South Park revitalized its relevance by revisiting its roots
Image: Gif: Libby McGuire TV Features South Park
For most of the history of television, the barrier to syndication—and to profitability—has been 100 episodes. The shows that have made it to that mark are an unusual group. Many were big hits. Some found small cult audiences. Still others just hung on as best they could and never posted numbers quite low enough to be canceled. In 100 Episodes, we examine the shows that made it to that number, considering both how they advanced and reflected the medium and what contributed to their popularity. This entry covers South Park, which has run for 309 episodes and 23 seasons on Comedy Central. Currently sidelined by the COVID-19 pandemic, the show has produced two hour-long specials in the last year.
In 2020, Entertainment Weekly published a retrospective where South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone picked their favorite and least-favorite episodes of the show. In typically dismissive fashion, Parker expressed his desire to delete the first three years of the duo’s most famous creation.
“If I had to permanently erase anything from the library, it would basically be anything before Season Four,” he told EW. “It’s just embarrassing to watch. Okay, we were, like, 26, 27. But it’s like, ‘Really? We thought that was funny? We thought that was well-written? Oh my god, this is terrible.’”
He has a point. South Park’s early years—primarily focused on the core foursome of potty-mouthed elementary-schoolers Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovksi, Eric Cartman, and Kenny McCormick and their collective antics in the Colorado town of the title—are marred by sometimes painfully crude animation and jokes that lean solely on irreverence. For instance, season one’s “Volcano” features a mountain monster named Scuzzlebutt who has Patrick Duffy for a leg, just because. Switch out Duffy for another veteran TV actor and the joke doesn’t become any more or less funny. It’s just kind of there as a flexible gag that would eventually be more at home on Family Guy, a show that South Park would go on to eviscerate in 2006 with its two-part “Cartoon Wars” saga.
But to counter Parker’s criticism, the lower-stakes, one-off nature of early South Park has proven to be somewhat aspirational among the series’ fanbase over the past five or so years. For its first 20 seasons, the show embarked on a slow climb toward longer-form storytelling, gradually dropping in a feature film, the aforementioned two-part episode, three-part episodes, and eventually, a complete pivot to serialized continuity. This also synced up with a much quicker turnaround time on production, which gave South Park the ability to comment on real-world events within a day of occurrence. “About Last Night…”—which reimagined Barack Obama’s first presidential election as part of a heist straight out of Ocean’s Eleven—wasn’t completed until the day of broadcast. As shown in the documentary Six Days To Air: The Making Of South Park, this wasn’t that unique of a situation for the show, either.
Unfortunately, the more serialized, eleventh-hour approach started to show its cracks around season 20, mostly due to South Park’s treatment of Donald Trump, a political figure so cartoonish and awful that he proved almost impossible to parody, even through the equally despicable surrogate of the boys’ teacher, Mr. Garrison. Parker and Stone occasionally got some comedic mileage out of just using Trump’s real-life quotes and actions as dialogue/story points for Garrison, but a lot of the material fell flat. It didn’t help that the character was given a season-long arc and that so many U.S. viewers were just plain sick of seeing his real-life counterpart on television.
Parker and Stone more or less admitted the futility of their Trump-lampooning in both the title and the content of the season-20 finale, “The End Of Serialization As We Know It.” Couple that with the year’s mixed fan and critical reception of the show, and it’s understandable why a 2017 promo for season 21 leaned so heavily on the South Park of yesteryear, Parker’s eventual comments to Entertainment Weekly be damned.
In the clip, Cartman performs a riff on Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It,” a song released only two years before South Park’s now-storied first episode, “Cartman Gets An Anal Probe,” and in the same year as the show’s groundbreaking short/sort-of pilot “Jesus Vs. Santa.” “Flip the track, bring the old school back,” Cartman sings—a line that was interpreted as hinting at a return to “classic” South Park and more standalone episodes. Even if the season did end up carrying over select elements from the previous year, it wasn’t nearly as concerned with linear narratives or commenting on the week’s news in such a down-to-the-wire fashion as its predecessor. Seasons 22 and 23 veered even further down that direction. Regardless of how you feel about the return of both Satan and ManBearPig or the show devoting more time to fan favorite Randy Marsh becoming a weed farmer than anything Trump-related, there’s no denying that Parker and Stone have gone back to what first got people to come on down to South Park in the first place.
For many, it wasn’t the sociopolitical commentary that caught our attention—at least not in the beginning. When South Park premiered in 1997, I was a 13-year-old boy, arguably the show’s core demographic at that point. I didn’t get sucked into those first few seasons because of the frequent skewering of organized religion or self-righteous humanitarianism. Like many other middle-schoolers who came of age with the series, I was there for the toilet humor. Even if comedic devices like the bleeped-out profanity, Stan frequently puking all over his girlfriend Wendy Testaburger, or an elephant making love to a pig don’t slap quite as hard as they did nearly 25 years ago, there was an inherent puckishness to South Park as soon as it hit the airwaves—a shared knowledge that the show was getting away with something that other shows weren’t. It didn’t just pave the way for other series to use more adult-oriented humor on Comedy Central. It made the network a household name and altered the landscape of television, usually by amplifying the transgressions of the time until they no longer felt like transgressions at all.
There’s no better example of this than 2001’s season-five debut episode “It Hits The Fan,” a takedown of the backlash surrounding NYPD Blue’s frequent use of profanity and, more specifically, the word “shit” being uttered on a 1999 episode of Chicago Hope, a first for a network television series (NYPD Blue would go on to use the word shortly afterward). The grittiness of NYPD Blue’s subject matter at least partially led to the formation of the conservative watchdog group the Parents Television Council, which was later outraged by Chicago Hope’s flagrant shift in vocabulary as well—on CBS no less. As quaint as it would be today to see Dennis Franz’s butt in a shower scene or hear Mark Harmon say “shit,” particularly with the advent of streaming, viewing PG-13 content like this on network TV was a big deal at the end of the millennium.
