For many 18- to 24-year-olds in America, the media has become one of our greatest influences. We grew up watching our idols on the news, on television shows and in the movies. Our heroes may be fictional, but they are nonetheless inspirational. We don't look up to just politicians and philanthropists. Our heroes are solving crimes on detective shows, standing up for themselves in melodramas, fighting for what is right in political thrillers ... and betting their friends that if you put food up your butt you'll crap out of your mouth.
For fans of Comedy Central's infamous and unforgiving cartoon South Park,? this is a typical plot line for an episode. No, seriously. Cartman bets Kyle that if you put food up your butt, you'll crap out of your mouth, reversing your whole digestive system. For the record, I'm a 22-year-old graduate student in the English department, and this is one of my favorite episodes.
You can't be an 18- to 24-year-old and not be familiar with South Park, the brainchild of producers and University of Colorado graduates Matt Stone and Trey Parker. The two met in 1992 while in school and came together to make an animated short titled "Jesus vs. Frosty," which they achieved with construction paper, glue and an 8mm camera. The film caught the eye of Fox executive Brian Graden, who commissioned the guys to make another short that would become an animated Christmas card. Graden invited Stone and Parker to produce a series for Fox in 1997, but the guys signed with Comedy Central instead.
South Park characters Stan, Kyle, Kenny and Cartman have been leading audiences on adventures through the fourth grade for 12 seasons, earning two Emmys, a Peabody Award, a nod from Time magazine as one of the Best TV Shows of All Time and an Oscar nomination for the music from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. The show has featured a slew of celebrity guests (rumor is Jerry Seinfeld was the voice of the turkey from season four's "Helen Keller! The Musical," though all he said was "gobble gobble gobble") and has tackled both ridiculous and serious issues.
The show's success resides in its ability to satirize and find humor in everything. Although Stone and Parker began the show using slapstick humor and capitalizing on the hilarious animation (12 seasons later it is still hilarious), the series took a turn in the sixth season by tackling more controversial topics. Season seven's second offering, titled "Krazy Kripples," took on stem-cell research in an episode that featured Christopher Reeve eating stem-cell fetuses. Season 10's "Smug Alert" portrayed San Francisco suffering from "smug," a result of everyone buying hybrid cars, thinking too highly of themselves and smelling their own farts. One of my favorites is season eight's "Douche and Turd," a parody of the 2004 elections, which featured an election between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. Literally.
I admit, it's hard to relate the satirical genius of this on paper, but South Park does something few shows are brave enough to attempt. For Stone and Parker, everything is up for grabs -- liberals, pop music, Catholicism, terrorism, vegetarianism, the NRA, pedophiles, religious cults, drug use, Sept. 11, Wal-Mart, immigration and so on. Literally, every facet of contemporary culture -- American and international -- can be source material.
The show's unrelenting satire has even caught the eye of academia. The 2006 book South Park and Philosophy: You Know, I Learned Something Today is a collection of essays about the show's relevance in philosophical thinking. There are numerous other books and essays about South Park, both in praise and condemnation, which only add to the show's acclaim and fuel its fire for material.
What does the future hold for South Park? The 2008 presidential campaign is heating up, we're still at war in Iraq, and there is more than enough material in pop culture to last for years. This season, Stan and Kyle have already tried to save Britney Spears, and Randy Marsh lived through nine days without the Internet. So if South Park has not yet satirized your beliefs, be patient. The show is contracted through 15 seasons. 3
Read More
The best albums of 2014
By Noah Zeidman | December 4, 2014Across genres, it has been a pretty great year in music.
Top 10 movies of 2014
December 4, 2014This has been an excellent year for film, offering everything from gripping blockbusters to innovative personal films.
Iggy Azalea is “Reclassified”
December 4, 2014It has become common practice among music artists to repackage their albums in an effort to simultaneously boost single sales and dish out new content by slightly renaming the album or slapping “Deluxe” onto the title.
