20 Years Young: Why South Park Never Gets Old (and Cartman is the greatest character in the history of satire)

The first time I saw South Park, I was seven years old and I didn't get it. The episode was "Tom's Rhinoplasty," where fourth grade teacher Mr. Garrison gets plastic surgery and leaves town to become a model, while the boys - Kenny, Cartman, Kyle and Stan - fall in love with their lesbian substitute teacher.

Like the boys in the show, I was too young to understand references to "eating box" or "licking carpet", and did not understand the humour of Cartman and Kyle doing - literally - those things, thinking it will turn them into lesbians and earn Ms. Ellen's affection. 

I did understand the quirky humour of Mr. Garrison's nose job consisting of simply pasting a photo of David Hasslehoff's face onto his cartoon body, though:

Watching cartoon children cuss and learn about anal probing aliens has to get old, but at the same time as the kids who delighted in watching Kenny die each week started to lose interest, I was maturing enough to recognize the genuine subversive wit in almost every episode.

The show was always subversive in a crass, simplistic way, primed for an adolescent audience, by privileging the perspective of snot nosed kids who embraced it for its irreverence for authority. But it was also a sophisticated satire with a focus on human nature and what's wrong with the world.

In later seasons, creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have tipped their hand and foregrounded the Serious Issues that have seemingly always fascinated them - even when the boys were licking carpet. To appreciate this, consider their most famous character: Eric Cartman, who has gone from school bully, to psychopath to, seriously mentally ill person, all in the run of one simple two dimensional cartoon.

South Park's very long run has allowed Parker and Stone to flesh out Cartman's cruelty into a bona-fide mental illness brought on by years of self loathing.

In season 1 when the Antichrist comes to South Park and finds the other kids don't like him, Pip explains "I think they make fun of the fat boy a lot too...but now I think they like him because he picks on me."

 In the classic, "Cartman's Mom is  a Dirty Slut" from season 1, we are privvy to this exchange:

Kyle: Mr. Mackey, something's really wrong with Cartman.

Mr. Mackey: (sarcastic) Oh, well there's a news flash!

Stan: No, no. We saw him a having a tea party with his stuffed animals.

Kyle: Yeah, he was doing their voices and pouring tea for them.

Mr. Mackey: Oooh okay, Eric is obviously suffering from some kind of emotional distress, mkay?

This is never not funny, especially when Mackey asks Kyle to film Eric's tea party without his knowledge and responds to Kyle's question of whether that's legal with an over-enthusiastic, "Oh hell yes!"

Cartman's tea party proceeds as follows:

Cartman: My goodness, that's a lovely dress you are wearing, Polly Prissy Pants.

Polly: Oh, thank you, Eric. You are a perfect gentleman, and you are smart and true.

Peter: Yes, Eric, you are strong and smart and true. Everybody likes you very much.

Cartman: That's niiice, Peter Panda...More tea, Rumpertumskin?

Rumpertumskin: Yes, please, Eric. You are tough and handsome.

Cartman: Thank you, Rumpertumskin. And what do you think about me, Clyde Frog?

Clyde: I think you're a big fat piece of crap.

Fourteen whole years later, Clyde, Polly, and Rumpertumskin return. After his poor fitness scores force the whole school to take extra phys ed classes, Eric is convinced another student is killing his stuffed animals as retribution, only to find that he, in a state of psychosis, is the one destroying is beloved imaginary friends.

"They were holding us back!" he says, in Polly Prissypants' voice, when he confronts her, "All the kids making fun of you at school, saying you're not keewl! Your stuffed animals all have to be gotten rid of, don't you see?!"

The point is that South Park has used its longevity to turn a simplistic dirty cartoon into something sophisticated and gut wrenching. Al the while, the wasteland of Eric Cartman's soul is as ripe for comedy and scorn as the substitute teacher who doesn't wear a bra (aka "Ms. Chokesondick").

In doing so, South Park has also been able to sidestep one potential pitfall of satire: that is, that a certain slice of the audience  will think  the venal, anti-semetic, racist, sexist, all-purposes-awful Eric Cartman, is actually the hero, a harmless sort of scoundrel who we're supposed to identify with (They're called "South Park Republicans").

