After 12 years of shocking, edgy jokes about disabilities, violence and patching up holes in dikes, Family Guy Season 12 Episode 18 finally took the show to a place it has never gone before.

It addresd the question of race.

Watch Family Guy Season 12 Episode 18 Online

Ah, man, sorry, sorry - I could barely keep a straight face even typing that.

Of course, Family Guy has explored the issue of race about as regularly as you do your laundry, with varying degrees of success (also just like you doing your laundry).

And I certainly don't begrudge Family Guy for going back to the race well; it's part of the fabric of all of our lives, and thus also part of the fabric of our animated satirical comedies.

But this half hour, while filled with enough serviceable Family Guy quotes, just wasn't very fresh; every part of it felt a little bit borrowed.

The plot line about people's comfort (or lack thereof) with inter-racial dating, for example, was handled more insightfully/ insanely within the past year or two by that other favorite animated boundary-pusher, South Park.

Likewise, Peter's song about all the lame stuff white people are into (like J. Crew and Taylor Swift), mined a vein of humor that was already pretty spent by the fifth season of In Living Color (and was effectively put out of business by the blog Stuff White People Like a few years back).

Not that there wasn't plenty of decent stuff here, especially the cut-aways - that Footloose homage may have been the most comically effective blend of cartoon, clips from a real movie and pictures of an ice cream sundae that I've seen this whole week.

But while the dance sequence managed to crisply update the well-worn terrain of the Footloose joke, the main plot just didn't invest the same amount of energy into finding new humor in Chris and Pam's relationship (or Jerome's opposition to it).

Hey, I'm not without empathy - controversial, gross-out humor doesn't usually age gracefully, and after more than a decade at it, Family Guy can still craft a 'carpet-cleaning' joke with the best of 'em.

But this placeholder of an episode, much like the relationship between Pam and Chris, wasn't really built on anything real.

(But seriously, the Footloose cut-away was great.)

Which was this episode's best cut-away gag?