NEW YORK -- All 13-year-old boys are on board with "Family Guy." They love this show and no wonder. It's silly, subversive and caters to a 13-year-old boy's endless craving for humor about bodily emissions.

Among this particular demo, the fact that "Family Guy" is also breathtakingly smart is just a bonus (or even beside the point). But the deft blend of the ingenious with the raw helps account for its much broader appeal, as it taps into every viewer's inner 13-year-old boy -- which, whatever your age and gender, is the easiest point of entry into the show's garden of delights. (This Fox animated series airs at 9 p.m. Sundays, as well as on TBS and Cartoon Network's Adult Swim.)

As a "Family Guy" fan who's long past preadolescence, I crack up watching it. I cringe. I ask myself how they come up with this stuff. And I find I'm in synch with it to a degree I might prefer not acknowledging in polite company.

I don't mean "Family Guy" necessarily mirrors my thinking. But it anticipates what I'm capable of thinking, if I were observant and twisted enough to see what it sees unassisted.

In its absurd incongruities, the show catalogs the detritus of modern life. In its devilish flights of fancy, it targets how things might be, if the world were only slightly more deranged.

There are cutaway sight gags and comic asides booby-trapping "Family Guy," making each episode's story line feel hyperlinked to out-of-nowhere bits of foolishness.

But through it all, the basic setting is the Peter Griffin homestead in Quahog, R.I.

Peter and his family have an unapologetic cartoonishness that, in contrast, makes "The Simpsons" seem entrenched in everyday reality. The characters on "Family Guy" seem infinitely adaptable to any situation, ready for anything to put a joke across.

As the vision of Seth MacFarlane (the show's creator, who's also a producer, writer and does numerous voices), "Family Guy" mocks politics, pop culture, celebrity, showbiz shtick and TV in particular.

Frazier Moore is a national television columnist for The Associated Press. He can be reached at fmoore@ap.org