On Wednesday, hours after Trey Parker and Matt Stone signed a $1.5 billion, 50-episode deal with Paramount, the 27th season premiere of \u201cSouth Park\u201d aired on Comedy Central. Like most episodes of \u201cSouth Park,\u201d it featured a heavy dose of naughty words that my editor probably won\u2019t let me write without using asterisks. Unlike most episodes of \u201cSouth Park,\u201d this one elicited an official condemnation from the White House:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Left\u2019s hypocrisy truly has no end \u2014 for years they have come after \u2018South Park\u2019 for what they labeled as \u2018offense\u2019 [sic] content, but suddenly they are praising the show. Just like the creators of South Park, the Left has no authentic or original content, which is why their popularity continues to hit record lows.\u201d The statement went on to declare the show \u201cfourth rate\u201d and \u201cirrelevant.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trey and Matt must be absolutely delighted.<\/p>\n
It seems the billion-dollar nose-tweakers behind \u201cSouth Park\u201d have the president pegged; after writing the odious, bigoted, cowardly Eric Cartman character for almost 30 years, they know the psyche of MAGA world better than just about anyone. They must have hoped that Trump would not be able to resist responding to jokes making fun of the size of his penis.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s clear that it\u2019s the MAGA-fied edgelords in the audience who should, like Cartman, feel useless.<\/p>\n
In the opening moments of the episode, titled \u201cSermon on the \u2019Mount,\u201d Stan, Kyle, Kenny and Cartman notice that things have changed in South Park. Cartman, who has always been a selfish and cruel loudmouth, is dismayed when his supply of schadenfreude is cut off with the cancellation of NPR, which Cartman describes as \u201cthe funniest show ever where all the lesbians and Jews complain about stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n
The strangeness continues at a school assembly, when the boys find that PC Principal \u2014 who for the last several seasons has strutted around in wraparound shades enforcing a rigid liberal orthodoxy \u2014 has gone full youth pastor, declaring himself Power Christian Principal and inviting Jesus Christ himself to South Park Elementary.<\/p>\n
Cartman spirals further when he discovers at school that none of his edgelord histrionics elicit a reaction from people like they used to. He\u2019s no longer the only one openly hating Jewish people or using gay slurs \u2014 being a bigot in the open is acceptable now. \u201cWoke is dead,\u201d he laments to his friend and frequent target of abuse, Leopold \u201cButters\u201d Stotch. He adds, \u201cI used to laugh, Butters. I used to have fun. But I\u2019m not special anymore. So what\u2019s the point of me even existing?\u201d<\/p>\n
As the people of South Park grumble about the changes in their town and the intrusion of Jesus in their public school, they watch a news report explaining why this is all happening: President Donald Trump threatens to sue anybody who doesn\u2019t do what he says.<\/p>\n
At the show\u2019s midpoint, Trump makes his \u201cSouth Park\u201d debut. (In previous seasons, the teacher Mr. Garrison played a sort of Donald Trump-like role.) Longtime fans of the show may recognize Trump\u2019s voice and animation style; he sounds exactly the same as the character of Saddam Hussein from early seasons and the 1999 film \u201cSouth Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut.\u201d Also like the Hussein of old-school \u201cSouth Park,\u201d Trump is depicted with a photorealistic head that flaps open and closed when he speaks, affixed to a crudely animated body made of cutout rectangles. Like the character of Hussein, \u201cSouth Park\u2019s\u201d Trump is also in a sexual relationship with Satan, who complains that Trump reminds him of one of his exes. (It\u2019s pretty clear where this subplot is eventually headed.)<\/p>\n
But unlike with Hussein\u2019s character, we see in multiple scenes that Trump, along with an obsession with his virility, has a micropenis.<\/p>\n
Jesus later admits to the people of South Park that the reason he\u2019s at the school is because Paramount made a deal with Trump and he\u2019s forced to be there to avoid more litigation, echoing Paramount and other institutions\u2019 capitulation to threats from the administration. The episode concludes with the townsfolk settling a threatened lawsuit from the president by agreeing to pay him millions of dollars and create pro-Trump content.<\/p>\n
What follows is a live-action public service announcement featuring a deepfake of a fat and out-of-breath Donald Trump stumbling through the desert and removing his clothing until he\u2019s naked but for his shoes and socks. A little penis with googly eyes peeks up over the president\u2019s heaving belly and chirps, \u201cI\u2019m Donald Trump and I approve this message!\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s baby penis and gay relationship with Satan seems to have grabbed the most headlines, but the true insult to South Park\u2019s MAGA fans came in Cartman\u2019s arc. Cartman, realizing that his entire personality was based on triggering liberals and mocking wokeness, finds that his knee-jerk contrarianism is no longer interesting. Without purpose, he decides to kill himself and Butters. (He does this by trying to asphyxiate them both using Butters\u2019 parents\u2019 car, which turns out to be electric and thus an ineffective suicide tool.)<\/p>\n
Cartman spirals further when he discovers at school that none of his edgelord histrionics elicit a reaction from people like they used to. <\/p>\n
If operating under the shallow assumption that \u201cSouth Park\u201d is a show that exists to mock woke culture, Cartman\u2019s despair could be seen as a meta-commentary on the program itself, which in the past has frequently satirized liberals by poking fun at activism in favor of trans women in sports, inclusive Hollywood casting, the #MeToo movement and performative antiracism. But with Cartman\u2019s existential crisis happening as the show fires on all cylinders at a new target, it\u2019s clear that it\u2019s the MAGA-fied edgelords in the audience who should, like Cartman, feel useless.<\/p>\n
Like Cartman, MAGA media figures who have built their entire careers painting themselves as aggrieved and silenced victims of a cultural \u201cleft\u201d must grapple with who they are now. They are the dog that caught the car.<\/p>\n
\u201cSouth Park\u201d is once again making clear that the show\u2019s humor was never about agreeing with its creators (or anyone) ideologically; it was about exposing phoniness, satirizing moral rigidity, poking fun at bullies and mocking unquestioned power. Trump demanded unquestioned power; he got it. MAGA fell in line. Institutions are falling in line. Now it\u2019s their turn to be mocked.<\/p>\n
On Thursday at San Diego ComicCon, Parker and Stone were asked to respond to the White House\u2019s condemnation of the episode. \u201cWe\u2019re terribly sorry,\u201d Parker deadpanned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Wednesday, hours after Trey Parker and Matt Stone signed a $1.5 billion, 50-episode deal with Paramount, the…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":88969,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[171,173,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-94054","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-tv","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114919499800513370","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94054\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}