Sociologists who've studied satire have found that this is often the case with the most iconic, "progressive" American satires. Archie Bunker - who Parker once said was an inspiration for Cartman - was supposed to satirize racist Americans in the 70s, but many of those same Americans felt they were sharing a laugh and being accepted by the broader culture.

South Park is particularly ripe for accusations of racism - what with the sole black child being named "Token" and every other ethnicity (though particularly Asians) depicted as the most broad, offensive stereotypes imaginable. But in Eric Cartman, it also has the single greatest character for critiquing white male privilege (among many, many other things).

Many Republicans saw the old Stephen Colbert on comedy central - a man who played in character as a right wing blowhard to highlight the flaws in their ideology - as a man who represents them, even as the man himself is a liberal who thought he was taking them down (no doubt this is how he ended up eviscerating George W. Bush to his face at the White House Correspondents dinner in 2006). Cartman is special, though, because of all the ways Parker and Stone go out of their way to show that he is broken and pathetic in ways that Bunker and Colbert never were.

To really appreciate just how far they've come though, I look back at "Tom's Rhinoplasty" where Mr. Garrison gets the face of David Hasslehoff and learns that being beautiful brings with it as many (fake) problems as being plain did, and Cartman eats a cardboard box in the misguided belief that it will make him a lesbian. Crude, yes. Absurd, definitely. But the message of the episode seemed to be that we shouldn't obsess over changing ourselves to be a attractive to others. Thinking a nose job will make you happy is about as ridiculous as pasting David Hasslehoff's head onto a cartoon body, and no one can make themselves into the object of someone else's desire, particularly if they don't really understand what that person desires in the first place (i.e. the boys trying to become lesbians).

The B-plot of that episode is that Wendy Testerberger, being jealous of Ms. Ellen for stealing the affection of her "boyfriend" Stan, plots to destroy the other woman. It's an amusing and sort of cruel referendum on female jealousy. Compare that to "The Hobbit" in season 17, where Wendy (generally a sympathetic character outside of the time she had Ms. Ellen loaded onto a rocket and fired into the sun) - goes on a crusade against Photoshop, leading all the other girls (and Kanye West) to label her as a jealous hater.

In that episode, all the girls at South Park elementary can be called beautiful, as long as they have a photoshopped picture of themselves that they can show people, to distract from the reality. In this world, true beauty and character become irrelevant when it can be faked on the computer. Wendy begins a crusade against this phoniness, then finally gives in with a tear in her eye.

Its the single greatest argument for South Park as not only a genius delivery system for highly relevant satire, but one that's actually gotten better with age.

Why the Facebook News feed is what's wrong with America

Jon Stewart was a master at criticizing a now obsolete delivery system for news. When he took to the Daily Show in the nineties, cable news was the fountainhead from which most peoples' perception of current events sprung. He did a masterful job in highlighting how the 24 hour news cycle thrived on making us dumber, which in turn explained why Americans were so susceptible to manipulation by politicians, corporations, religion, et. al.

His departure from The Daily Show was duly mourned, and I doubt we'll see another like him. But this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Because cable news' time has passed. It's still where we turn to hear about big events - mass shootings, political conventions, and other tire fires - but not where the meat of our understanding-or lackthereof- comes from. That would be the internet - a jungle of facts, figures and opinions from which we can choose which narrative we wish to believe, then disseminate it among an imagined network of "friends" through social media.

If Cable News was a tabloid magazine - a glamorized, exaggerated vision of real life, overselling drama at the expense of context (or credibility). The internet is a "choose your own adventure" novel. That cable news, and the various other instruments of media manipulation have dumbed down our expectations for current events does not improve things.

"Truthiness" is the word Stephen Colbert coined to describe the intellectual dry rot that had settled into American media by the mid 2000s - that is, how we give something that feels true equal consideration to something that is true. You don't need technical psycho-mumbo-jumbo to understand this concept, just click on any polarizing "trending" topic on Facebook and read the headlines of articles people are linking to.