Of course, it shouldn’t have been, and Parker and Stone knew just as much, as evidenced on “It Hits The Fan.” In the episode, the whole town of South Park is a-flutter because an upcoming episode of the fictional Cop Drama (a clear sendup of NYPD Blue) is going to air the word “shit” uncensored. The joke is that, leading up to the Cop Drama broadcast, South Park’s own characters say the word uncensored about once every eight seconds. By the time the episode ends, a counter at the bottom of the screen reveals “shit” has popped up 162 times (200 if you count its appearances in written form), with only one of them coming from the show everyone’s so hyped about. The point is, many of us use profanity on a daily basis, and it’s fucking ridiculous to get so up in arms or excited about a single curse word on a TV show, network or otherwise.
Despite all the pearl-clutching leveled at CBS less than two years earlier, no one made that big a deal about “It Hits The Fan,” a half-hour of TV with 162 times more “shit” than Chicago Hope. Stone himself remarked at the time how “nobody cares anymore,” and the word has been uttered openly on South Park with little fuss ever since. And that’s to say nothing of all the other subsequent basic cable shows like The Shield, where profanity (and more) became a regular occurrence. Network procedurals may have been the first to broach the wall of censorship, but it was South Park that actually tore it down. And it did so by pushing the act of swearing on TV to such an illogical extreme that a swear word for “poop” got sapped of its power.
Parker and Stone would take the same beat-it-into-the-ground approach to so many other taboos as the show progressed, developing an uncanny ability to identify topics that were ruffling peoples’ feathers. What’s considered transgressive has tended to change over the years, and as South Park evolved, its creators gradually set their sights on targets that had more complexity, gravity, and severe real-world consequences. Most notably, 2005’s season-nine finale challenged the sanctity of the Virgin Mary with a statue that the town’s citizens think is bleeding out of its ass. Then, starting in 2006 with “Cartoon Wars,” the show embarked intermittently on a four-year stretch of taking on the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad controversy, in which a Danish newspaper scoffed at Islam’s longstanding practice of aniconism (the absence of sentient beings in artwork) by depicting the religion’s founder in several of its cartoons.
Protests arose in Muslim countries around the world, which The New York Times reported resulted in hundreds of deaths. The political unrest became so severe that, when deciding how to handle South Park’s own depiction of Muhammad, Comedy Central split the episode into two installments to allow more time for negotiations. The network ultimately decided to censor Parker and Stone’s intentionally brief and nondescript portrayal of Muhammad. The irony was that South Park had shown him onscreen nine years earlier as part of a Justice League-esque team of religious figures in season five’s “Super Best Friends,” to little contention. Parker and Stone sent up the whole quagmire in the series’ 200th and 201st episodes, the latter of which not only saw its animation of Muhammad censored, but also the utterance of his name. The same thing happened to a final monologue from Kyle implying that censorship is the product of giving into intimidation and fear (Comedy Central and the show’s creators were receiving death threats by that point). When it aired, his speech was completely drowned out by one long bleep.
“It wasn’t some meta-joke on our part,” Parker and Stone revealed in a statement from South Park Studios. “Comedy Central added the bleeps.”
With the quadrilogy of “Cartoon Wars” parts one and two, “200,” and “201,” the show attempted something it had already done all the way back in 2001, and was met with significant resistance from the network and wider culture. Granted, the cultural landscape had changed a lot by then. The violence stemming from the Jyllands-Posten incident was very real, plus “Super Best Friends” had aired on July 4, 2001—two months before the September 11th attacks made jihadism a more visible and widely talked about threat. And yet, even with that added context, the show’s Muhammad controversy still feels notable for being the one time South Park wasn’t able to demystify the subject of its satire, as those episodes have been continuously censored to this day. When HBO Max added the entire series to its programming in 2020, “Cartoon Wars,” “Cartoon Wars Part II,” “200,” “201,” and even the previously uncensored “Super Best Friends” were all noticeably absent, although the complete audio of Kyle’s speech had already surfaced online in 2014.
From the beginning, South Park’s courting of controversy—whether through swear words or higher-stakes religious figures—seems to have been a contributing factor to its longevity. As dangerous as it might have been to keep poking a half-asleep bear with episodes like “200” and “201,” there’s no denying that, at that point in the show’s history, the eyes of the world were on Parker and Stone. To paraphrase a line about Howard Stern from 1997’s Private Parts, fans and detractors alike wanted to see what they would say next.
One of the other keys to South Park’s long-term resonance and influence is decidedly uncontroversial, having little to do with taboos, but rather the transcendent nature of pop culture. Once Parker and Stone moved beyond the reference-for-reference’s-sake style of season one, they developed a brand-new aesthetic that leaned on subversions of other TV shows, movies, songs, and celebrities not just as jokes, but as a kind of organizing principle that appealed to many different types of viewers. Amidst the controversy the show has often sparked, it’s easy to forget how specific the series can get with its cultural talking points and how those talking points have affected South Park’s audience and unique mode of storytelling.
Sure, there are entire episodes devoted to mainstream pop culture like Avatar and Game Of Thrones. But Parker and Stone also have an ongoing fascination with more idiosyncratic art such as that of Rankin/Bass, the production company responsible for everything from the original ThunderCats to all of those holiday claymation specials from the ’60s and ’70s. Season three’s “Mr. Hankey’s Christmas Classics” builds an entire episode around the introduction delivered by Fred Astaire’s musical mailman in Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town. And when Mr. Hankey nearly died one year earlier in season two’s “Chef’s Chocolate Salty Balls,” Parker sang the character’s normally upbeat theme song in a mournful, marble-mouthed tone reminiscent of Frosty The Snowman’s own melodious narrator, Jimmy Durante. It’s a scene ripped straight from the heartbreaking sequence when Frosty melts in the greenhouse, rendered impossibly funny because “Durante” is now singing about the death of a sentient piece of shit rather than a magical snowman.
