\n<\/p>\n
I<\/span>\u2019ll admit it: I\u2019m more of a Simpsons guy than a South Park guy. Nothing really against those South Park guys \u2013 I\u2019ve caught plenty of episodes over its astonishing near-30-year run, and loved the 1999 big-screen movie. But while I haven\u2019t always maintained clockwork viewership of The Simpsons, either, those characters have proved durable enough to revive my interest in episodes old and new. South Park has a thinner bench by comparison, and as the show itself astutely pointed out years ago, it\u2019s difficult for a satirically minded animated sitcom to explore ground that The Simpsons hasn\u2019t covered already. South Park\u2019s political bent, too, has often seemed less varied than the warmer (but still sometimes cutting) social ribbing of Matt Groening\u2019s signature show. It\u2019s a fine line between omnidirectional satire and libertarian crankiness.<\/p>\n And yet the 27th season of South Park has accomplished something vanishingly few of its peers, whether in animation or topical comedy, have been able to do: getting laughs taking shots at the second Trump administration. It\u2019s not that the White House is beyond reproach. Quite the opposite problem, much-documented: the Donald Trump cabal is so outsized in its stupidity and cruelty that it\u2019s hard to distend it into a \u201cfunny\u201d caricature, even a bleak one. In Trump\u2019s second term, it has only gotten bleaker; jokes that were worn out by the end of 2020 are getting retold with a nasty vengeance, and the bar for cathartic laughter has been raised considerably.<\/p>\n For a comedy fan, this winds up translating to an aversion. The occasional shots taken by The Simpsons somehow don\u2019t land as squarely as they did when aimed at presidents I liked much, much more. I watch Saturday Night Live every week, and mostly dread James Austin Johnson\u2019s accurate but ultimately defanged impression. (Some weeks, Johnson himself seems bummed out to be doing it.) I respect the hell out of Stephen Colbert, but I have never sought out his Trump commentary; I don\u2019t need any more clapter \u2013 the reaction encouraged by comedy that wants your approval more than your laughter \u2013 in my life. South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone seemed to agree; Parker\u2019s 2017 announcement that they\u2019d grown bored of taking shots at Trump \u2013 then barely into his first presidential term \u2013 was one of the show\u2019s many controversies over the years.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n So how is it that South Park\u2019s revived anti-Trump blows this season have managed to land? A big part of it is precisely Stone and Parker\u2019s allergy to clapter and the grandstanding that inspires it. They obviously resent anything they read as putting on airs and sometimes in the past, this came across as its own form of preachiness, with \u201ceverybody chill\u201d-style speeches at an episode\u2019s end that would secretly sound just as prescriptive as the self-righteousness they wanted to send up. With their most recent Trump parody, though, there isn\u2019t much moralizing \u2013 just gratifyingly mean caricatures of deserving figures such as Trump, JD Vance and homeland security secretary Kristi Noem. Some (not all) of their past roastings have verged on point-and-laugh bullying; here are targets worthy of that derision.<\/p>\n Some of this derision speaks through the language of South Park itself. Trump isn\u2019t vocally or visually imitated; he\u2019s depicted in a series of repurposed photos, with the same voice and animation technique that Parker and Stone used to bring Saddam Hussein to life in the South Park movie. He\u2019s also given the same sexual partner: a muscled-up and put-upon version of Satan, who has found himself in another toxic relationship. Calling Trump a wannabe dictator doesn\u2019t break new ground, but there\u2019s something satisfying in Stone and Parker using their personal toolkit to draw a line between Trump and Hussein; if they thought it was a histrionic comparison, they\u2019d be making fun of it instead of making it. Similarly, there\u2019s real spite animating the depiction of Noem as a dog-murdering zealot whose glamorous face needs to be repeatedly lacquered and reaffixed to her head as she commands an army of Immigration and Customs Enforcement thugs.<\/p>\n Not all of the season\u2019s satire has involved making real-life figures regulars on the show. Because South Park\u2019s ensemble has rarely felt as vast or believably developed as Springfield of The Simpsons (or even Arlen on King of the Hill), it\u2019s also flexible enough to turn Randy, Stan\u2019s desperately trend-following dad, into a ketamine-microdosing, tech-bro moron addicted to the soothing, empty reassurances of ChatGPT \u2013 the focus of the most recent episode, to the point where most of the core child cast doesn\u2019t appear. Surprisingly, this season has deployed forever favorite Cartman more sparingly so far, again getting self-referential in the season\u2019s second episode, where the id-driven and arguably evil little kid is incensed to find out that podcasters have stolen his \u201cshtick\u201d \u2013 his pervasive hatefulness, repackaged as a challenge to debate where the aggressor is always the self-appointed winner. Ascribing this \u201cmaster debater\u201d title to Cartman (alongside a fellow kid serving as an obvious Charlie Kirk\/Ben Shapiro stand-in) somehow manages to make this ridiculous behavior funny in its petty smallness without glorifying it.<\/p>\n A South Park diehard would probably describe this praise as a fair-weather fan only enjoying the show when it goes after the \u201cright\u201d targets. Maybe that\u2019s true, but it\u2019s also a lot easier to take some joy in savaging Vance as a meme-faced version of a Fantasy Island sidekick than, say, accusing George Lucas and Steven Spielberg of cultural rape. It\u2019s probably wishful thinking to wonder if Parker and Stone might actually move the needle of the perception on tech bros, debate-me podcasters and Trump-world ghouls, especially among the dude demo. But it\u2019s also just a blessed change of pace to see say-anything, first-amendment types finding a fresher target than the wokeness bogeyman. While countless standups continue to whine about being silenced, Parker and Stone seem highly aware of their rarified position (and, as Paramount contractors, also aware of what actual political-corporate interference looks like). In a world where Trump\u2019s actual political opponents seem terrified to actually fight him, some well-deserved, point-and-laugh meanness has become a surprising novelty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019ll admit it: I\u2019m more of a Simpsons guy than a South Park guy. Nothing really against those South Park guys \u2013 I\u2019ve caught plenty of episodes over its astonishing near-30-year run, and loved the 1999 big-screen movie. But while I haven\u2019t always maintained clockwork viewership of The Simpsons, either, those characters have proved durable<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17466,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[6338,8627,121,241,122,81],"class_list":{"0":"post-17465","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-era","9":"tag-important","10":"tag-park","11":"tag-show","12":"tag-south","13":"tag-trump"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}