“South Park” has been coming after President Donald Trump hard, and creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone said Paramount’s leadership doesn’t seem to mind.
“I know with the Colbert thing and all the Trump stuff, people think certain things,” Stone said in an interview with The New York Times published Saturday. “But they’re letting us do whatever we want, to their credit.”
Speaking to NYT, the pair talked all about the 27th and 28th seasons of their long-running adult animated series. The headline of these seasons has been the frequent and heavy mockery of Trump, portraying him in an abusive relationship (as the abuser) with Satan, among a great many other digs.
While some would expect these jokes to make new Paramount leadership a bit gun-shy, the creative duo said that they’ve been given no pushback over their hot-topic comedy.
Parker and Stone copped to being attracted to making touchy jokes about political topics in their series. Though they initially conceived of the Trump gag as a single-episode point of focus, they quickly steered into the skid when they realized the wealth of material the president provides — and how much Trump conversation permeates everyday life.
“It’s not that we got all political,” Parker said. “It’s that politics became pop culture.”
“Trey and I are attracted to that like flies to honey,” Stone said. “Oh, that’s where the taboo is? Over there? OK, then we’re over there.”
The lack of pushback from Paramount is a surprising one, particularly considering the environment in which these new seasons began. Ahead of Season 27, Parker and Stone faced a public set of negotiations, that ended with a $1.5 billion streaming deal with Paramount. The deal was struck just days before Season 27 hit the air.
Around the same time, Paramount merged with David Ellison’s Skydance and soon after cancelled “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” The move followed Colbert calling the company out on-air for giving Trump “a big, fat bribe” in a $16 million “60 Minutes” settlement. When “South Park” came after Trump so fiercely in the wake of this decision, it seemed like an act of resistance against Paramount, one with the potential to land Parker and Stone outside the good graces of company leadership.
Parker noted that he and Stone are “very down-the-middle guys,” making fun of extremists of any kind,” regardless of their side of the political aisle. Today, he said “there’s no getting away from” MAGA in modern culture, thus making them the show’s latest target.
“It’s like the government is just in your face everywhere you look,” Parker said. “Whether it’s the actual government or whether it is all the podcasters and the TikToks and the YouTubes and all of that, and it’s just all political and political because it’s more than political. It’s pop culture.”
