Owing to my parents’ discomfort with the crass subject matter, I was late in coming to the South Park fandom. Outside of the rare episode I could watch when they were out for the evening, I completely skipped over the first thirteen seasons, jumping in when I finally got access to Netflix — and subsequently the entire series’ episode backlog — in college.
I was amazed at the sharply intelligent writing underneath its foul-mouthed dressing. I gorged myself on fourteen seasons worth of episodes in a few short months and latched onto new ones as they became available. By the time season 18 started, I had migrated from seasonal binges to watching new episodes as they came out, and while some of the magic of those middle years had been lost, they were still going strong with topical parodies of crowdfunding, fad diets and pop star sensations.
Recently, however, the series has been in a notable slump, with the entire last season being frankly unfunny. Despite the wealth of political campaign antics that the US presidential election afforded them, series creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone instead focused the entire ten episodes fleshing out tangential subplots — such as internet trolling, toxic nostalgia and Cartman becoming “woke” — that previous seasons would have relegated to a couple of loosely connected episodes. Sure, Trump (or in this case, Mr. Garrison) running against Hillary was there, but it was entirely bereft of the blazing satire that defined the series’ best years.
Parker and Stone have revealed that they are going to be “backing off” on political satire under the Trump regime. In an interview with ABC News, Parker explained that
it’s really tricky now that satire has become reality. We were really trying to make fun of what was going on, but we couldn’t keep up. What was actually happening was way funnier than anything we could come up with. So we decided to just back off and let [politicians] do their comedy and we’ll do ours.
The only thing more shocking to me than this detestable cowardice on the part of Parker and Stone is that they actually seem to think that they’re doing the right thing by leaving the new American president alone. For comedians who built their reputations on lambasting figureheads from both sides of the aisle with equally reckless abandon, their lack of satirical enthusiasm in Trump’s American is a strikingly partisan move.
It is the job of satirists the nation over to call out politicians when they cross the line. While the legislature and judiciary are more fundamental forces at checking the powers of government, entertainers raise public awareness of these kinds of crises and are powerful tools at making the arcane machinations of politics accessible to everyday Americans. Comedy helps make the powerful accountable by stripping away the veneer of their well-kempt public image and dragging them down in the mud with the rest of us.
While South Park showed Trump as Mr. Garrison, the relatable guy we’ve seen on the show since 1997, Billy West illustrated Trump’s buffoonishness by reading his public comments in the voice of Futurama‘s Zapp Brannigan. While the series portrayed Hillary as a mindless drone incapable of going off-script, Mark Hamill revealed Trump’s vicious intent by reading his comments in the voice of The Joker. While Parker and Stone sniggered at portraying Trump as the hapless victim of his own popularity, series like The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight were calling out his radically un-American policy proposals.
It’s not even like the series was firing on all cylinders during the campaign. When they actually focused on presidential politics, their milksop satire failed to touch on the innumerous controversies, inflammatory statements and bizarre behaviors of the president-to-be. It’s not that they couldn’t keep up with Trump, they simply didn’t want to.
For the first time in years, I will not be tuning in to the upcoming season of South Park: not because of parental mandate or lack of access, but because it simply isn’t worth it any more. Its willful and uncharacteristic silence on national politics is an affirmation of Trump’s actions, and the show suffers for it. It is simply not the series that I fell in love with all those years ago.
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