic steroids, cocaine, and ecstasy.

After being laid off from the toy factory, Peter bought a boat and became a fisherman. 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. Upon their rescue, 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.

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 (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.

Peter has had a wide variety of jobs. See List of Peter Griffin's jobs.

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 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!" 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 experience, 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 ended up in a fight with another woman, the same one who sent Peter on the women's retreat.

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 dream), and again in "Blind Ambition".

His ego can get inflated by the most miniscule of achievements. For instance, in "Petarded," he wins a game of Preschool Edition "Trivial Pursuit" 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. Ironically, pedantic means "Often used to describe a person who emphasizes their knowledge through use of vocabulary."

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). 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, and music in general is a major part of the series.

He has a tendency to criticize Lois's cooking. In "Petarded" he describes his meatloaf as "shallow and pedantic". In a cutaway in another episode in which he is narrating his own life, he described the food she prepared as "questionable," causing Lois to knock him unconscious.

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.

Peter can be sentimental at times as well. For example, he cries when hearing the song "Up Where We Belong."

Health

Physically, Peter is in very good health, despite being overweight 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. 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.

However, he does occasionally suffer from incontinence 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 several of Peter's sperm in the episode "Emission Impossible." In "Sibling Rivalry" he has a vasectomy. Excessive consumption of alcohol has damaged most of his brain cells. 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.

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 advertisment 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. 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.

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.

Ancestry

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.

In the episode "The Son Also Draws," Peter falsely claimed to be Native American, with an ancestor named Jeep 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.

Peter has many strange ancestors, some of whom were involved in important historical events, and who usually show up in throwaway gags.

Gender issues

Although heterosexual, there have been a few throwaway jokes over the course of the series implying Peter is gay. In the episode "PTV", a cutaway shows Peter and Jake from Sixteen Candles talking about Peter's birthday. They lean for a kiss, then Jake throws Peter to the ground and rapes him. In yet another cutaway from a different episode, Peter is suggested to be a female-to-male transsexual, who chose his new first name after looking at his new penis, he also grew breasts in junior high school, however other episodes have flashbacks showing Peter as a male child. Peter also admitted to losing his virginity to another man while being tackled in a football game. He was also eager to suggest homo sexual intercourse as a means of survival when in a Survivor-like situation, and in the episode 'You May Now Kiss the - uh - Guy Who Receives', Peter displays a thoughtful expression after discussing a possible homosexual orgy with Brian's gay cousin Jasper and his Filipino boyfriend.

Trivia

Peter doesn't like "The Godfather" (1972).

Peter is FAT

External links

Family Guy at IMDb
DailyHaHa Peter Griffin Soundboard
TurnInto How to become Peter Griffin