Rankin/Bass continued to be a touchstone for the show: Season six’s “The Death Camp Of Tolerance” based a gerbil’s journey up a man’s ass on the animation house’s 1977 adaptation of The Hobbit, and one of the goblins from that same special popped up in the background of season 11’s “Imaginationland” saga—an Emmy-winning arc that’s essentially a convergence of all the popular culture Parker and Stone hold dear. Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass are almost their spiritual forebears—a creative duo like Parker and Stone who, however unintentionally, revolutionized an entire genre. Rankin/Bass may not have invented the stop-motion TV episode or the Christmas special, but they certainly popularized both formats and changed what was possible within the medium.
Even if you’re not a scholar of antiquated yuletide cartoons or folksy J.R.R. Tolkien adaptations, there’s likely another significant pop-cultural touchstone in South Park’s history that caters to you, given the scope of its creators’ respective tastes and knowledge. Whether it’s animating an entire season 18 episode in the style of Hanna-Barbera’s Wacky Races or borrowing a breastfeeding gag from Little Britain to make fun of U2’s Bono in season 11, at some point, South Park seems to have spoken everyone’s pop-culture language.
Many other comedies that followed have taken note and relied similarly on pop culture—not just as an occasional source of jokes, but as an integral part of their DNA. There’s Family Guy (which you could argue corrupted South Park’s formula early on), as well as Dan Harmon’s Community, a show that, on the surface, has a completely different style of comedy from Parker and Stone’s. But Community also uses pop culture as a way for its characters to understand the world around them, including its own tribute to Rankin/Bass—a Christmas claymation special. Harmon later even admitted to having to keep himself from ripping off South Park with his other series, Rick And Morty. In a Vulture interview alongside co-creator Justin Roiland, he acknowledged unintentionally aping his predecessors with a mashup of Inception and A Nightmare On Elm Street, as well as Parker and Stone being unrivaled as pop-culture specialists. South Park’s style is so steeped in the universal language of pop culture that other artists might not realize when they’re mimicking the show’s approach.
There have been other unintended psychological consequences. Because pop culture is a force that can transcend politics and cultural barriers, it’s easy to drop in on a message board or comments section related to South Park (including the one on this very site) and find any number of viewers—many of them trolls—insisting that the messaging of a particular week fits in perfectly with their respective ideologies, simply because they understood the show’s references. The most recent special prompted online posts from viewers who interpreted the episode as being critical of QAnon, Antifa, and Black Lives Matter in equal measure. Never mind that the latter two groups are never mentioned, while the former is explicitly depicted as a mob of violent, misinformed losers (even the horned “Q Shaman” makes an appearance). Hell, the spelling alone of the title, “South ParQ Vaccination Special,” goes out of its way to poke fun at far-right conspiracy theorists.
But Parker and Stone’s own political stance—while nowhere close to being alt-right—has been annoyingly apathetic at times, and thus malleable to a certain type of fan. In recent years, they’ve begun to reckon with some of their more damaging viewpoints, going as far as to criticize and even repent for past episodes. In season 22’s “Time To Get Cereal,” the boys finally apologize to Al Gore for not believing him in season 10 about ManBearPig, the show’s bestial personification of climate change—a concern which, after being ignored and even made fun of, has proved to be the most urgent crisis of a generation.
Parker and Stone had also recognized their (somewhat unknowing) role in fostering online troll culture in 2016’s “The End Of Serialization As We Know It.” Granted, their stance wasn’t as conclusive, successful, or as funny as it was in “Time To Get Cereal.” But it’s further testament that across 23 seasons, South Park’s creators have developed a worldview that’s more engaged and compassionate than when they started out, if still flawed (their handling of anti-trans bigotry has been far from nuanced).
In a way, Parker and Stone pivoting from a “both sides suck” argument feels like a provocation in itself. What could be more surprising for them than apologizing to Al Gore, a guy who they mercilessly made fun of 12 years earlier for doing the right thing? Likewise, even if most of their Trump jokes don’t hold up, they still tried to take him on after they said they wouldn’t. Despite what the season 21 promo implied, the show hasn’t actually gone back to the beginning, because what was shocking for South Park back in 1997 isn’t shocking anymore. And for Parker and Stone—two guys who once prided themselves for not giving a shit—taking a firmer political stance could be a new kind of transgression.
132 Comments
In what world did Al Gore “do the right thing”? You mean, letting George Bush steal the election? Or do you mean saying “climate change” 50 times without any other solution except “carbon credits”?
Fun hint: SP isn’t in the business of virtue signaling. That’s why they hounded the shit out of their one African-American cast member over his religion and replaced him with a character literally named Token.
He is obviously referring to climate change, not the 2000 election. I have no idea where you get the idea that Gore’s approach to education on the subject has been superficial or redundant. An Inconvenient Truth is a deep dive into the science, and he proposes a sweeping overhaul of our consumption habits and energy infrastructure.You also might want to learn some basic facts about the subject you’re pontificating on before you embarrass yourself. Token was a character long before Isaac Hayes left over the Scientology episode (and how exactly could an eight-year-old boy “replace” a grown man)? This is such a weirdly sloppy comment. Did somebody give you $100 and a five-minute deadline to own the libs at the AV Club? It’s like somebody fed a machine-learning program with alt-right rhetoric and South Park’s Wikipedia page and gave it only half the processing time needed to converge on something factually sound and logically coherent.
(and how exactly could an eight-year-old boy “replace” a grown man)?
Ask Paul Mooney.
Oh God, your comment gives me a great idea. Feed a Markov chain program a bunch of alt-right troll material and have it generate comments to put on alt-right youtube videos.
I love that the OP’s comment is at a 0:57 star ratio to yours right now. Sam Ursu’s comment is now the “Ecks vs Sever” of AVClub comments.
Wait, Sever WON!? Fackin’ SPOILAH AHLERT!
Wow, you think black people are replaceable?That’s fucked up.
In what way does taking the case all the way to the Supreme Court constitute “letting” Bush win? Should he have appealed to the Supremer Court?
That sounds like a dessert at Denny’s.
