There’s a new girl at South Park Elementary. All the guys are excited, but when Cartman finds out she’s black, he makes it his mission to pair her up with Token. It’s a fairly vile premise that somehow digs its way out of its own racism partly because it’s Cartman and more easily dismissable, but mostly because they run with it so unapologetically that “Cartman Finds Love” turns into a somewhat sweet, and funny episode.
Cartman is so determined to set up Nichole with Token, that after he finds out she has a crush on Kyle, he starts a rumor that he and Kyle are in a relationship. Then [...]
Cartman is easily the most unsympathetic character on South Park. Anti-semetic, racist, exclusionist, and classist, he makes truly offensive comments and mocks other characters relentlessly. Many of his remarks go unchallenged. Kyle and Stan roll their eyes and tell him to shut up every once in a while, but it’s clear that no one takes him too seriously. So although it’s not an uncommon thread for South Park, it is always fun to see Cartman’s own confidence in his beliefs shaken — sort of like watching Barney lose his cool on How I Met Your Mother. In this week’s episode, Cartman experiences a tranquilizer gun induced Passover dream and [...]
In the Season 16 premiere of South Park, “Reverse Cowgirl,” Clyde Donovan leaves the toilet seat up and accidentally causes his mother’s death. What started out as an unreasonable and near psychotic obsession with having the toilet seat down, ends up being validated when Betsy Donovan falls in, makes the mistake of flushing, and dies when all of her insides are torn out because of the pressure. It’s fairly disturbing, even for South Park.
Because the men and women of the town can’t agree on a standard for toilet seat etiquette (“It isn’t a woman’s responsibility to see that the seat is down, it’s a man responsibility to put [...]
A Muslim convert in Brooklyn is expected to plead guilty today for posting online threats against the South Park creators for insulting the prophet Muhammed. A good reminder for all of us to take comedy a little less seriously, maybe.
Sitcoms really only have four ways of handling Christmas: it can either be the Sentimental Episode, the Parody Episode (like all seven billion It’s a Wonderful Life lampoons), the Christmas Doesn’t Exist Episode, or, my favorite, INSANE CHRISTMAS. That’s the one that usually features a lot of blood and violence and reindeer frothing at the mouth, and it’s almost always because of the actions of Saint Nick himself. I love Bad Ass Santa because there’s only so much you can do with Christmas, plot-wise, and any story with Father Christmas brandishing a machine gun or baseball bat feels fresh and exciting. And on TV, it’s almost exclusive to sitcoms; [...]
So South Park went live action. And Stan is apparently the best looking of the group. But we’ll get back to that later.
This week, South Park satirized the Dateline-esque newsshow by adopting its format and sticking with it throughout the entire episode. A deep voiced narrator leads us through the day the boys decided to go ziplining with frequent standard-issue reality show cuts back to the boys in an interview room reacting to what just happened, tense musical interludes teasing action and tragedy, and graphic representations of stomachs and brains to lend a cheesy scientific bent to the account of the day. And the show gets everything about [...]
On this week’s episode of South Park, the boys become obsessed with meme culture. Though it’s a little early to be making any grand pronouncements about the strength of the season as a whole, “Faith Hilling” is certainly the best we’ve seen so far. It’s funny, pertinent, full of quotable lines, and reminds just how insane the Internet can make us.
Faith Hilling, we discover, is a meme where you pull the chest of your shirt out with both hands to look like breasts while someone takes a photo of you. Like Tebowing and Planking before it, Faith Hilling is the latest and greatest thing. Everyone on the Internet [...]
Lost Roles is a weekly column that takes a particular comedic actor or writer and dives deep into all of their movie and TV projects that came close to happening but didn’t for one reason or another. This week, we turn our attention to Trey Parker and Matt Stone, just in time for the premiere of South Park's 16th season next week.
One of the biggest duos in modern comedy, Trey Parker and Matt Stone have developed and refined a distinct style that emanates from all of their projects. From The Book of Mormon to South Park, That's My Bush! to Team America, Parker and Stone's trademark blend of raunch [...]
The Best Sitcom Episode Ever Tournament is pitting 32 of the greatest episodes of funny TV shows ever produced against each other in a single-elimination winner-takes-all (well, takes-nothing) competition. Every day, we're putting up episodes for you, our loyal readers, to vote on. Today: Friends vs. Fraiser and The Dick Van Dyke Show vs. Get Smart.
Seinfeld — “The Marine Biologist,” February 10, 1994 The final moments of “The Marine Biologist,” in which George heroically recounts saving a beached whale in order to continue lying about being a marine biologist, is one of the funniest scenes in Seinfeld history. The reveal of George pulling out Kramer’s blowhole-obstructing golfball is [...]
Back in the summer of 2002, when Jimmy Fallon released his first and only album The Bathroom Wall, I was at the peak of mix CD-making phase. The albums weren’t for my friends or girlfriend (ha), but rather, for me, myself, and Josh. Mp3 players were still a few years away from becoming ubiquitous, so if I wanted to listen to multiple songs by a variety of artists, and not carry around my cumbersome, carefully alphabetized booklet of CDs, I had to make a mix for the 20-minute bus ride to school, and for the 40 it took to get back. (Don’t ask.) Rather than include anything cool, like [...]
Season 16 has not been especially even for South Park so far. It was hard not to hope that somehow last season’s standouts would translate into an entire lineup of great episodes, but five episodes in, it’s clear that that has not been the case. They haven’t even been especially timely, which can often make up for an episode that isn’t all that funny on its own. So it was refreshing that after four only passingly topical episodes, South Park decided to take on bullying, Kony2012, and the Weinsteins.
The kids notice that Butters is being bullied by someone, and instead of taking the time to figure out who [...]
After last week’s gross-out episode, South Park went dark with “Cash for Gold,” managing to take on capitalism, consumerism, and the exploitative evils of the semi-precious jewelry industry. Cartman starts his own business selling crappy jewelry to old people, Stan screams at a sweatshop worker in India for preying on his grandfather, and an HSN-style jewelry salesman kills himself in the middle of a broadcast, splattering blood all over the faux rubies on the spinning display case as the department store muzak continues.
It all starts when Stan’s grandfather gives him a gold, diamond, and turquoise bolo tie that he proudly tells his horrified family that he bought for [...]
The Best Sitcom Episode Ever Tournament is pitting 32 of the greatest episodes of funny TV shows ever produced against each other in a single-elimination winner-takes-all (well, takes-nothing) competition. Every day, we're putting up episodes for you, our loyal readers, to vote on. Today: Community vs. Party Down and South Park vs. The Simpsons.
Community — "Remedial Chaos Theory," October 13, 2011Community has done a lot of beloved "thematic" episodes, but none played with the form and structure of the 23-minute sitcom episode quite like "Remedial Chaos Theory." With each roll of the die we saw how the study group's dynamic changed based on who left the room, [...]
The announcement that a big-time South Park RPG is currently under development at Obsidian Studios was like catnip for a very specific type of nerd, one whose Venn Diagram of obsessions contains both comedy and video games. You will actually get to control what will look almost exactly like an episode of South Park! You will be able to select "Jew" as your user class (a "paladin/monk type character") and then attack a roving pack of gingers with a golf club! And now we get to see the first screenshots of actual gameplay, and lordy does it look just like the show.
