The first episode of season 27 of the iconic animated series lit up media last week, but in the tumult over profane political satire pundits only got part of the picture.
“Take heed, sirrah—the whip.”
—Lear to his Fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear
It was a terrific water cooler week for people who follow the media, news, and entertainment.
In the wake of CBS announcing that this season of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert would be the show’s last, and President Trump taking credit for CBS “firing” Colbert on social media, conspiracy theories popped up like kudzu claiming that the cancellation was a quid pro quo for the Trump administration allowing the Skydance/Paramount merger. (Scott Galloway’s analysis that ending The Late Show was a financial decision is useful.)
Monday, on his highly-rated first episode after the announcement, Colbert told Trump to “go fuck yourself” (bleeped, of course). That same night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart led a small gospel chorus singing the same words sans bleeps.
Nothing compared to the first episode of Season 27 of South Park.
Let’s get through the obvious stuff in a hurry.
The South Park Season premiere is hilarious. If you have cut the cord and don’t get Comedy Central, or if you don’t subscribe to Paramount+, then get the free week trial of P+ and see this show.
It’s every bit as shocking as you’ve heard. Yes, it portrays President Trump in a sexual relationship with Satan. Yes, it portrays and vigorously mocks President Trump as having a micropenis. Yes, at the end of episode there’s a nude deep fake that looks like President Trump (not animated).
La Profesora and I watched it Thursday on P+. We were so surprised and laughed so hard that we watched it a second time because there was so much we didn’t catch. (I recommend watching with the subtitles on.)
Here’s the less obvious stuff.
The episode was richly allusive. Back in 1995, a five-minute video called “The Spirit of Christmas” exploded onto the Los Angeles scene. Producer Brian Graden had commissioned then-unknown artists Trey Parker and Matt Stone to create the video as a Christmas card he could send to friends. You can see it on the Internet Archive.
Known as “Jesus vs. Santa,” it introduces the foul-mouthed quartet (Stan, Kyle, Kenny, and Cartman) and has them watch as Jesus and Santa Claus have a Kung Fu movie-style battle to resolve who is the true spirit of Christmas. (Ice Skater Brian Boitano also shows up. It’s hard to explain.) This short video contains the narrative DNA that went on to become South Park.**
Jesus has since been a recurring character in South Park, and he is a focal character in the season premiere.
Satan is also a recurring character. In the 1995 movie South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, Satan was in a sexual relationship with Saddam Hussein. My favorite moment: at one point, Satan was reading a book in bed: “Saddam is From Mars; Satan is from Venus,” a nod to John Gray’s popular self-help book from 1992: Men are From Mars; Women are From Venus.
Younger viewers don’t have to field those references to understand and enjoy the episode, but for those of us who did get the references it expanded our pleasure. This sort of reference has been a key intellectual interest of mine for decades: I wrote my doctoral thesis about how Shakespeare used “repertory allusion” to bind his audience more closely to his company through references from one play to another.
Shakespeare and South Park are not often talked about in the same sentence, but they should be.
The episode is visually complex despite the still-primitive animation. Watching the second time, I paid attention to the paintings in the background, which ranged from a tame portrait of Gerald Ford to obscene pictures of Trump having sex with a sheep and taking advantage of a public toilet glory hole. Also, the portrayal of Trump’s face was thoughtful, using myriad different photos so that his expression changed from moment to moment.
There’s immense empathy for all the characters in the episode except Trump. This is something that folks don’t get about the Parker/Stone oeuvre: their characters experience deep emotions within ridiculous circumstances. When I saw their hit musical The Book of Mormon on Broadway, I found myself crying shortly before the intermission when Nabulungi sings “Sal Tlay Ka Siti” (Salt Lake City) because she is so unhappy and because the missionaries are giving her false hope.
Empathy also abounds in the South Park premiere. The school principal has invited Jesus Christ into the school (literally) because after the election he is searching for answers that he thinks he can find in religion. Stan’s father, Randy Marsh, is confused about religion in the school: “isn’t that illegal?” he wonders and then talks it over with ChatGPT.
At the local bar, patrons struggle to reconcile Trump’s pro-Jesus-in-schools stance with his actions: “Yeah, I voted for him,” one man says, “but all I’ve seen him do is arrest and sue people.” “I voted for him to get rid of all the woke stuff,” another says, “but now that retarded faggot is just putting money in his own pockets.” Kyle’s Jewish father then jumps in, “Are we just gonna sit here and let him break every rule of freedom?” “No!” the bar patrons cry.
Eric Cartman, the most foul-mouthed and rule breaking of the four key boys, is suicidally depressed because in the Trump era there is no place for his willingness to cross verbal lines and say terrible things—because everyone is doing it.
Even Satan is bummed because his relationship partner (Trump) is unkind and starting to remind him of another guy he used to date (Saddam Hussein).
Trump doesn’t care about South Park. Sure, he was probably irked at the attacks on his genital size, but at the same time the episode plays to his vanity by portraying him as the most powerful man in the world who, among other things…
- Has 60 Minutes correspondents quivering in fear about saying the wrong thing, and
- Gleefully sues the citizens of South Park for $5 Billion and gets them to settle for $3.5 Million, even though all they did was exercise their freedom of speech.
Side note: the least convincing aspect of the Trump parody is the animated president’s happiness. The South Park Trump hums merrily to himself as he walks around the White House, laughs at his successes, and smiles as he works the room at a party, all of which miss how the president’s emotional fuel is rage. (End of side note.)
Why do I think Trump doesn’t care? Two reasons.
First, the most thin-skinned man in history hasn’t said or posted anything about the episode. The White House (i.e., not Trump) released a bizarre statement that includes:
This show hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention. President Trump has delivered on more promises in just six months than any other president in our country’s history—and no fourth-rate show can derail President Trump’s hot streak.
But Trump himself has been silent, which is wildly out of character. Ergo, he doesn’t care.
Second, Trump understands AQ or “Attention Quotient.” Negative attention is still attention. Even if Parker and Stone are making fun of him, Trump still dominates the news cycle.
I first wrote about Trump’s powerful use of AQ almost exactly six years ago in July of 2018. What I concluded then is now again the case:
The president’s opponents—especially midterm Democratic candidates—need to bear in mind that every time they mention the president they are doing him a favor. Any campaign that builds its identity around opposition to the president is doomed because that campaign is about the president (which he likes) and increases the president’s AQ.
Parker and Stone won’t get into trouble with their new overlords at Skydance / Paramount both because South Park is a valuable property and also because they enjoy the privilege of clowns.
In King Lear, Lear’s Fool says out loud the things that the king needs to hear but resists. In an irate moment, Lear says, “take heed, sirrah—the whip,” but never acts on that threat. Fools and clowns act as release valves for social pressure: critic Mikhail Bakhtin called this the carnivalesque in his 1960s book, Rabelais and his World.
But while clowns point out important things, those things don’t change because of the satire. We should all celebrate the brilliance and bravery of South Park—which is astonishingly at the top of its game in its 27th season—but we shouldn’t mistake political satire for political action.
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* Image Prompt: “In the style of South Park animation, create an image of a 79 year old white man with blonde hair and an unnatural orange tan. The man is obese, wears a two-piece blue suit, and has a red tie that he wears so long that it goes past his belt buckle.” I then asked ChatGPT to “make the man in the image more of a blustering blowhard” to get the angry quality of the image that I wanted.
** I did not know until writing this piece that Parker and Stone had created an even earlier “Spirit of Christmas” video in which Jesus battled Frosty the Snowman.
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