That’s actually the one part in their nonsense that’s accurate, Al Gore conceded when he didn’t need to. If he’d held out and not given in to a partisan court the facts of the recount likely would have swung in his favor (and history would be a lot different).
he facts of the recount likely would have swung in his favorI’ve seen people make this case before, but I haven’t seen any actual evidence that another recount would have changed the results. Seems like partisan griping to me, but I could definitely be wrong.
Even if a recount ultimately wouldn’t have made a difference, I think the *perception* that it could’ve is the bigger problem, one that has dogged the Democrats (and politics as a whole) ever since. The lesson learned is that playing fair/being civil doesn’t pay off, so you might as well lean into every dirty trick you know. Flash forward to our most recent presidential election and…well, I really don’t need to rehash it, but, with plenty of people still doubting the legitimacy of the voting system, I don’t see it getting better anytime soon. Every vital election will be scrutinized and recounted, dumb theories about why a favorite candidate didn’t win will continue to flourish, and even official results will be litigated and relitigated.
I’m not really seeing the logical thread. I get the first part about Democrats rolling over while Republicans play to win. But how does Democrats still questioning the legitimacy of the 2000 election 20 years later make Republican arguments that the 2020 election was rigged less viable? If anything, wouldn’t it reinforce the idea that it’s a “both sides” problem? That the Mueller investigation is essentially equivalent to the Capitol riot or even worse, two examples of the Democrats trying to steal power?
Sorry, I probably did lose the thread somewhere there. I’m probably just pissed about all the “Stop the Steal” banners I’ve seen in my town (some have been quietly replaced with less-offensive twaddle like “Trust in God”), so I was on a bit of a tear. To be clear, I am certainly not a “both sides”-ist. The Democrats certainly have their issues, but the GOP has far, far more to answer for.
Honestly the 2000 election wasn’t stolen. You could make the argument that the result in Florida was so close that there is no way to truly know who won, becuase the election process itself is not perfectly accurate. But they counted those ballots several times and while the end total fluctuated, they never counted it and came up with a win for Gore. I wish he would have won, and the whole election raises bigger questions about the electoral college and the antiquated way we chose our president, but the fact of the matter is that Bush won the election fair and square per the rules we have in place at this time.
That’s always been my take on it too. Stolen in the sense that the Electoral College dictating the outcome rather than the popular vote is ludicrous, but not stolen in terms of the actual count.
Actually a full state recount would have handed it to Gore, but they did not ask for that.
Well if they never did a full state recount, how do you know that would have turned it to Gore? And more importantly, there were never any grounds to challenge the state-wide results, so it’s a moot point. We have to follow the rules here, whether they’re stupid (electoral college) or not. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be trying to change those rules going forward (again, the electoral college is by far the most obvious problem). It just means that we gain nothing by getting worked up over something that is a settled matter of fact.
The NYT or the WP did just that. There was a full sate recount of the ballots done. And the ballots were the reason to do a full state recount.
SP isn’t in the business of virtue signaling. Okay, I have to ask: what the fuck does the term “virtue signaling” actually mean? Not the textbook definition, I’m talking what does it mean to you?
How do you figure that Chef was “replaced” by Token? Token had been a character on the show for many years before Isaac Hayes left/Chef was killed off.
Isaac Hayes quit. According to his son, it was his Scientologist friends that insisted that he quit and that his father was vulnerable because he had had a stroke. I believe his son has gone as far to suggest the original statement was likely not written by him at all. Claiming he was hounded simply because they made an episode about Scientology when they had gone after plenty of other religions seems like a reach.Token also appeared in the background starting in the pilot and became a significant character around Season 3. Trapped in the Closet and Isaac Hayes quitting didn’t happen until Season 9, a good 5 years later.
> That’s why they hounded the shit out of their one African-American cast member over his religion and replaced him with a character literally named Token.
Dude, I’m only a casual South Park fan, and even *I* know that that’s not what happened, to either the cast member or with Token. I don’t know you well enough to know whether you’re reshaping fact to meet your need for controversy, or you’re really that misinformed, but either way it’s not going to work. Take that shit somewhere else.
Talk to Leah Remini about Scientology being a “religion”. It isn’t, and they called it out. Issac Hayes didn’t like it and left, and they hated that he left too, but stood by their defense.Token has always been in the show. He became prominent in Season 4 and “Chef” left around the end of Season 9. Nice troll attempt.
YOU TELL’EM SAM YOU KRAZY KID!
Troll smarter.
THE RATIO
When I began to scroll down and saw the iconic South Park knit caps, I was hoping this was one in the series of the AV’s other themed articles running this week:“Blame Canada” should not have been the song nominated for an Oscar from South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut. The song that deserved the Oscar nomination (and arguably the win) was “Uncle Fucka.”
I like Mountain Town….
Or La Resistance. Or Up There. Or Mountain Town. Pastiches or not, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut was one of the best musicals of the past 25 years. Any of its songs deserved to beat Phil Collins’ (fine but workmanlike) work on Tarzan. Magnolia’s Save Me and Toy Story 2’s When She Loved Me deserved it more than Tarzan.
You are absolutely right about Phil Collins. But on the other hand his winning the Oscar led to one of the funniest images Matt and Trey ever put on their show.
“Up There” might be my favorite too, since it’s clearly a parody of the songs from the Disney Renaissance animated musicals, yet at the same time not really a parody since it’s a surprisingly tame, straight-faced take on those types of songs and would actually fit right into a Disney movie of that era.
I think that’s exactly why the whole score is so successful. Even if they are parodying classic tropes of musicals Parker and Stone (and of course Tony winner Marc Shaiman) clearly know, love, and respect the art form.
This obviously may have changed over the years with all the musical stuff they have done, but back in ‘99 Stone claimed it was Parker who knew and loved all the musicals and was responsible for the songs.
I sort of remember Robin Williams’ version of blame Canada. Til that stupid Tarzan pap song beat out WHEN SHE LOVED ME and I am broken.
