For outrageous filth, close-to-the-bone social satire and exuberant innocence, South Park™ can’t be, or once couldn’t be, bested. It’s now the clumsy, sentimental and moralising shell of it’s former glory (seasons eight to thirteen),1 but try Something Wall-Mart This Way Comes for a superb critique on predatory pricing or Tsst! for an acutely well-observed commentary on spoiling children, or The List for an incisive and very funny send-up of the sexual league-table. Other highpoints, not just of satirical insight but of well-structured comic storytelling, include the ludicrously scatological More Crap, the splendidly absurd Fantastic Easter Special and the gory slapstick of Hell on Earth 2006.
That said, South Park™ pulls its punches, those which aren’t directed downward. Minority totems are, as you might expect, pandered to. There is a touch of raillery directed towards women, black folk and homosexuals, but compared to what the show dishes out to knuckle-dragging men, rednecks2 and prissy middle-American liberals, it’s light to the point of cowardliness. Likewise, Judaism gets a few playful wrist-slaps, and the Islamic prohibition against showing Mohammed was courageously satirised,3 but neither religion-culture is ever seriously criticised,4 for the simple reason that if they gave either one the same treatment as they do Catholicism, say, or Scientology, or Mormonism, they would be, in the former case, out of work, and in the latter case, dead.
Similarly, and relatedly, if Stone and Parker seriously critiqued American foreign policy, if they made clear the nature of American war-crimes, if they exposed and ridiculed US support for genocidal dictatorships — dark subjects, to be sure, but not beyond the reach of savage satire — they would be obliterated by the press, and dropped by their wealthy sponsors. Instead, they excuse their nation’s abominable interventionism (and mine while we’re at it — the British state gets off very lightly too) as a necessary evil or as a fumbling attempt to do good. You might think that their amusing feature, Team America: World Police, was a spicy critique of US foreign policy. You’d be quite wrong though. Here’s Trey Parker…
We wanted to deal with this emotion of being hated as an American. That was the thing that was intriguing to us, and having Gary (the main character) deal with that emotion. And so, him becoming ashamed to be a part of Team America … he comes to realize that, just as he got his brother killed by gorillas [sic] — he didn't kill his brother; he was a dick, he wasn't an asshole — so too does America have this role in the world as a dick. Cops are dicks, you fucking hate cops, but you need ‘em …because there are assholes — terrorists — you gotta have dicks – people who hunt down terrorists. …Dicks are bad, and it sucks to be a dick, but it's way worse to be an asshole, and because there are assholes, we need dicks. So shut the fuck up, all you pussies!
Do you see see? We need America. Otherwise, well, perish the thought, amirite? Just think what leaders of tiny impoverished third world countries (particularly those who have oil, land or other resources that we need) might get up to without clumsy but well-intentioned American dicks ‘hunting down terrorists’. Just think what that laughable fool Vlad Putin, who ‘starts fights because his dick doesn’t work properly’ might do without the good old boys keeping him in check. Actually no, don’t think. After all, Parker and Stone don’t. Neither World Police, nor South Park™, ever seriously ponder such eventualities because doing so would entail thinking thoughts that simply cannot enter the systemoid mind.
Unsurprisingly, the religion of professionalism — of technocratic management and the cult of work — is an assumed and accepted background to South Park™, and completely invisible as a target of satire. Individual professionals, technologies and jobs are skewered, but the system itself remains an unspoken given, which is as it has to be if you want to keep working in the system. If Randolph Severn ‘Trey’ Parker III (son of a geologist) and Matt Stone (son of an economist) had been seriously critical of the medical profession during the ‘pandemic’, for example, instead of fully accepting, as they did, the necessity of lethal lockdowns, pointless face masks and experimental gene therapy5, they would have found themselves swiftly pushed to the lunatic fringe.
Willing acceptance of systemic constraints is not the result of pressure from above. Parker and Stone are allowed to take constant pot-shots at B-list slebs and take poo jokes to undreamt-of extremes not, ultimately, because they are willing to conform to any overt censorship or political pressure, but because they are incapable of really upsetting the system. This is why they are not just tolerated, but celebrated. As with any ‘radical’ critique, you can tell how dangerous or incisive a critic really is by how long they keep their job for. In Stone and Parker’s case, 28 years and counting, with a $900 million deal from Paramount to extend South Park™ to 30 seasons through to 2027.
That’s how edgy they are. In fact, that’s really what ‘edgy’ means — satire that goes up to the edge of what is officially permissible and then turns round and pisses on everything else. As with radical journalism, this serves a crucial function within the system. It marks off the limits of the sayable, while giving frustrated, atomised, alienated consumers a means by which to release steam, either through laughter or outrage, both of which can be safely managed. Again, there’s no need to explain this to people like Parker and Stone, or to tell them what can and cannot be said, because they would not have risen to the exalted position they are in if they could possibly understand or had to be told.
This is most evident in the two principle characters, Stan and Kyle, who began South Park™ as cheerfully amoral as Cartman, but who now are only a means by which Parker and Stone can lecture their audience about not understanding the black experience, or about moving on and healing after the pandemic.
The catchphrase chanted with a moronic slur by rednecks in the show is ‘they took our jobs!’ People complaining that they can no longer afford to live in anything but the most brutally reduced conditions is simply hilarious to Stone and Parker.
The fact that Mohammed is not allowed to be depicted was ridiculed in the episodes ‘200’ and ‘201’. The second part was censored by Comedy Central, which bleeped out the word ‘Mohammed’ and the concluding speeches by Kyle, Jesus and Santa Clause, which were then leaked, four years later, onto 4Chan:
Kyle: That’s because there is no goo, Mr. Cruise (a magical substance that makes you immune to ridicule). You see, I learned something today. Throughout this whole ordeal, we’ve all wanted to show things that we weren’t allowed to show, but it wasn’t because of some magic goo. It was because of the magical power of threatening people with violence. That’s obviously the only true power. If there’s anything we’ve all learned, it’s that terrorizing people works.
Jesus: That’s right. Don’t you see, gingers, if you don’t want to be made fun of any more, all you need are guns and bombs to get people to stop.
Santa: That’s right, friends. All you need to do is instil fear and be willing to hurt people and you can get whatever you want. The only true power is violence.
Jewish Kyle is one of the principal voices of moral reason in the show. The idea that his race or culture (or, needless to say, Zionism) would ever be mocked in anything other than the gross, absurdly exaggerated — and therefore easily dismissed — slurs of Cartman is unthinkable.
Stan occasionally lectures the audience too, unless ‘feminist issues’ — which is to say the right for women to degrade themselves by imitating men within his insane system — are at stake, then Stan’s characterless mother, who is essentially a glued-together collection of outraged opinions, takes the mic.
The ‘Pandemic Specials’ predictably accepted the necessity of masks, lockdowns and vaccinations, equating criticism of them with hurr-hurr-hurr QAnon.
What’s also interesting about these episodes is not that the pot-shots at anti-vaxxers were feeble in the extreme, but that the entire plot, along with all the gags, and all the dialogue, was extremely weak, with the tiresome, cheerless ‘drama’ between the children reaching an absolute nadir of amateurish exposition. This I think demonstrates that artistic creation is a whole. If you base a whole story on cowardly and immoral propagandising, every aspect of the show is infected and sucked downwards.