It might seem like taking things a bit far to blame the decline and fall of Western Civilisation on an animated comedy series, but taking things a bit far has always been the South Park way.
Back in the ‘90s, before Trey Parker and Matt Stone unleashed their cartoon creation on the world, things were different. There was next to no internet; culture was what you found in magazines or newspapers. Television news was maybe an hour or two a day, and most people believed what it showed them. How did we get from there to here? Two words: South Park.
At first it all seemed simple. Crude animation, funny voices, cute kids doing messed up stuff in a small town where a lot of weird things happened. Cartman got an anal probe from aliens in the first-ever episode; audiences couldn’t pretend they didn’t know what they were in for after that.
There was a lot more going on than just being offensive. The episodes were full of funny characters, silly voices, and running jokes that went beyond killing Kenny each week (though as running jokes go, that was a classic). For sheer comic inventiveness South Park has always been hard to beat, and the first 15 seasons – that’s over 200 episodes (all streaming ) – are incredibly imaginative.
But yes, a lot of the comedy came from being outrageous and shocking. Not just making fun of public figures, or pop culture, or even mocking religion: all that had been done before, though not quite as bluntly and consistently as did.
It’s when you get to characters like , or episodes like the one where , or , or — that things start to move in a direction beyond, say, having Chef sing about his chocolate salty balls.
Everything’s up for grabs, nothing is safe; daring to put together a show featuring these kind of outrageous ideas was the joke. The fact that the show wasn’t exactly siding with Cartman, and that pretty much every episode ended with a fairly blunt repudiation of what just happened – or even just an acknowledgement that it had all been pretty messed up – didn’t hide the fact that a lot of the time being controversial was what made it funny.
Always unpredictable: 'South Park' season 1. Credit: Comedy Partners
And it seemed like there was a lot of room to be controversial in the early years of South Park. Pushing boundaries was a big part of comedy after a decade or two of playing it safe. In the late 1990s, both sides of most issues, political or otherwise, were seen as being as bad as each other; everything was fair game as far as satire goes. The media increasingly treated topics such as racism and sexism and prejudice like they were problems that were largely in the past. And if they were yesterday’s news, it was fine to make fun of them.
With grunge music and slacker culture peaking in the 1990s, it felt like a time when caring about issues made you a loser; if you were getting upset about jokes, no matter what they were about, that just showed you didn’t 'get' the joke. It was like believing the Earth was flat. Nobody really still believed any of that stuff, right? Right?
the joke with Cartman isn’t “he’s cool and edgy and pushing boundaries”, but that he’s a complete idiot who loses pretty much all the time.
It’s safe to say we now live in a somewhat different world. And a big part of today’s world involves people saying and acting in ways that seem purposefully designed to be as offensive and unpleasant as possible, towards pretty much anyone not like them, and, if anyone calls them on it they claim it was only a joke. You know, like on South Park.
The thing is, if you actually pay attention to what’s in South Park, there’s a lot more going on than just a bunch of jokes involving religion, minorities, sexism, and pretty much every hot button topic of today’s culture wars. It might be stating the obvious, but clearly it needs to be said: the joke with Cartman isn’t “he’s cool and edgy and pushing boundaries”, but that he’s a complete idiot who loses pretty much all the time.
If South Park destroyed Western Civilisation, it’s because a bunch of people who watched it totally missed the point. We’re not going to say the only way to get things back on track is to watch all 15 seasons back to back… but it couldn’t hurt.
Seasons 1 - 15 of South Park are now streaming at SBS On Demand.
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