TVSquad

The opportunity was there, and I missed it. You see, the most recent episode of South Park focused on an episode of Family Guy which (didn't) show an image of the Prophet Muhammed. In the episode, Family Guy, at least on one level, became a kind of symbolic representation of South Park. By the end of the show the question wasn't whether Family Guy would show an image of Muhammed, but whether South Park would (as many people pointed out, this was made clear in the last line of the episode: "If Comedy Central doesn't puss out").

I didn't focus much on that aspect in my review of the episode, choosing instead to examine the episode's negative assessment of Family Guy. My prerogative, of course, but by doing so I missed the chance to mention something that was staring me in the face the whole time: South Park already has shown an image of Muhammed, and they did it almost five years ago. The episode was called "The Super Best Friends" and featured Jesus and all of his religious super hero pals, one of which just happened to be Muhammed. So yeah, I could have sounded smart, but I didn't. My only consolation is that this will only happen about twenty more times today.

Note: I went back and read the comments on my previous post and noticed Elliott alluded to this, as well. Nice job, E.

Update: YouTube has the relevant portion of the episode available, embedded below.

Last night South Park, in a way only South Park can, managed to mix Family Guy and the recent kerfuffle over cartoons involving the Prophet Muhammed into a scathing indictment of both. In the South Park universe, the "offensive Muhammed cartoon" is an episode of Family Guy which the Fox Network decides to censor. Cartman convinces Kyle to join him on his quest to get the episode off the air. It turns out Cartman doesn't care about the offensive episode, he just really, really, hates Family Guy, calling it poorly-written and accusing it of using interchangeable jokes, rather than jokes that actually have something to do with the plot.

I've said it on this blog and elsewhere that Family Guy's humor can be very jarring at times. Whatever plot there is has to be ground to a halt in order to insert as many one-off gags as possible. There's no effort on behalf of the writers to try and weave jokes into the story, jokes simply pop in and out wherever they seem to fit. In that regard, it's not even comparable to shows like South Park and The Simpsons, which take a more substantive approach to their humor and satire, even if South Park appears to delve into the same scatological humor as Family Guy at times.