“South Park” has been on the air since 1997 and in that time it’s remained one of the most hot-button shows in American TV. Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s comedy of profane fourth graders with a first-hand view of a bonkers world has endured thanks to its no-holds-barred approach to literally every topic. You name it and “South Park” has mocked it.
This take-no-prisoners style of parody, combined with some of the sharpest satire on television, has made them both extremely controversial and wildly popular. It turns out that annoying every major demographic on the planet is great business, as Parker and Stone just signed an eye-watering $1.5 billion deal with Paramount to remain on the network.
To celebrate the occasion, “South Park” dedicated its Season 27 premiere to lampooning its home corporation and their seeming pandering to President Donald Trump over their planned merger with Skydance. Earlier this month, Parker and Stone criticized the merger for being a “s—show” that was “f—king up South Park.” So, the decision to dedicate an entire episode to the political nightmare of the business deal, and Trump’s own pettiness, one day after reupping their deal is classic “South Park” behavior (the show famously has a tight turnaround of one week from beginning to airing, so they certainly captured the zeitgeist.)
Parker and Stone have been doing this for decades now, finding new, often hilarious, and frequently controversial ways to tackle world issues, pop culture shifts, and their own snarky grievances. 28 years since their premiere, they’re still making the world pay attention.
Sermon on the Mount
The 27th season premiered Wednesday with a shot across the bow to Paramount and the Trump administration. The episode centers on the presence of Jesus in schools, with a parody of “60 Minutes”, a CBS show, having its hosts nervously talk about Trump for fear of retaliation. The parents don’t want Jesus in schools, but Jesus himself turns up to say he had to “because it was part of a lawsuit and the agreement with Paramount […] South Park is over.”
The townspeople agree to pay off Trump and create a “pro-Trump message,” which turns out to be an AI video of the President walking naked in the desert, a PSA that now has its own website. Oh, and Trump is also shown to be the latest bedfellow of Satan himself (Lucifer has bad taste in men, as those who remember him being in love with Saddam Hussein in “South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut” will attest to.) And even Satan lambasts him about the Jeffrey Epstein list. We see Trump’s penis many times in this episode. It’s no wonder the White House is furious.
“It Hits the Fan”
“South Park” has always been defined by its plentiful profanity. It understands that swearing is just inherently funny. Not every TV show got away with it. In the Season 5 premiere, the town goes wild after an episode of “Cop Show” breaks the glass ceiling of naughty language and says the word “s—t” on air. Now everyone feels free to swear as much as they want, and other TV shows decide that the only way to grab more ratings is to add more swearing. But curse words come with a price, of course.
This episode was a parody of when the CBS series “Chicago Hope” broke new ground in network television by having Mark Harmon say the word during one episode. “South Park” did better with saying it 162 times — an average of once every eight seconds.
“With Apologies to Jesse Jackson”
Parker and Stone had wanted to create an episode centered on use of the N word for many years when they finally made it happen with the 11th season premiere. Randy Marsh, while competing in “Wheel of Fortune,” is meant to spell out the word “naggers” and instead says, well, you know. It inspires controversy and Cartman hopes it will lead to a race war. Seeking forgiveness, Randy goes to talk to the Reverend Jesse Jackson and ends up kissing his backside.
The use of the slur was obviously controversial, although it did receive some support from the organization “Abolish the N Word,” whose founders said that the episode was surprisingly educational on why hate speech is so dangerous. The depiction of Jackson as an indisputable “emperor of Black people,” as Token calls him, who others must adhere to was also tricky.
“Trapped in the Closet”
Parker and Stone had mocked the Church of Scientology before this legendary episode from Season 9, but it’s their depiction of Tom Cruise in a closet that became iconic. Stan decides to join Scientology and a personality test decrees that he is the reincarnation of founder L. Ron Hubbard. The alien-heavy origins of the faith are detailed with an accompanying onscreen caption reading “THIS IS WHAT SCIENTOLOGISTS ACTUALLY BELIEVE.” When Stan says the church’s practices should be free so that they can help everyone, the president admits that the whole thing is a money-making scam disguised as a religion.
Rumors swirled following the episode’s airing that Paramount had been told to pull it so as not to offend Cruise, who was preparing to promote “Mission: Impossible 3.” Cruise’s team eventually denied that, and the episode was a ratings smash. The parody of Cruise as a man in the closet has endured almost as much as the show’s explanation of Scientology, which helped to mainstream the controversial organization’s lore. Jenna Miscavige Hill, the niece of the current Scientology leader David Miscavige and a famous defector of the church, admitted that she learned the story of Xenu from this episode.
“Bloody Mary”
Only “South Park” could combine a scathing critique of Alcoholics Anonymous with a parody of religion that features a statue of the Virgin Mary who starts bleeding from its backside. The Catholic Church sends cardinals to decide if this is a true miracle. It turns out that the statue is just menstruating, which the Pope says isn’t a miracle because there’s nothing more common than a woman on her period. Meanwhile, Randy is arrested for drunk driving and is forced to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, where he becomes a full-on drunk who thinks he’s beyond help because AA’s tenets hell him he’s powerless to stop his addiction.
Needless to say, the Catholic Church was not happy about this episode, which aired on the eve of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, a day specifically related to the Virgin Mary. The Catholic League demanded an apology and that the episode be retracted, and it was absent from rerun rotation for a short while.
