Too much Family Guy? Really?

If the “Family Guy” TV series asked the question, “what’s funnier than a half-hour of misogyny and racism?” the new “Family Guy” movie provides the answer: “Certainly not 90 minutes of it.” Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story, the full-length DVD, ranges from painfully funny to simply painful.

Each TV episode is hit-or-miss with its gags, but its rapid fire delivery and the show’s complete tastelessness usually make up for it. This formula doesn’t apply to a feature-length film, however. The movie version, which is a trilogy of thinly connected episodes about Stewie’s search for his “real” father, features the kinds of laughter-free dead zones that usually belong in new episodes of “The Simpsons.”

The show’s strength has never been subtlety; when creator Seth MacFarlane and company hit a joke, they hit it over and over like an epileptic playing Whack-A-Mole. Star Wars references, a hilarious Stewie-as-Saddam-Hussein sequence, and an obvious jab at George W. Bush are among the most successful jokes.

The misses are severe and the deadening exposition makes for a dull conclusion. As far as third installments of trilogies go, Clint Eastwood had funnier lines in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

Viewers looking to this DVD for raunchiness on the level of Andrew Dice Clay on a coke binge will be disappointed. Despite a few profanities, the plan for all three of the episodes to eventually air on TV naturally limits MacFarlane from hitting the crescendos of vulgarity the “South Park” movie did. It also makes the DVD’s optional uncensored audio track largely pointless.

Stewie will undoubtedly be bought up in truckloads by loyal fans. While it never quite lives up to its potential, the movie packs a few laughs and the kind of crass humor that made the TV series the bane of critics, who seem to believe that life in a Soviet gulag would be funnier, and a guilty pleasure for everyone else.