womzilla | Tiring of South Park

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Tiring of South Park

Last week (I'm slowly cacthing up on my friends' list),

docbrite indicated an inability to watch South Park, and took a little glee in Isaac Hayes walking out on them.*

*Assuming he did, anyway. I can't be the only person in the world to have noticed how odd it is that Hayes chose to address the issue of whether someone else was making decisions in his name by having a spokesperson say that no one was making decisions in his name.

Poppy's disenchantment sprang from two sources: one, realizing how much the show had devolved into petty pop-culture put-downs, and the other realizing how much the show revolves simply around being hurtful--both of which I think are much more true than they used to be and are fair markers of the show's decline. I realized while watching last week's episode ("Smug Alert") on tape last night that my enjoyment of South Park is almost completely dependent upon whose ox is getting gored this week, and sometimes even that isn't enough. I loved the episode a couple of years back which mercilessly presented the true facts of the foundation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, but the episode attacking the Scientologists was only Good in Parts. (I consider the Mormon Church to be a pathetic fraud, more sad than evil, but the Scientos are an international criminal conspiracy posing as a destructive cult to gain respectability.)

A big part of it is what has been called "South Park Conservativism", which is apparently the belief that, well, yes, right-wingers may variously want to re-enslave blacks, imprison gays, rape the environment, and let the poor die in the streets, but you know, liberals are really annoying because they oppose racism, so really they're at least as bad. Last week's episode perfectly encapsulates that. Hybrid cars are a great idea, but because Matt and Trey think their owners are smug, they should be destroyed? How does this improve the discourse? Add in the extended, repetitive, and lazy George Clooney joke (I originally wrote "jokes", but let's be honest) and it was a painful experience.

(And I don't even know who they thought they were parodying in last season's episode about Alcoholics Anonymous. I guess one too many recovering alcohol tried to thirteenth-step Trey.)

The ending of "Smug Alert" had a delightful turnaround which shows that they're still capable of writing very clever things, but it wasn't enough to overcome their own smugness, and I fear South Park--one of the high points of television--is finally running out of steam.

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Last night's anti-Family Guy episode had some pretty sharp writing, I thought. It had something to say (at least two somethings, in fact) and the Big Wheel chase was clever.

Tack on the continued use of the "I learned something today" structure in both the Super Adventure Club and Smug Cloud episodes. They make me believe they're sincere when Stan or Kyle deliver the moral.

I don't think the writing staff is becoming complacent or lazy.

As for "South Park Conservatism", as I've said before, I think South Park is fundamentally punk, particularly in the Holden Caulfield sense of the term; they despise phonies, faith without reason, and anything you believe in or hold sacred. And in Hollywood, they're more likely to encounter insufferable fools and phonies who espouse basically liberal positions, so it may be that their ire is more readily turned on liberal smugness.

It is, however, certainly true that they are less able to shock us, simply because they've shocked us so many times before. They're not likely to top "Scott Tenorman Must Die".

BTW, in case you haven't seen it, The Venture Brothers on Cartoon Network is a brilliant Jonny Quest parody.

As for "South Park Conservatism", as I've said before, I think South Park is fundamentally punk, particularly in the Holden Caulfield sense of the term; they despise phonies, faith without reason, and anything you believe in or hold sacred.

Yes, that's another way of naming the problem: that they think it's worse to express distaste for racism than to be a racist.

Public piety of any kind is a common target of punk. (Amusingly, that means Jesus was a punk.)

I would argue in the particular case of racism that Cartman stands as their statement that racism is a very bad thing. (And indeed of the fairly sophisticated statement that children don't have a lot of power over their situation, and in particular lack the power and experience, the tools, to deal appropriately with bad actors like Cartman.)

Admittedly, these days we get more episodes like the hippie festival and fewer episodes like the South Park flag, which is, I suppose, your point.

In the South Park town flag episode, I thought they were presenting a thin and fact-challenged view of the antiracist position and as sympathetic as possible a view of the proracist position.

Or, think of it this way. In almost any dispute of substance, there are multiple levels of argument--instant, shallow reactions; thoughtful positions; caricatures of thoughtful positions; and others. The arguments put into the mouths of the "traditionalists" (i.e., the people who thought nothing was wrong with the fact that the South Park flag depicted whites lynching a black) were the thoughtful positions of actual people who support the display of the Confederate flag. The arguments put in the mouths of the opposition were either shallow reactions or caricatures of thoughtful positions.

If you present an argument only in terms of instant, shallow reactions, you're giving equal weight to the side which is wrong, which is bad enough. If you deliberately ignore thoughtful arguments on one side of a dispute, you're doing something worse.

And then there's the terrible episode last season where one of the supporting "liberals" just kept shouting "Little Eichmans!" as if somehow that actually represented how liberals thought about, well, anyone. Even Ward Churchill doesn't think corporate America is all neo-Nazis, and Ward Churchill represents almost no one.