“Cartoon Wars”
Does “South Park” have any limits? No, but Paramount certainly does. In the third and fourth episodes of Season 10, Parker and Stone wanted to depict the Prophet Muhammad, the leader of Islam, even though it is extremely taboo within the faith to do so. “Cartoon Wars” imagines the fury around not “South Park” showing it but “Family Guy.” As the townspeople fear retaliatory terrorist attacks if the episode airs, literally burying their heads in the sand to avoid seeing it, the kids wonder what all the fuss is about when they see the censored gag.
Paramount ended up censoring the show’s depiction of Muhammad, a decision that Parker and Stone decried as hypocritical. Why were all of their parodies of Jesus OK but not this? They argued, before slamming the network for giving into hypothetical threats. A black title card appeared over the intended scene, which only further drew attention to the issue.
This wasn’t the first or last time Parker and Stone would try to get Paramount to confront the topic. In “Super Best Friends,” from Season 5, they depicted Muhammad with little pushback, although the episode became more controversial later on. Another two-part arc in the episodes “200” and “201” brought him into several scenes, which Comedy Central heavily censored. Kyle’s two-minute speech on the perils of giving into violent threats was completely bleeped out.
“Band in China”
If you’re going to challenge censorship then you go for the big guns. Episode 2 of the 23rd season took shots not only at the Chinese government’s censorship of media but of Hollywood’s willing adherence to it in the name of profit. In the hopes of expanding his family’s marijuana farm (a long-running joke in later seasons), Stan ends up in China where he is imprisoned, tortured, and stuck in a cell with Winnie the Pooh and Piglet (a reference to the characters being heavily censored in the country because President Xi Jinping reportedly didn’t like some memes comparing him to Pooh.)
While the episode is forceful on Chinese censorship, it is far more pointed in how American corporations willingly bend the knee to such forces, changing their work and ignoring their own values in the name of profit. In response to the episode, “South Park” was entirely banned in China, which just proved Parker and Stone’s point. Perhaps the image of Randy strangling Winnie the Pooh to death like Anton Chigurh in “No Country for Old Men” was a step too far.
“The China Problem”
“South Park” is known for going dark, but “The China Problem,” the eighth episode of Season 12, went to an unexpectedly bleak place. While Cartman becomes convinced that China is ready to invade America following the 2008 Beijing Olympics, he dresses in yellowface to go undercover at P.F. Chang’s to try to trick the Chinese people into revealing their plans. Meanwhile, Stan and Kyle are traumatized by “the rape of a friend” that they saw and did nothing to stop. The reveal? Said attack was the rape of Indiana Jones by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg via the cultural desecration that was “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” (shown as a parody of the rape scene from “The Accused.”)
In terms of shock appeal, there’s a lot to go on with this episode. Even Matt Stone admitted that the rape scene was darker than it was funny. According to media reports, Paramount (which distributed the Lucasfilm-owned Indiana Jones franchise pre-Disney acquisition) didn’t protest the episode but “[wanted] it to go away.”
“Cartman Joins NAMBLA”
During the 1990s, the North American Man/Boy Love Association, better known as NAMBLA, came to prominence after an undercover detective unveiled membership numbers to the pro-pedophilia group. It was prime fodder for “South Park” in its fourth season.
After deciding he is too mature to hang out with the other kids, Cartman decides he should look for older company. Dr. Mephesto tells him about NAMBLA, and soon Cartman becomes the poster boy for the group. A group of pedophiles holds a party for Cartman and all the other kids, keen not to be left out of the mature fun, go along for some perfectly innocent partying. And, just to make the episode more controversial, Kenny keeps trying to forcibly abort his mother’s new baby. In the UK, the episode was banned from Sky One but eventually aired elsewhere. Joking about pedophilia was close to the bone for many but “South Park” kept its focus on how NAMBLA tried to equate their abuses with being a marginalized group.
“The Return of Chef”
The legendary soul singer Isaac Hayes had played the character of Chef since the show’s first season, offering sage advice to the kids and singing hilariously inappropriate bops like “Chocolate Salty Balls.” After the “Trapped in the Closet” episode, Hayes, a Scientologist, left the show over the issue and a statement decrying the series was issued in his name. In response, Parker and Stone dedicated the first episode of Season 10 to excoriating both their former friend and the organization he supported.
In “The Return of Chef,” Chef comes back to South Park after journeying the world with the “Super Adventure Club.” Said “fruity little club,” it turns out, brainwashes its members into becoming child molesters. All of Chef’s dialogue was made up of spliced together clips from old episodes, which made for hilarious if uncomfortable scenes of Hayes singing about wanting to “make love” to the kids. The episode violently killed off Chef, but ended with a eulogy of sorts that blamed not him for his about-turn but the group that had taken control of his life. The Scientology parallels were subtle to nobody.
The episode took on a new level of pathos when one of Hayes’ children released a statement only this year, claiming that his father had been forced to quit the show after the “Trapped in the Closet” episode by his representatives and Scientology officials. Hayes, who had suffered a stroke during this period, was unable to speak out for himself, said his son.
“The F Word”
A group of irritating bikers ride into town, thinking they’re cool and intimidating while everyone rolls their eyes. The kids label them the F word, not as a homophobic slur but to mean that they’re annoying and pathetic. As the issue becomes controversial outside of town, the kids insist that they’re not using the word to bash gay people, and that words’ meanings can change.
Can you reclaim a slur that isn’t yours? Probably not but Parker and Stone certainly gave it a good try in the 12th episode of the 13th season. While the central point of the evolution of language isn’t wrong, and that plenty of people have used the F word as a casual insult for years, the message doesn’t land as effectively as Parker and Stone desired. As GLAAD noted in their response to the episode, the word remains a slur primarily used against queer people and that hasn’t changed even if other people insist it has.
All episodes of “South Park” are now streaming on Paramount+.