1999 songs I would have nominated above Tarzan:Beautiful Stranger from Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged MeThe Great Beyond from Man on the MoonThe World is Not Enough from… Well, you know. And, fuck it, Wild Wild West.
Hell yes Shirley Manson.
Now now now
Once upon a time in the West
Madman
Lost his damn mind in the West
Loveless
Timmy! and The Lords of the Underworld deserved it more than Phil Collins.
Semi-related but I would have loved for the Best Animated Film award to have come in that year instead of two years later. South Park, Toy Story 2, The Iron Giant and Princess Mononoke (and Tarzan, which is pretty good turn-of-the-century Disney) would have made for a great opening roster.
“Uncle Fucka” didn’t get nominated for the Oscar because there’s just no way to be able to perform that one on network television. The entire song is obscenities… the FCC would have been on their ass! But we did get Robin Williams performing “Blame Canada”, which was certainly a hell of a lot more fun than any of the other nominees.
Your lack of acknowledgement of What Would Brian Boitano
Do is telling.
I bet he’d kick an ass or two.
I’ve never seen a man eat so many chicken wings.
He’d probably kick an ass or twoThat’s what Brian Boytano’d do!
Honestly that entire album slaps and was worthy of nomination.I can only assume that the Oscar voters hadn’t seen either movie and gave the award to name recognition, and then felt incredibly shame when Robin Williams sang the song to them for the first time.
Every song on that soundtrack is brilliant. That third act medley… Chef’s kiss. Also, a later credit to how good future episode Broadway bro-down ended up being. Would you like a blowwwwjob? On football! Sunday!
The South Park movie is one of the only musicals I actually enjoy.
I was eating nachoes in the theater at the time and almost choked on them from laughing so hard at “Uncle Fucker”.
I saw Team America in a discount theatre with maybe 5 other people, and I was howling with laughter throughout…probably to the point of pissing off every single one of those other people, who seemed mildly amused by the film. South Park: The Movie was both hilarious and gorgeous and I cried with laughter through the whole damn thing.
As someone who is not good with puking in movies, the bit where he projectile vomits for like five minutes was simultaneously super hilarious while also being the worst thing ever.
I felt exactly the same way. One of those things that should get less funny but somehow rides the wave to super hilarious.
Now that I think about it, Stone and Parker are responsible for what I think are the two times I have laughed the hardest in theaters. One time was the entirety of Uncle Fucker, if it had gone on any longer I might have choked to death. The other was in the opening of Team America when one of the heroes and a terrorist stare each other down as if they are about to have a martial arts duel, and then they just shake and smack the puppets into each other like a kid playing with toys.
I think South Park is the sick old man of adult animation that, much like the Simpsons, should have ended a long time ago. Hell, it annoys me that they spent years peddling climate change denier nonsense and that saving the environment was stupid. But everyone thinks they deserve a mea culpa for saying it is real a few years ago. Or how when they made that episode comparing gender confirmation surgery to wanting to be turned into a dolphin. Or the time they used their fictional gay character as a mouthpiece to argue that homophobic organizations should have the right to restrict gay people from accessing their services. They haven’t really apologized for either of those takes.
Still waiting on them to apologize for the transphobic episodes. They did a lot of damage and created a lot of negative stereotypes for a few cheap jokes. You can probably draw a pretty straight line right from the Randy Savage episode in 2019 to the anti-trans bills passing today. Good comedy punches up. Punching down just makes you an asshole.
.
I hated that episode, but the idea that a cartoon episode on Comedy Central is mainly responsible for recent bills in legislatures is ridiculous. Shows like South Park reflect the culture they’re part of, they don’t direct it, and in any case stodgy people in the Congress don’t watch fucking South Park.
I agree that it’s punching down and a mediocre take at BEST, but I think it’s far easier for sheltered liberals to draw a line from South Park to a political movement than to confront the reality of how basic some of these things are to American political thought. Partly because we have raised expectations of Parker and Stone because of their publicly seen ability to shift on these topics, but also because media-savvy liberals “know” the show in a way that they absolutely do not know the folks actually promoting and voting for these bills, and so they’re easier to “confront”: the devil you know, so to speak. I guarantee you, most of conservative America, especially the older folks in the South, are not watching South Park, nor care about it, nor see it as part of ANY conversation, not even as ammo for their own barbs and insults.
It is far easier to attack a TV show with showrunners that seem convincible than it is to confront the people who you have no clue about why they think the way they do. As if Parker and Stone are parents whose children are all of brainless America. Well, unfortunately, you can find a lot of folks who have put a LOT of thought into their stupid ass feelings about trans folks, and many have not even watched a single episode of South Park, much less an episode from the most recent seasons.
That doesn’t make the episode in question less of a problem, but it’s a problem for people who like to come on websites devoted to pop culture criticism to discuss problematic content in shows they like. Sorry, but that simply ain’t the average conservative legislator in the South.
Normally I would agree with you, but I’ve had that randy savage pic from south park thrown in my face when arguing for the rights of (real) trans kids. So, y’know, that’s just been my personal experience.I didn’t think a 4chan post would influence the my pillow guy or general flynn either, but here we are. It’s a weird timeline.
That is all completely fair, and a problem the South Park dudes have grimly noted: how much harder it is to make fun of a reality that is already absurd beyond parody.
Same fucking comment, every damn time on anything South Park-related. If it’s clearly been ages since you’ve even watched the show, why do you get worked up enough to post the same tired take on every SP-related article on this site? You’re a weird cat.
“Dear guy on the internet, we’re sorry we depicted things you don’t agree with”? Something like that?
They apologized for one of many things, is what I learned from this article. I haven’t watched for many years.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if people are taking their moral lessons and political views form a cartoon that prominently features a talking piece of shit (or really any TV program for that matter) it is not the show that is sick, but the society.
South Park infuriates people who have no sense of humor about their own beliefs. These folks are very easy to spot in the comments.
When I saw that there was a South Park article up, I had a feeling there would almost certainly be an appearance in the comment section from that annoying Laserface guy, who’s weirdly obsessive about how much he hates this show. And… yup, there he is directly below your comment, with the same exact post as always!
