South Park: The Crudiest, Stupidest, Funniest Show on TV

Vanessa Grigoriadis looks at Comedy Central’s “South Park” as it enters its tenth season for the cover story of this month’s Rolling Stone. The subhead says it all: “For ten years, ‘South Park’ has been the crudest, stupidest, most offensive show on television. And the funniest.”

Some excerpts:

It’s also the most ideologically opaque political show on television, fostering an open-ended dialogue on difficult questions like whether one has a duty to obey unfair laws or if there is a God in an evil world. Unlike The Simpsons, which is intellectual and pleasantly dumb in its portrayal of American life, using both to further a leftist agenda, South Park offers simple parables — often with an optimistic message — to take aim at all issues without ever showing its hand. “If Matt and Trey came out and said what they were about, all of a sudden people would watch the show with a map,” says Penn Jillette, a close friend. “But you shouldn’t have a map to look at during the ride. You must trust the art and not the artist. They’ll never say what they’re about.”

[...]

Most of South Park’s humor either advocates radical individualism (everyone is stupid, so don’t listen to anyone but yourself) and/or a conservative agenda (this is a great country, and you’re a pussy if you’re down in the mouth about President Bush). Neither Stone nor Parker will delineate his political views, and both contend that the libertarian label, which has been applied to them in recent years, is not entirely appropriate. (As far as the “South Park Republicans” tag that was affixed to their fans a few years ago to define the “cool” part of the conservative movement, they say it’s a dumb notion.) They won’t talk about the war, even to voice an opinion on President Bush’s new troop-deployment plan. “I wouldn’t even begin to say I know enough to say if it’s right or wrong, because whomever is telling you it’s wrong is full of shit too,” says Parker. Neither votes — “like, ever,” says Stone. Parker waves a hand in the air. “Each election is a choice with a douche or a turd, so who cares,” he says. “If Gore had beaten Bush, things wouldn’t be much different.”

While Stone is in fact deeply immersed in politics and a serious reader of nonfiction books about the Middle East, I practically have to wrestle him to hear a smidge of his politics: He’s against the War on Drugs, pro-gay marriage, against socialized medicine and basically in favor of free markets, except in cases like dropping public funding for roads or education. As for Parker, who owns a couple of guns, the closest I can come is his paraphrase of Team America‘s climactic monologue: “There’s a difference between dicks and assholes. Because there are terrorists — assholes — you’ve got to 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!”

Try to argue back to this kind of logic, and the joke’s on you, much to the glee of Stone and Parker. “We went to a party in Malibu on the beach recently,” says Stone, “and this woman came up to us, like, ‘Oh, my son is at the University of Colorado, and I can’t get him to go to class, because he snowboards all the time.’ I’m immediately thinking, ‘Fuck you and your kid,’ because I couldn’t afford to snowboard in college. Then I say, ‘Yeah, I still go to Colorado to visit my family.’ She’s like, ‘So they really are just a bunch of gun-toting hicks out there, aren’t they?’ I’m like, ‘I just told you my mom and dad and sister live there.’ Then Trey walks up to her and says, ‘George Bush is a great man.’ She looked like we’d poured acid in her ear. We were laughing our asses off.”

“That’s the most punk-rock thing you can do in L.A.: say ‘George Bush is fucking awesome’ instead of talking about how lame it is that he’s fighting for oil,” says Parker. “The only way to be more hardcore than everyone else is to tell the people who think they’re the most hardcore that they’re pussies, to go up to a tattooed, pierced vegan and say, ‘Whatever, you tattooed faggot, you’re a pierced faggot and whatever.’ ” He looks very pleased with himself. “That’s hardcore.”

Read the rest at the link.

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South Park: The Crudiest, Stupidest, Funniest Show on TV

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