Last night Matt and Trey took aim at hybrid car owners, George Clooney, and the
entire city of San Francisco, which they see as a place populated by smug couples with hyphenated names who close their
eyes when they speak (cause that's what smug people do). Oh yeah, and they love the smell of their own farts. It's not
really a South Park episode without some scatological humor.
In it's own way, South Park has been, for some time, enjoying the same kind of creative surge The Simpsons experienced once it stopped being the next huge pop culture phenomenon and its creators were able to focus on the series without a lot of outside noise. South Park, and more specifically Matt and Trey, have the added bonus of being, by choice, outside not only the Hollywood system, but isolated in such a way as to have left everyone and everything open for satire. In the episode, the "smug" from all the hybrid car owners in South Park begins to merge with the "smug" from the hybrid car owners in San Francisco. Things begin to get really serious, however, when the "smug" from George Clooney's Oscar acceptance speech also begins to drift, resulting in "the perfect storm of self-satisfaction." Not only do they take down an entire city with one fell satirical swoop, they're also not afraid to take a shot at someone who, I assume, they must have liked at one point, considering he appeared in their movie.
The episode had tons of great moments, from Stan's "gay little song" to Cartman being forced to don a vintage diver's suit in order to go into San Francisco and rescue Kyle, which was actually a rather bittersweet moment among all the San Fran bashing, with Cartman realizing that despite his hatred for Kyle, he just can't be "Cartman" without him.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
3-30-2006 @ 7:41PM
gfunk21 said...
Clooney was also the voice of Stan's gay dog in the "Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride" episode
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3-30-2006 @ 8:47PM
purpleslog said...
Kenny was not in the episode. I hope the Super Adventure Club didn't get him.
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3-30-2006 @ 10:21PM
Lampbane said...
The funny thing about all this is that South Park is pretty damn smug in its own way. Or at least, very very preachy.
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3-31-2006 @ 12:29AM
RAB said...
One quibble: the line about "they're also not afraid to take a shot at someone who, I assume, they must have liked at one point" seems way off the mark here. Poking fun at a celebrity is NOT a sign that Matt and Trey have fallen out with him or that there's any bad blood between them. One of the central tenets of the show is that nothing and no one is above mockery. They make fun of themselves; they make fun of their friends and coworkers. (Think of what they've done to Butters over the years; he's based on the director of animation for the show!) Tweaking George Clooney for a self-praising speech is just a way of showing that anyone can be a target. Personally, I'd bet anything Clooney loved that bit.
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3-31-2006 @ 7:20AM
Chris W said...
I liked South Park a lot when it first came out. It was rude, it was crude, and I was 16... Perfect! Then the scatological humor got a little old, and I took an unintentional break from the show (not really noticing when it was on and not minding when I would miss it). I started watching again during season 4 (?); a little while after the movie came out. That movie is the best thing that happened to the show, because they got that sensationalism all out of their system and jaded all of us to it. Since then, South Park has become one of the best, if not THE best, satire currently on TV. Their social commentary is really strong, and even if I don't agree every time it still manages to be funny. Lampbane has a point; it is preachy at times. But the redemption in my eyes here is that they have no discernable "textbook" point of view. They poke fun at everything and everyone, and it's always funny to me that at the end of the day it's a bunch of 8-year old kids who've "learned something today."
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3-31-2006 @ 7:49AM
Mike said...
I don't think that you can really consider the show "preachy" in the traditional sense. It's not as if they espouse an overarching political philosophy (like, say, The Daily Show seems to). They sink their claws into everyone. I remember one show in particular about the war in Iraq where the town was divided between the Hawks and the Doves so to speak. They took aim at both sides of the argument, never clearly injecting what their opinion of the war was. SO unless you meant that they are preaching don't-take-yourself-too-seriouslyism, I don't think you can really call the show "preachy". Maybe individual episodes can be preachy, but not the series or the writers as a whole.
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4-02-2006 @ 11:25PM
Chris said...
Does anyone have an mp3 of Stan's Gay little song. It was so funny I want to listen to it again!
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