Generally it looks like this: Person A, writes a few words about how they feel, then link to an article which supports that feeling. Something like these:

Both of those articles are bullshit. This is something that has to be recognized, whether you agree with the feeling that caused them or not.

Republicans who threatened to boycott Bradley Cooper's movies after he appeared at the DNC did not do so because they "can't tell the difference between movies and real life". Such a person would be certifiably mentally incompetent. They did it because 1) they learned Bradley Cooper has a different political orientation than they do, and 2) This is particularly egregious because he achieved the greatest financial and critical success of his career by playing staunch republican Chris Kyle in American Sniper. Whether you agree with these people or not, is up for debate, but first we have to be debating actual people, not a cartoon caricature drawn up by a Huffington Post that tries to maximize clicks by being witty. The news is not witty. An editorial can be witty. And an editorial absolutely cannot be confused with news if you want to be a functioning, intelligent contributor to society.

On the other side, a contributor to The Hill claims Khizr Khan, the father of a fallen soldier who gave a moving anti-Trump speech at the DNC, was "tricked" into his appearance. The suggestion that this educated man somehow he didn't realize his grief would be politicized at a political convention is absurd, condescending and ridiculous. It's an argument that can only be made by someone who is just about to realize they are out of logical arguments, and must invent things to justify their gut feeling.  Since Khan was sympathetic, eloquent, and morally unimpeachable, they cannot posit that anything he said was wrong, so they attack Hillary Clinton for using him for the wrong reasons.

In either case it's clear that the authors of such pieces were less interested in informing the public about current events than reassuring people of their gut feelings. The problem with this is that everyone who doesn't already agree them feels misunderstood, mocked and angry.

Imagine going into a store, where the salesperson says to you: "That dress makes you look fat. Buy this - it's more slimming." That person does not make the sale. No matter how accurate their summation of your appearance, most people will refuse to listen to a person who insults them. And thus does the country become more divided.

The reality is that we aren't helping. Ideology, and politics are salesmanship. You are trying to get someone to "buy" your opinion - be it that progress necessitates racial equality, or that racial equality is a threat to national security. Insulting the customer rarely helps.

Though I could sincerely point out that Khizr Khan was not "used" or "tricked" by the Democratic party - no Muslim has to be tricked into disliking Donald Trump, particularly not a grieving parent who feels his son's memory is insulted by the candidate - any more than anyone else who stumps at a political convention, I would rather criticize my people for taking their eyes off the ball. I can't fully grasp the ugliness that has led to Donald Trump's candidacy, but would like to. Depicting his supporters as a rash of idiots feeds their distrust of the "main stream media", such that people feel that news items which don't support their beliefs are hiding something from them. And the internet is always there to offer a comforting assurance that they were right.

See Trump never kicked a baby out of his rally! The lefties who read the articles on Huffpo or Rolling Stone or wherever else that incorrectly cited that he did probably know this. "He didn't kick the mother out, he was just a jerk to her.". "He was definitely joking when he said 'get the baby out of here', but his mocking the mother for believing he liked it was sincere'.". It doesn't show he hates babies, it shows he's an asshole.

This is eerily similar to the way Trump supporters explain some of his more incendiary proclamations as "sarcasm".  News, like a presidential candidate, is supposed to tell you what actually happened, but we no longer expect it to. On social media, at least, it is a tool for asserting our rightness, for affirming our beliefs by highlighting the multitudes who share them. Not for learning. Not for questioning.

Thus, many now claim as "news" any article supporting their already held beliefs, and are living in a completely different world from their neighbors. The problem is that you can't determine whether your beliefs are right or wrong without thoughtful debate, but who can debate when the facts themselves cannot even be agreed upon.

I'm a liberal, but if the left is more determined to be smug than useful, they are part of the problem. And both sides exist in their own bubble, obstinately refusing to recognize the other side as made up of thinking human beings . On the left I blame vanity, on the right I blame fear and insecurity. But either way, nobody's helping.