Oh Hamburgers: Thoughts On South Park‘s 15-Year Run

Mid-America centrality

South Park exists as a moral, cultural, and conspiratorial nexus, an “Everytown” capable of (and perhaps best suited for) staging and suffering the nation’s infirmities and anxieties. Episodes like “Goobacks” manage to upbraid every party, interest, and prejudice involved in the question of illegal immigration in the United States, where the solution in extremis—a defiant gay orgy—works in its contorted logic.

Small-town Colorado has proven a fitting microcosm for national and planetary stupidity and short-sightedness, as in Randy’s crowning victory in “Pinewood Derby.” Randy’s ad hoc teleconferences with the world’s leaders, all failing to take a stand on how to deal with the unforeseen consequences of first contact with an alien race, effectively flatten both the playing field and the abilities of those participating in the intrigue. The town participates in, makes decisions about, reacts to, and ultimately endures the show’s big problems precisely because its inhabitants and decision-makers are cut from the same fallible cloth as those with notably larger municipalities and jurisdictions (Satan or otherwise).

Randy’s not too old to keep in touch.

An intransigent aversion to authority

As in the aforementioned “Pinewood Derby,” Parker and Stone favor expository absurdity and steer towards conspiracy theories . . . both as plausible and equipotent as sheer human stupidity. The show’s powers-that-be often exercise willful delusion in the name of an ostensibly just end. And very few causes rankle the writers like political correctness. In “Death Camp of Tolerance,” the elementary school’s high brass sends its students to an internment camp to inculcate tolerant attitudes toward the school’s diversity—all the while, Mr. Garrison is flubbing his nose at the community’s brain-dead, high-minded “acceptance” of his public sexual behavior.

With Garrison taking the lead as the boys’ teacher from year to year, those with the authority to teach or model behavior have paper-thin control. When the school’s guidance counselor, Mr. Mackey, is asked to explain why, precisely, “drugs are bad” in class, he fails miserably, is fired for his incompetence, and copes by doing drugs himself. Parker and Stone arrange a world in which children are the voice of reason, and adults are panicked, irrational, vain, gullible, and hypocritical. Well . . . perhaps not when rampant accusations of child molestation are involved (“The Wacky Molestation Adventure”), but still the kind of community that bets the line on an elementary school football game.

Assailing celebrity

South Park has consciously rebelled against Matt Groening’s haloed guest spots for celebs. George Clooney was cajoled into barking as Stan’s gay dog in Season One, and the voice-over offers never notably improved. “Impersonations done badly” are the abiding principle of the show, as Parker and Stone despised what they saw as Hollywood’s prevailing patronizing attitude towards mid-America (e.g., Rob Reiner in “Butt Out”).

The entitlement and unimpeachability of celebrity culture found its exemplar in “Trapped in the Closet,” wherein the show beats the famously litigious Church of Scientology to the punch—mocking Tom Cruise, R. Kelly, and any celeb so aggressively self-protective (see also the infamously censored “200” and “201,” where Mr. Cruise covets a religious figure’s inviolability). Celebrities’ intentions are rarely noble—from Sally Struthers in the first “Starvin’ Marvin” on—and are often targets for the simple fact of their public life as well as the creators’ distaste for their careers or egos (“Mecha-Streisand,” Patrick Duffy and Scuzzlebutt, Kanye West in “Fish Sticks”). And in the case of notorious individuals like Gary Condit, the Ramseys, and O.J. Simpson, a plot can generate opportunities to balance huge legal defense funds by quite literally screaming some common sense.

Par for the course.

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