‘South Park’ Creators on Avoiding Trump, Revisiting Casa Bonita, and Experiencing TikTok Jealousy

In most ways, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone are trying to look forward, nearly 27 seasons in. Take Donald Trump, now running for president for a third consecutive cycle and a subject (via series stalwart Mr. Garrison) in the long-running animated series. The pair tell Vanity Fair that they’re about done with satirizing the Republican candidate. “We’ve tried to do South Park through four or five presidential elections, and it is such a hard thing to—it’s such a mind scramble, and it seems like it takes outsized importance,” Stone says. “Obviously, it’s fucking important, but it kind of takes over everything and we just have less fun.” Parker adds, “I don’t know what more we could possibly say about Trump.”

The creators, also known for their Tony-winning musical, The Book of Mormon, reveal in our interview that South Park will not return until 2025, bypassing the November election. Part of this has to do with “waiting for Paramount to figure all their shit out,” Parker says. But skipping Trump? “Honestly, it’s on purpose,” Stone tells me.

On a more personal level, the past has been looming for these guys. We’re sitting on a balcony in Telluride, at the film festival where their documentary ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor! has just screened to strong reviews. (It hits select theaters on September 13 and will stream on Paramount+ later this fall.) Helmed by Arthur Bradford, the film follows Parker and Stone buying the Lakewood, Colorado, Mexican restaurant that they’d previously honored in a classic South Park episode, “Casa Bonita,” more than 20 years ago. A local landmark that held a great deal of meaning to the two Colorado natives, Mi Amor provides surprisingly intimate access to Parker and Stone sinking millions of dollars into a seemingly doomed attempt at revitalization. Every beat in this Kitchen Nightmares–esque saga appears to have been captured on camera. Not quite the colorful fantasyland, in other words, that Cartman introduced us to back in South Park’s seventh season.

Bradford has been following the creative partners around for more than a decade. Ever since helming 2011’s 6 Days to Air: The Making of South Park, he’s been allowed to trail them with his camera. They never knew what would come of it, even as he captured some pretty seminal moments in their careers of late: The behind the scenes, 36-hour mad dash to make an episode about the 2016 election after being stunned (like most of the rest of the country) about Trump’s victory. The lead-up to and execution of the South Park 25th anniversary concert at Red Rocks. They’d often wonder where the movie was in all of those years of random BTS filming. But as the Casa Bonita saga began, Bradford knew he had his movie. As for the rest of that aforementioned footage: It’s still out there, and maybe we’ll see it someday.

Between the concert and the buying of Casa Bonita, Parker and Stone have been pulled back to their home state in a way they haven’t since they first broke out in the ’90s. “It did feel like we were finally kind of welcome back home, because until then, it didn’t,” Parker tells me as Stone nods along. They recall the release of their classic 1999 South Park film, Bigger, Longer & Uncut: “Everyone in the country was super nice to us critic-wise except for people in Denver,” Parker says. “It was more like, Who the fuck do you guys think you are?”

The reception this time around, by contrast, was “nice,” Stone says. But they also returned to a different Colorado than the one they left behind for La La Land. “It’s just so different culturally now with the internet and everything—there weren’t, like, sushi restaurants in Colorado,” he says. “There Casa Bonita just stuck out as this amazing place. There was nothing like it.” The level of investment he and Parker put into the renovation of the beloved Mexican restaurant includes grappling with such changing times. By the end of the movie, Parker describes leaving it behind—inevitable when they have a TV show that actually makes them money to produce—as a “break up.” Especially since the restaurant will officially be back up and running next month. “Now, people are just like, Yeah, I went to Casa Bonita last night and Trey Parker wasn’t there—it’s weird,” he says.

Generally, of course, few TV writers respond as urgently to changing times as this pair. And so while they are intently ignoring this political cycle—“It’s just way more fun to be like, Oh, Cartman’s going to dress up like a robot,” Stone says—the last few specials alone have proven they’ve still got their finger on the pulse. Their special from earlier this year focused on the Ozempic craze. Its roots were, again, surprisingly personal. “I got on it, I lost like 25 pounds, but I was like, I hate this—I feel different. I feel like something’s different,” Parker says. “Like, yes, I want to eat less, but I also want to do everything else less. And that’s where that whole show came from.”

No show nearing its third decade can claim to still be as anticipated as South Park is. Parker and Stone look around at the shifting comedy landscape with, at times, some envy. “The stuff I’m jealous of is TikTok—like, That’s a great joke, that looks like they had fun doing it, and then you move on,” Stone says. “We both just have endless respect for that.” But he sees the continued demand for what they do, too: “Writing a story and building a frame so that you can do more complicated stuff.”

“We’re the Rolling Stones, man—we’re trying to get out five, six nights a year,” Stone says. “We could do more, but I don’t think it’d be better.”