“Such impudence!—it’s like being alive,” the critic Marvin Mudrick marveled of the writing of fellow critic and provocateur Harold Rosenberg. The sucker punch thrown by this summer’s edition of South Park has the same jolted-awake effect, blowing a hole of daylight to let the raw air in.
Now in its 27th season on Comedy Central, an endurance record topped only by The Simpsons, Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s animated comedy about a small community of foulmouthed kids and put-upon adults in Colorado—a Lake Wobegone of underachievers—has been a taboo breaker from day one, as evidenced by episodes titled “Cripple Fight” and “Crack Baby Athletic Association.” Adding to their maverick cred, Parker and Stone’s raucous, profane musical, The Book of Mormon, is a long-running Broadway smash. They’ve definitively demolished the old show-business adage that “satire is what closes on Saturday night.”
South Park’s low-budget, bobblehead, alien-abductor tabloid shock approach remains intact but has picked up steam, urgency, and malice. It isn’t playing cute. Compared with the cuddly, inside-dope-ish, celebrity cameo’d Hollywood satire of The Studio; the gleeful savagery of South Park’s attacks on Trump, media consolidation, and suppression; the siren song of ChatGPT (lulling its users into stupefaction); and the heavy plod of Fascism are more like pirate raids.
The show’s direct calling-out of Paramount+ for capitulating to Trump, neutering 60 Minutes, and canceling Stephen Colbert’s late-night show to facilitate a merger with Skydance (which sounds like an evil entity from a bad James Bond film) has punk precedent. It’s in the spirit of rocker Graham Parker ripping Mercury Records in the song “Mercury Poisoning” (“I got Mercury poisoning—it’s fatal and it don’t get better”), the Clash asserting “Complete Control,” or the name-calling on the Snivelling Shits’ classic “I Can’t Come!” (available for your listening enjoyment on Apple Music). That Parker and Stone had just signed a $1.5 billion contract with Paramount+ makes the mischief even spicier.
When not flossing itself by the pool, Hollywood likes to promote tales of staunch resistance in troubled times: Edward R. Murrow standing up to Senator Joe McCarthy in Good Night, and Good Luck, Bryan Cranston’s portrayal of blacklisted Dalton Trumbo in Trumbo—institutional self-exoneration through individual heroism.
Hollywood has always been largely craven and C.Y.A., waiting for a suitable time to pass before taking a wobbly stand, which is why it’s been useless during the coronavirus and the rise of Trump. Some of our leading newspaper editorial boards are equally culpable for being chicken-livered. This season of South Park rips right through the prevailing cautions to go for the jugular.
Or, actually, the groin.
Debate coaches, rhetoricians, and deacons of civility discourage the use of ad hominem attacks as unbefitting, but the best, meanest satire doesn’t hold back, especially when there’s a monster on the loose. Such unrestraint can go too far, not because of cruelty but from overkill.
South Park mocks Trump’s purported micro-endowment, his wee willy winkie, with merciless playground taunting. But each iteration of “small penis” has a diminishing shock value. It, too, suffers from shrinkage. It isn’t news that Trump isn’t packing a trout in his pants. Stormy Daniels—adult-film star, American lioness—asserted that for the public record, and she should know.
The bolder breakthrough in South Park is in porn-ifying Trump to a degree not seen since the Earl of Rochester tore into Charles II in his play Sodom, or The Quintessence of Debauchery (1684). The portrait of Trump pressing his torpid belly against a glory hole follows in this tradition, while the creepily plausible A.I. depiction of Trump’s gummy-worm penis having a pair of eyes like Microsoft’s Clippy is some new kind of bizarre.
Even the boldest satire can’t keep up with the lunatic surreality of American life. This we know. Philip Roth made that point in the 1961 essay “Writing American Fiction,” and it remains truer today, when so much of the country and its leaders parade around in a fugue state, somnambulating in lockstep.
The scene in South Park in which tech leaders queue up to offer tribute to Trump is funny and tonic—Apple’s Tim Cook and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg are ridiculed as spineless toadies—but, again, it’s not news that Trump craves presents and praise like the man-baby he is. For orchestrated politburo bowing and scraping, nothing beats the actual Cabinet meeting this August, when Trump was assured by his gormless posse that no one alive was more deserving of the Nobel Prize and was thanked for saving college football, among his many other head-scratching achievements.
But let’s be grateful for what Parker and Stone have been able to roust up rather than be overly niggling. As with the fabled Springfield of The Simpsons, South Park is proof that a small-town setting can become a self-perpetuating multiverse where the characters scarcely age but the political allusions and pop-culture cameos are always up to date, the show stuck in time and moving forward simultaneously; a neat trick only animation enjoys.
With its abbreviated lead time, South Park has even greater ability to take advantage of the news cycle. When rumors ran wild on social media over the Labor Day weekend that Trump was dead, my thought was, What will South Park do with this? Something suitably tasteless, one trusts, with a monkey’s-paw touch of the macabre. And they didn’t disappoint, defying the rules of biology, theology, and every other -ology to provide the revelation that Satan is pregnant with Trump’s love child, which will be a difficult thing to explain to Melania, assuming she even cares.
South Park Season 27 is airing now on Comedy Central
James Wolcott is a Columnist at AIR MAIL. He is the author of several books, including the memoir Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York