Ah, I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s noticed Laserface copying and pasting from his Word document titled “South Park: My Same Tired Take” on every South Park-related article on this site in recent years.
South Park infuriates people who have no sense of humor about their own beliefs. It does indeed like to take the piss out of banal ideological cheerleaders.
Serious question: is it not fair for me as a trans woman to dislike being compared to someone who wants to turn themselves into a dolphin? Like, the show is glaringly anti-trans, they still openly shit on trans people.
is it not fair for me as a trans woman to dislike being compared to someone who wants to turn themselves into a dolphin? That’s absolutely fair.
I love South Park, but yeah, that’s one thing Matt and Trey still really need to work on. It’s not as bad as it once was, but the episode that aired back in… 2019? was still pretty cringeworthy.
“These folks are very easy to spot in the comments. “The nuAVClub
South Park is, was, and always has been a pretty damned entertaining (at best) show invested with WAAAAAAAAAY the fuck more sociopolitical weight than it was ever intended to bear.I want to take the people who blame the downfall of the republic (even in part) on South Park, shake them vigorously, and scream “BUT WHAT DOES THAT SAY ABOUT US THO.”Like, if South Park is even in the top 50 of reasons why the modern world is shit, then we deserve everything we’re reaping.
My issue is that South Park has made a bunch of stupid takes that they platformed. While, from what I’ve heard, they’ve become less edgelord, I don’t feel that they have earned a mea culpa until they actually reconcile these past takes.
Here’s the thing: they don’t have to worry about “earning” a mea culpa. You don’t have to like the show. It’s fine.In terms of stupid takes they’ve platformed, you’ll find similar shit in Chuck Lorre pap (casual mysogyny, casual transphobia, “Boy, those folks not in Middle America like US sure are WEIRD aren’t they?” crap). And in terms of cultural impact, which character is more (arguably) damaging: Token or Apu?If nothing else, it’s a show that is growing with its creators. And in terms of entertainment value, I’ve gotten at least some chuckles out of even the shittiest episodes.I think the main problem is this: anyone who takes the lazy route of basing their sociopolitical identity on a pundit/radio personality/fucking cartoon is an idiot. And it turns out that there are WAAAAAAAAAY more idiots on this planet/in this country than is sustainable.
Is Token voiced by a white guy?
Spot on. SP didn’t make anyone believe climate change wasn’t real and it didn’t make anyone think republicans and democrats were the same. People didn’t base their politics or ideology on a single cartoon and barely anyone bases it on pop culture fiction alone at all.It made jokes with and about those attitudes and thousands more. It didn’t have time for scolding or guilt trips or moral panics and that irreverence seems to drive people up the wall. Especially people who have the same tactics as Kyle’s mom.
I mean, yeah, like…okay, consider the following:For a good 30% of the country, it’s completely plausible that Democrats are harvesting adrenochrome to fuel sex parties in the non-existent basement of a pizza parlor, despite a dearth of actual evidence or logic.For that same 30% of the country, anthropogenic global warming is a myth with no basis in reality. South Park didn’t cause that.
Yeah. I’m always very wary of any claims about a TV show or a movie moving anyone’s political or ideological beliefs. Especially when the people who make that claim are (knowingly or not) saying “oh but not me I’m far too savvy for that”
I don’t know…every time I see a roadrunner, I try to blow it up with oversized rockets and old-timey-looking bombs. Maybe there is something to the whole media causation.
The first couple of seasons of South Park were its absolute peak: All it had in the tank was some potty humor and lolrandom, and when those were exhausted it just ran out of steam. And then kept going for 20 years as a completely worthless shambling corpse with no yuks and nothing of interest to say, making anyone unfortunate enough to catch an episode slightly stupider and the world around it slightly worse.It’s not that it’s no Simpsons or Archer – few things are – but it isn’t even a 12 Oz Mouse or a Cleveland Show.
I would like to counter that having Patrick Duffy for a leg set up a funny and very specific joke about Step by Step. I suppose he could have been replaced with Suzanne Somers, but that’s about it.Also, Gnomes from S2 is one of the funniest things I have ever seen in my life, and pretty sophisticated as well.
I think the author forgot Patrick Duffy was still mildly relevant in the mid-90s.
The Step 1: Steal underpants. Step 2 ??? Step 3: Profit! joke has been used as a meme by people who have never even seen the episode.
Indeed, by people who weren’t born yet.
This is a very good argument. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to pick up on Scuzzlebutt’s leg possibly being a more clever joke than I initially believed. And looking at the appendage closeup, it sorta resembles a young Sasha Mitchell even more so than Patrick Duffy.
I’m kinda surprised at South Park. I don’t have cable and so my only way to watch it was if it showed up on Netflix and it kinda stopped doing that a few years ago. So all I had seen was through roughly season 13.Recently I subbed to HBOMax and they have it so I decided to see what happened to it since and it is still decent. Recent seasons seem a but less edgy than they used to be but it didn’t have any completely wasted seasons. It didn’t do a Simpsons in other words where it became reliably completely unwatchable (Although I’ve heard recent Simpsons are clawing back up a bit too).
Yeah, in terms of overall quality over time, South Park takes it. While I hope that The Simpsons gets better, that’s gonna be like turning a tanker.
Well, SP is still mostly the vision of it’s creators, the Simpsons isn’t. As much money as SP makes Comedy Central, it is a drop in the bucket compared to how much the Simpsons makes Fox. And as long as it keeps making Fox money, and there’s nobody with any vision at the helm to fight them, Fox has no impetus to make the Simpsons any better.
Modern Simpsons is nowhere near what the show was at its peak, but it’s also an infinitely better show than it was in those truly dire years in the early to mid 00’s (starting during Mike Scully’s second year as showrunner and not really letting up until they did the Movie.) It’s now a breezy show that seems to mostly function as a punchline delivery system above all else, and I think most of the jokes land. Plots can still be very cartoony, but they don’t feel as outlandish as they did during the really dim years, and characters behave like you’d expect them to rather than based on the whims of simply moving from A to B on the storyboard. My big criticism is that the show now feels slight in some way – the networks’ push to get more ads in to every 30 minute block has cut the runtime down slightly but noticeably, leaving a lot of episodes with only the most perfunctory resolution to their stories.
