Not getting jokes on Family Guy

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I think family guy is a very funny show, however, do you often feel like you don't get a lot of the jokes? I find when I watch family guy, I do enjoy it and think it's funny, but I also get kind of frustrated because there's so many jokes I do not get because a lot of the humor requires being educated about current events, media, and other things. As a result, I often feel frustrated watching the show because I feel left out when it comes to the depth of most of the humor. Does anyone else feel that way too?

Family Guy is mostly a bunch of "inside jokes," meaning, "you had to have been there."
If it references something you don't know, you won't 'get' the joke.
The humor is rarely based on standalone logic.

I once watched an episode where there was a typical cutaway gag featuring The Snorks, and I was surprised because I thought no one else remembered the Snorks except me (basically Smurfs with snorkels on their heads who lived in the ocean). And of course they had to murder my childhood by turning the snorkel into a penis.

I never found Family Guy, American Dad, or the Simpsoms to be funny. To me Family Guy and American Dad consist of bathroom humor, while the Simpsoms remind me of my so-called life growing up.

I actually get a great many of the jokes. And I agree, much of the gags depend on understanding the current political scene, but also having a grasp of many older TV shows which the writers had obviously grown up with. A strange mixture of the intellectual along with bathroom humor.

I think this might be the crucial difference between Family Guy and The Simpsons, though. The Simpsons drew from a wide, varied spectrum of cultural references, socio-political ones, pop cultural ones, it was very much an everyman's comedy show. Family Guy also enjoys great popularity, but you can see that it draws from a much narrower pool of references. Who cares about Growing Pains or The Facts Of Life in 2014? How are you gonna stay relevant if you want to sell those jokes to 15-year-olds?

And I actually like Family Guy, which is not a popular opinion on most online communities I visit. I therefore do find it surprising to see that Family Guy is criticized here for being too elitist or exclusive, even if they draw from 80s movie and TV references and push Seth MacFarlane's personal political views without throwing in all that much nuance, since the complaints I usually read about the show draw attention to how it caters to the lowest common denominator by going for the quick jokes, featuring lots of coarse and violent jokes that are seemingly unrelated to the narrative. And I can agree with that, even if I do get a lot of laughs out of this show. But that's what surprised me about this thread. That Family Guy would be viewed as 'in-jokey' at all, when it is usually played up as the opposite of that.

I prefer Robot Chicken, all the sociopathic humor and 80's cartoon references of Family Guy, without the lame attempts at plot they hang all the jokes on and annoying ass Peter Griffin. That, and RC has a real deconstructionist impulse that I enjoy, as someone who always nitpicks about the details in my entertainment.

I must say that some of their best jokes play on you having "inside knowledge" because if they were too obvious, it'd be censored from the script.

I think not getting an inside joke is the eorse, especially when tons of people laugh. It like makes you feel left out, like your a kid not being able to join a tree house club.