On the other hand, in Team America, everything was caricatures, and often very funny ones; I don't think anyone could come away thinking Matt and Trey were endorsing anyone.

You're pretty convincing.

I do think that out on the left fringes of the Green Party and suchlike you're going to pretty readily find loony inflammatory statements, so it's not like they're making it up.

But it is also true that you find the opposite kind of loony inflammatory statements on the other end as well (and quite arguably closer to the mainstream), so omitting them is indeed prejudicial.

I tend to agree with

drelmo, but I also think it's gone downhill a bit. Early shows skewered everyone all the time, even if the show was mainly hacking away at a certain topic. If you watch South Park, you will be offended. Nonetheless, some of the newer shows seem to lose perspective, such as the Smug Alert one above. I thought it was funny until the second time everyone sniffed their farts without a counterbalancing shot. Then it was just repetitious. This weeks's Family Guy episode was much better, with the best tricycle chase ever, but still... Cartman seemed cardboard and I had a hard time believing Kyle would fall for him yet again. Oh well. It's a guilty pleasure, but less pleasurable now than before, and I don't watch regularly.

Same thing for much of Cartoon Network's Mad Magazine-like deconstruction of virtually every cartoon made by Hanna Barbera: Works some times, not others. There are several in the lineup. I recommend Squidbillies... once. Most of the others are to taste. The only consistenly great one is Boondocks, and I'm not sure I forgive them for dragging Aaron McGruder away from his strip.

I've never gotten South Park. When people describe it to me, it sounds funny, but when I try to watch it? Not funny. I gave up trying years ago, and it sounds like now isn't the time to change my mind.

I think they've finally jumped the shark, but keep hoping they'll prove me wrong. The first show this season had some laughs in it. The next two, precious little.

Parker and Stone seem to hit the mark when they really go after something for a reason. They miss the mark when they seem to say, "hey, we haven't personally attacked any well-known liberals for a while," and set out to remedy the situation. In fact, their attacks on liberals get more and more heavy-handed, with less and less behind them other than some vague sense of duty.

In the case of Clooney, I guess they felt an obligation to bite the hand that helped them out early on (and the man who voiced the gay dog in the first season). It was about as funny as some very unfunny thing.

They still have an impressive body of older work. In each show, there's at least one thing I wish they hadn't done, but I think they achieved genius level over and over. Now I get more entertainment from "Drawn Together," which is particularly good at nailing cartoon cliches.

I am pretty unimpressed with "Drawn Together", actually, which seems to me to go for the cheap, repetitive joke (e.g. Toots is fat) rather than displaying any particularly sophisticated understanding of cartoon cliches.

Some of the characters, e.g. Captain Hero, are parodies of the cliche. Others, e.g. Spanky Ham, are examples of the cliche without much in the way of new elements. Still others, e.g. Toots, Ling-Ling, are simply cast into the form of a cliche, but mostly serve as vehicles for jokes that are unrelated to the cliche. (*Exception, Ling-Ling's battle=sex metaphor, but all his other jokes aren't related to his cliche.) That incoherence in approach doesn't suggest very sophisticated comic writing, but more a desperate grab for whatever joke suggests itself.

I'll grant that they've really wasted Toots as a character. I had hopes they wouldn't. She had some good scenes that more or less ignore the one-joke part, but then they go back to it. And Foxxy Love relies too much on "stupid" jokes.

Be that as it may, the throwaway jokes they make have gotten more laughs from me than most of what South Park has tried this season. Even last season, when South Park still had some good shows, I've laughed more at Drawn Together. I guess I'm just a fan of unsophisticated comic writing and desperate grabs for jokes. Which is not to say I can watch a whole minute of "Family Guy" without wishing I was watching someone's vacations slides instead. A man has to have some standards.

That's me speaking right up there.

I certainly can't argue with actual laughter 8)

I enjoyed this week's episode (part two) a lot more. When they announced they were showing Terence and Philip, I perked right up. After that, I was in a better mood, which lasted through the show. Gives me hope for the rest of the season.

My sister is a big South Park fan, and she got me into it. I've often found it very funny. But the whole conservatism thing can get really annoying, most notably in Team America,* which, while it had a few good moments, was basically the world according to the New York Post and thus a big yawn.

*Yes, I know it's not part of South Park, but it's really the same mentality.

For some reason, Team America had me looking at my watch. It seemed to me there was maybe about thirty minutes of real good material in it, and thirty more of so-so stuff, and the rest (another thirty at least) of utter dreck they had to cram in to prove their conservative bad-boy bona fides. I haven't watched it a second time yet.

That about sums it up for me, too, though I'm not sure there's even that much good material. I did think the doll-making was good, though.

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Tiring of South Park

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