About

Real Life Peter Griffin, whose real name is Rob Franzese, is an actor and cosplayer most known for impersonating Peter Griffin from the show Family Guy. According to his website, he has been cosplaying at NY Comic Con since 2012. In January 2015, Franzese was featured in a YouTube video that gave him online fame when his Peter Griffin costume went viral online.

Online History

On January 6th, 2015, Real Life Peter Griffin made his first appearance online in a YouTube^[1] video posted to the channel, Boom! Big Pants. The video (shown below) features Franzese in character at NY Comic Con 2014. The video received roughly 3 million views within two days. As of August 2021, it has roughly 17 million views.

Before 2015, Franzese was making content on Vine and reposting it on Twitter,^[2] though he didn't get much traction on either platform. After the January 2015 video, Franzese continued to post content to the YouTube channel.^[3] He would also post his content to Instagram and Facebook. However, most of the content from 2016 to 2018 was deleted by him due to a dispute with a former business partner and talent manager.^[4] Franzese moved his content to his brand new YouTube channel, The Real Life Peter Griffin, when they split ways in January 2019.^[5] Many notable videos during this period were deleted.

Real Life Peter Griffin met Real Life Lois Griffin during this time and they collaborated on many videos on his old channels. In 2018, he also started the "Grinds My Gears" series. The "Grinds My Gears: Fortnite" video (shown below, left) was posted in May 2018. The "Grinds My Gears: Racism" video (shown below, right) was posted in July 2018. Both are deleted now but were reuploaded to YouTube in 2019. In 2018, he also started a Cameo page.

Joins TikTok

On June 30th, 2021, Franzese would join TikTok as @reallifepetergriffin.^[6] In his first TikTok (shown below, left) he taps on the camera and cracks a joke about the app. The video received roughly 1.2 million views and 161,000 likes in one week. On July 11th, 2021, Franzese posted another TikTok (shown below, right) that featured the "Real Life Stewie Griffin." This TikTok accumulated more views, roughly 6.7 million, as well as 746,000 likes in one week.

Related Memes

Real Life Peter Griffin received most of his meme attention in 2018 and 2019 because of his "You know what really grinds my gears" Instagram and Facebook videos. Snippets of these videos, as well as snippets from his commissioned Cameo videos, received viral attention across Instagram, Facebook and iFunny most notably.

The most viral catchphrases from the videos include, "You know what really grinds my gears? Fortnite," "Attention Freddy Fazbear Pizza customers, there's a mixed-race couple kissing at table 4," and, "Oh boy, Nachos Bel Grande!"

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References