Manatees

Family Guy is written by a few manatees with idea balls swimming in a tank. Every idea ball has a noun, verb, adjective, celebrity, etc. When they pick one, it and four other idea balls are placed in order in a compartment with five place holders for idea balls to be made into a cutaway joke for the show. If one idea ball is ever taken out of the tank, the manatees stop working and production slows, thus losing money for the Family Guy corporation. No matter what executives do, the manatees will not work if an idea ball is removed. The manatees somehow know whether an idea ball is taken out, even secretly by anyone. They are presumably underwater mammalian herbivores.