The last 5 years I’ve caught episodes sparingly and that’s kind of where they’re at from my perspective: The simpsons losing 1-3 minutes + seemingly longer couch gags to fill in shorter stories feels like they’ve settled into what would almost be shorts because character development is non-existent as they’ve mined those characters to death so now it’s just a series of jokes that strive to land consistently and seem to do so.
Was it season 15 that had “you’re getting old” and “Broadway bro-down?” Cos holy shit, that season is among their very best.
South Park also has much shorter seasons. For context, The Simpsons reached South Park’s current episode count in Season 14, when the show was still considered to be pretty good, but shy of its heights. In fact even though South Park has 23 seasons and The Simpsons has 32, The Simpsons has more than double the number of episodes South Park has. It’s a bit of a folly comparing them in that way.
Fair point!It’s like comparing two meat grinders, though that’s an imperfect analogy.That said, FFS Simpsons could stand to change something. Even the shit that supposed to be historic falls flat.
I think the struggle for the showrunners has been, since the inception of Garrison/Trump, real life has become as strange if not stranger than fiction. How can you lampoon the elephant in the room topic when the news is crazier than what you can come up with? The Vaccination Special was almost too realistic.
Even though I’m not a hardcore fan, this article really digs into what I admire most about this show. It’s been on the air for seemingly forever like Simpsons and Family Guy — but unlike those, it actually remains relevant because they’re still challenging themselves with things like shifting to long-term serialization, or willingly putting their show on the hot seat to call out its more dated aspects.Compare this to how The Simpsons spent years dancing around something like the Apu controversy and it’s a night-and-day difference (and they’re still haven’t really given a definite answer what they plan to do with him?) There’s a reason why the most recent South Park special was one of the highest rated cable events of the year, and why you only hear about the Simpsons when someone else is making news out of it.
I remember the bigger irony of the Muhammed episode being that Comedy Central was willing to show Jesus and George W. Bush shitting on the American flag instead. They were calling them out for double standards.
This isn’t a complaint; truth be told, I don’t know what I would do in a situation like that, but of the whole ‘showing Muhammed’ phase of that time, one thing that seemed lost on some people was that it was obviously just as offensive to peaceful Muslims, too. There’s a free speech and freedom of the press issue, for sure, but some of the giddiness of showing the image seemed to be unconscious of that at times.
It is important to exercise one’s right to be a jerk, I guess.
I remember a big theme of the episode was not giving into threats, which Parker and Stone followed up on in interviews afterward. And they were right. The official excuse was “Religious Sensitivity”, which they called bullshit on. “You’re afraid of getting blown up. We don’t blame you for that, because that’s a reasonable concern, but you have to admit you’re caving to a threat made against you.”
On the one hand, I feel like the dude doesn’t need to be shown. No real point.OTOH? Fuck terrorists. Any and all.
I miss their multi-part episodes like the Imaginationland trilogy… give me more of that.
Agreed. Straight up serialization isn’t in their wheelhouse; but fucking tight two or three parters absolutely is.
It’s hard to articulate what seeing the first episode of South Park was like in 1997. It felt new, hilarious and somehow overdue at the same time, and fresh in a way that is scarcely replicated by modern television, even if its quality now is light years ahead than offerings from the 1990s.
That said, the “both sides suck” mentality drove me away in the 2000s. It was a facile approach then and has been proven wrong by the catastrophic events of the last 20 years. “Both sides” do suck, true, but not nearly to the same degree, and not nearly with the same consequences.
I worked tech support for an ISP at the time, when Jesus vs. Santa hit the web we must have watched it 100 times.
I remember falling over laughing when Kyle just starts cussing out the aliens after his heartwarming speech falls flat. It just kept going!
– “Hey Wendy, what’s a [bleep bleep bleep]?”
– “(Shrugs)“
I wouldn’t expect any creator to enjoy work they did 20 years ago, but I think South Park’s biggest folly is its fast turnaround. The older episodes, when you watch them now, have a feeling of being really written, because they were! There was attention paid to individual lines and individual gags, and the joke-per-minute ratio was pretty high.As it’s gone to longer form storytelling, it feels like I’m watching a detailed outline, where the plot is well-construcred but individual lines/beats aren’t given the same attention. Pretty much every episode I watch now, and I watch a decent number though not religiously, I feel like could benefit from an extra week of focusing on the script. Especially as they get older, I can’t imagine the 6-day turnaround or whatever it is to be conducive to putting out their best material, even if it allows them to be crazy topical.In some respects, it reflects a modern problem with media, journalism, the internet, et al: the desire the be first rather than to take your time and get it right.
I like your take, most thoughtful one out of the usual “South Park is XXX-hobic and needs to apologize to ME” comments on a SP article.
I honestly only like the older stuff, after season 4 is kinda when they started to lose me iirc. It was good, absurdist humor and was right up my alley. Was it particularly well written? Probably not. Was it funny, at least to me? Yep and it still is. Tried to watch it a few seasons ago and the newer episodes just weren’t as funny.But hey, comedy is ultimately subjective, right?
“If I had to permanently erase anything from the library, it would basically be anything before Season Four,”
That’s kind of a bummer, because even though I still believe they make great episodes from time to time, there’s something about those initial free-wheeling seasons that make them my favorite. They’re not just gross-out humor, there’s a sort of joyful ‘anything can happen’ quality that became rarer once they got into the routine of feeling obligated to take on topics ripped ‘straight from the headlines.’
Kaiju Robert Smith, the Scooby Doo / Korn Halloween episode, the Plane’Arium, UNDERPANTS GNOMES! For being considered an ‘edgy’ cartoon, there was something kind of carefree and uncynical about it, and I kind of miss that South Park. It still comes out from time to time, but it was in full momentum in those early seasons.
