There’s a misnomer about South Park that’s followed the four foul-mouthed boys from Colorado since their debut in 1997: They go out of their way to offend people.
This is wrong. Like all great comedy and satire, the first priority is always to do what’s funny regardless of the subject or target. Issues in politics, religion, sports, and culture may springboard the ideas, but the people who say South Park just goes for crassness and offensiveness are almost always the “offendees.”
Take, for instance, the first two episodes of the Comedy Central cartoon’s 27th season, the first of which premiered on July 23 and the other last Wednesday. Both took direct aim at President Donald Trump, whose never-ending scandals, sound bites, and psychosis keep popping up in our feeds, thanks to the media circus that propped up his political chances. In both episodes, South Park finally took a clearer shot (metaphorically, for the context-intolerant) with a double-barreled bazooka.
Showrunners Trey Parker and Matt Stone and longtime producer Vernon Chatman, the creator of some of TV’s smartest dark comedies like Wonder Shozen and The Shivering Truth, tackled Trump during his first term, but they kind of backed off by transforming school teacher and fellow psychotic Mr. Garrison into an orange-faced tyrant who could do more outrageous things to the world than the first administration (if you don’t count firing trans military members for no reason, separating families by housing children in cages, Trump’s many criminal and civil convictions, and too many other things we don’t have room to list here).
Parker had his reasons. He told Vanity Fair in 2016 that Trump’s ability to ooze into almost every news cycle made him “less fun” to mock, adding, “I don’t know what more we could possibly say about Trump.”
Well, here’s another chance, and now even the 24-hour news cycle can’t (mostly because of layoffs and the race to be first rather than right) cover all of Trump’s scandals and sweeping government changes. Now Trump and his cavalcade of wacky and scary characters in his cabinet and some of his most ardent supporters have become the big, orange elephant in the room that the show can no longer ignore. We’re only two episodes into the long-awaited new season of South Park, and they’ve more than made up for the time when they stopped doing a full-on Trump takedown.
First episode “Sermon on the ’Mount” caught the entire world’s attention by giving Trump the Saddam Hussein treatment. The visual technique Parker and Stone used in the first South Park movie to animate the Iraqi dictator now employs real photos of Trump’s leathery noggin. The show also gives Trump a crudely animated yellow body, a squeaky voice, and a cartoonishly miniscule penis. And like Saddam before him, Trump is also in a same-sex relationship with Satan. Hasn’t he suffered enough? I’m referring to Satan.
That’s just the head of the mockery. No pun intended.
South Park finds a new edge to push on even the limits of cable television by portraying Trump stark naked with a pencil eraser-sized penis that somehow made it on the air unblurred. This includes a live-action version of a fat, naked, deep-faked Trump, a new weapon for comedy that Parker and Stone first perfected with their Sassy Justice deep-fake YouTube series, with a pointer finger-sized penis that wears googly eyes and “approve[s] this message” for the president’s patronizing PSAs. Trump is also depicted in paintings as a bloated Jesus with a tiny penis, having carefully angled sex with a drone and a pig Black Mirror-style with his tiny penis, and something involving a public restroom and his tiny penis that I’d rather not think about right now.
Maybe some of these Trump jokes and sight gags go close to the level that South Park critics, who’ve never watched the show, go to in their heads. However, the balance of democratic power and the fabric of reality is in uncharted territory right now, and based on the episode’s viral response, such mockery is needed.
The South Park crew isn’t about making jokes. They care deeply about stringing together a good story in which actions have consequences and crossroads and chaos can raise the stakes and the humor grows out of them like wild vines. Trump’s character traits and consequences trickle down to the town of South Park in a number of ways. There’s a great opening story in which asshole child Eric Cartman gets mad that Trump cancels NPR funding because a radio show “where all the liberals bitch and whine about stuff” is entertaining as hell.
This and other events like Jesus’ literal presence at South Park Elementary and PC Principal changing his name from “Politically Correct” Principal to “Power Christian” Principal also drive Cartman, the show’s Archie Bunker but more heartless, down a dark hole of depression that promises to be the start of a great season-length thread for one of South Park’s most popular characters.
Second episode “Got a Nut” widens the scope of the show’s satire with a criticism of Trump’s signature immigration policy and the rapid expansion — and some say abuse — of the powers of ICE and Homeland Security. This time, the skewering extends to Kristy Noam, the former governor of South Dakota who not only runs Homeland Security but has become the Billy Mays of ICE’s low-standard recruitment campaign, leading untrained SWAT teams that include freshly fired school counselor Mr. Mackey into armed round-ups of anyone who meets Noem’s criterion of “If it’s brown, it goes down!”
The flappy-headed Trump makes a short reappearance with a bloated-faced J.D. Vance in a brilliant Fantasy Island parody reimagined as Mar-a-Lago. Also, if you know anything about her backstory or her constant and obvious photo-ops in the horrid places where she sends arrestees without due process, the story covers as much ground as it can without spreading too thin. There’s also a great B-story about the rise of conservative mouthpieces like Charlie Kirk, the head of Turning Point USA who debates (or rather talks over) college students. The episode features a great crack about Kirk’s goofy haircut that looks like a colonial tricorn hat suddenly turned into a toupee.
Most of all, the new episodes are setting up perhaps the funniest running bit (or bait?) of them all that may last the season but is not something the show can control. It’s the responses Parker and Stone elicit from the real people they target. Both episodes prompted a response from a White House source, the latest of which came from Noem herself. She criticized South Park only for mocking her looks as “lazy” and “petty” on a right-wing talk show as if that was the episode’s only joke.
The targets of the satire think they are standing up for themselves or firing up their base by debasing any criticism but end up feeding into the narratives about them that their critics and the satire creates, basically confirming they have no thick skin or sense of humor.
South Park’s 27th season is only bound to get better as the showrunners go down the line of the current administration and whatever else creeps into the national discourse. I’m hoping for Stephen Miller, which is something no one has ever said.
