E.M. Forster once called “Ulysses” “an attempt to cover everything in filth,” so one wonders what he would have had to say about “South Park.”
Since the mid ’90s, “South Park” has been the basketball of American television: ubiquitous, infinitely available, popular across broad demographics, and often entertaining.
Some of my happiest memories of freshman year involve eight sweaty men huddling in front of a small, communal TV at 10:30 on Wednesday nights. The episodes were of variable quality. “South Park” has always been of variable quality, though every episode has a very high rating on Web sites—sites on which creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker generously make the show available to the public for free. On a bad week, some of the people would laugh some of the time, and on a good week, all of the people would laugh some of the time. On a great week, everyone would guffaw hysterically at everything.
The episode that satirizes “The Mighty Ducks” aired on a great week. During spring semester, Stone and Parker heralded the new season with their finest effort yet, “With Apologies to Jesse Jackson,” a finer racial satire than anything by Sarah Silverman or Dave Chappelle. “Jesse Jackson” transcended topicality. I can watch it tens of times without getting bored. My mother thought it was uproarious. I think it’s nearly perfect. South Park was as funny and germane as ever.
And then it got really bad really quickly. What happened? A friend told me that the new episodes must have germinated from a single joke that Stone and Parker found droll while high, and this seems about right. A good South Park episode—like “Jesse Jackson,” “The Death Camp of Tolerance,” or “Scott Tenorman Must Die”—has one main theme but tons of jokes. A bad “South Park” episode has one joke that it harps on incessantly. A series of these episodes followed “Jesse Jackson.” Stone and Parker ran out of ideas.
For example, “The Snuke,” which tropes on the presence of a nuke in Hillary Clinton’s snatch, is good enough for a one-liner but is hardly enough to sustain an entire episode. “South Park” often turns to pastiche whenever its own ideas aren’t enough, so a “24” parody fills in the rest of the 20 minutes. The season got worse.
“Imaginationland” is an episode filled entirely with other people’s ideas. You have to be extremely well versed in pop-culture to get all of “South Park’s” allusions, but what’s done with the vast wealth of knowledge in “Imaginationland” is just lame. The filth was entirely someone else’s, and the episode was flamboyant in a way that indicated a deficit, not a surfeit, of imagination. Another friend described it very well as “out there.” Two sequels would follow. “South Park” had never done a three-part episode before. In retrospect, it seems obvious that Stone and Parker were stalling for time.
The latest episodes have harvested ideas with greater rapacity and less originality. It took a good 10-plus seasons, but “South Park” has jumped the shark.
A large following will be watching the rest of the 13th season. “South Park” will always have millions of cultists that find everything about it hilarious—but I am not one of those people, and I will not be watching.
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