It’s so weird revisiting the early South Park games when they only had a season or two’s worth of ideas to work from and seeing what madness they were able to throw in, like the mutant turkeys or using Old Frida to give an enemy herpes.
Ha, I had (and may still own) Chef’s Love Shack on the N64. We really don’t get much Dr. Mephesto anymore, do we?
No we don’t, because Matt and Trey got sick of him. His last plot-relevant episode was the NAMBLA one, and they said in hindsight they regretted not killing him off there, because by then he’d worn out his welcome.
I agree, early South Park was the best. I remember the early days, since Comedy Central wasn’t on my cable network, people would scour the internet the next day for copies of the episodes online. Especially that first season. I don’t know, maybe the episodes weren’t as good as I am remembering them, and I am thinking about the joy of anticipating the next episodes and searching for them.
I re-watch them fairly regularly and I think they totally hold up.
I didn’t know many people with high-speed internet back then, but I had a couple of friends who would tape the episodes and we would all get together and watch them. It absolutely felt like ‘must watch’ TV back then. I remember once time in particular where we all watched the first Mr. Hanky episode at a Christmas party.
I was working at the Virgin Megastore at the time, and when the Chef Aid and Mr Hanky’s Christmas Classics albums came out, we played them in the store ALL THE TIME. Those first few seasons made an incredible mark on Gen X culture at the time.
From one of the DVDs, they had the original 26 minute unpaired pilot of Cartman Gets an Anal Probe, not the 21 minute one that ran on TV. Visitors, LOL. Still my favorite SP episode.
sorry but Season 3 of South Park is awesome.Chinpokomon, the meteor shower episodes, the rain forest episode, the episode with korn.all classics that i go back and rewatch.
“viewing PG-13 content like this on network TV was a big deal at the end of the millennium.”It still would be! Although basic cable TV has joined SP in the last 25 years in pushing content boundaries without the burden of regulation, broadcast TV/The Big Four — no doubt in response to the HEAVY FCC fines NYPD Blue racked up, in addition to the JT/Janet incident that also paid a huge monetary price — continues to shy away from nudity and any profanity beyond the acceptable damn/hell/bitch/SOB tier.
I appreciate you pointing out all the Rankin/Bass stuff, which I always get a big kick out of whenever it pops up. South Park started as a Christmas thing, after all!
Maybe I am a social malfeasant, but seasons 2 and 3 gave me two of the funniest episodes – Cat Orgy and ChickenLover. Still classics to me.
I’ve always bristled at the idea that the South Park attitude is “both sides suck” because I’ve found that with notable exceptions, the more glass-half-full “both sides have a point” is also showcased.
I think they summed up their philosophy best in Season 9, Episode 4 “Best Friends Forever”. It ran along the lines of “Their side is wrong for the right reasons, and our side is right for the wrong reasons.”
I actually have a hard time imagining a network show with regular nuditybeing allowed to happen now. It’s kind of weird how things pulled back in that way.
Yeah, that’s true. Weird that network TV series seem to be “safer” now than they’ve been in a long time.
I’ve always perceived a very strong streak of quintessential Gen X “caring about stuff isn’t cool” cynicism throughout the show’s history. I’ve been trying to figure out how that aspect fits into their newfound (but decidedly intermittent) attempts to actually care about stuff, but I’ll need to give the subject more thought. Curious if anyone else has thoughts on the subject, though.
Gen X’er here. Could not care less.
There’s been a weird counter-narrative around the show after the 2016 election— every few months someone will go semi-viral with a take on Twitter or whatever, blaming South Park for Trump’s election. The argument is usually that by not being fully left-wing in its messaging at all times, the show “doesn’t take a stand” and “taught a generation to be nihilistic.”It’s a dead giveaway that the speaker has no real familiarity with the show. For instance:
Also, a few months ago there was a whole “man, we were all SUPER mean to Britney Spears about 10 years ago, huh? Gosh, I guess society just didn’t know any better!” sentiment. Meanwhile, South Park— you know, that mean-spirited troll farm that doesn’t believe anything?— had made an episode in 2008 directly analogizing society’s treatment of Spears and similar young female celebs to Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery.
Family Guy didn’t corrupt the South Park formula so much as they took it and sanded down the edges to get it on network TV while going directions that Parker and Stone are legally unable to go to go. Seth, once Family Guy got revived, was allowed to make multiple versions of each episode of Family Guy (one for broadcast, one for Adult Swim, and one 100% uncut for DVD) and has had “banned” episodes released direct to DVD. Meanwhile the closest thing to a win P&S could achieve in terms of creative freedom was being able to unbleep their swears on the broadcast episodes and still are at the mercy of censors at Comedy Central, especially after the Jared Has AIDES and 200/201 debacles.
I think it’s less that they’ve transitioned from “apathetic to engaged” and more that their essential humanism (“It doesn’t matter if you think you’re right. Don’t be an asshole.”) no longer lends itself to taking the piss from both sides, now that the GQP is an *openly* fascist, nativist movement.The mask has dropped, which eliminates the fallacy of moderation.
South Park is an insanely durable show, staying fun and relevant WAAAAY past when its quality should have been Simpsons’d/Family Guy’d. That said, it’s funny that Stone & Parker want to scuttle the first four seasons from the show’s legacy… to me, that’s core South Park. I miss when an episode’s plot had little to do with the headlines and was just a series of increasingly silly events. I even miss how unapologetically ugly and basic the art used to be. Modern SP (“modern” in relative terms) is still quite ugly and basic by comparison to other adult animated shows, but for different reasons that don’t appeal to me as much as the attempts to look like paper cutouts. Nostalgia? Probably, but I’m still more likely to rewatch a season 2 episode over, say, a season 18 one.
its crazy to me how some animated series seem to live on as zombies forever, while other good ones can’t get renewed for a 2nd season. i guess basically i can’t believe Simpsons and South Park are still going after all this time