There is a slang term that, because I am not writing this for a foul-mouthed satire on a streaming service, I will refer to as “bleep-you money”: the amount of cash you need to feel free to do and say what you want.
For Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the makers of “South Park,” that number appears to be around $1.25 billion — the price tag on their recent deal with Paramount. Once the ink dried, they put their mouths where their money was, going hard after President Trump and their own corporate benefactors.
The Season 27 premiere aired July 23, shortly after Paramount agreed to a lawsuit settlement with the president that the late-night host Stephen Colbert called a “big, fat bribe,” and shortly after CBS, which Paramount owns, announced that Colbert’s show would end next year. (Paramount said the move was purely a financial decision.)
In the episode, “Sermon on the ’Mount,” the president is suing everyone, and everyone — from local governments to “60 Minutes” — is giving up. The town of South Park has to literally bring Jesus (a recurring character since the show’s earliest days) into its schools. President Trump appears as a tinpot dictator, in bed (again literally) with Satan. Desperate, the townspeople turn to Christ, who bestows his wisdom: “All of you, shut the [expletive] up, or South Park is over,” he says. “You really want to end up like Colbert?”
In the follow-up episode, the school counselor, Mr. Mackey, gets fired because of funding cuts and signs up with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (“If you need a job, it’s A! Job! To have!” goes the recruiting jingle.)
Mr. Mackey and his inexperienced comrades pull up their face masks, bust a “Dora the Explorer” live show (another repurposing of a Paramount property) and raid heaven to round up Latino angels. For good performance, Mr. Mackey wins a trip to Mar-a-Lago — here, a debauched Fantasy Island with President Trump as Mr. Roarke and Vice President JD Vance as Tattoo.
If you were making a list of the series likeliest to become voices of the Trump 2.0 resistance, “South Park” would not have been close to the top. It has savaged liberal pieties and has been credited, if not by its own creators, with inspiring a wave of “South Park conservatives.”
The show’s politics have been elusive — close to libertarian, in the neighborhood of cynical. It’s not that “South Park” is amoral — it is often deeply moralistic, summing up episodes with speeches and epiphanies. But for years, its core principle has been that people who care too righteously about any cause are ridiculous.
That message may have been a blueprint for civic nihilism, an invitation to LOL all the way to dystopia. But the show’s history may also be exactly what makes “South Park” a compelling voice at this moment. Along with its three-comma price tag, the show has amassed cultural capital, a reputation for not being in any party’s corner.
So when it starts spending that capital to suggest that one side is more out of control than the other — that government bullying of network news and academia is a mite more worrisome than social pressure to say nice things about Caitlyn Jenner — people listen. (After the brouhaha over the first episode, linear ratings for the second doubled.)
The thing that’s always enraged “South Park” above all is being told what not to say or do, as when Parker and Stone chafed at the proscriptions against depicting the Prophet Muhammad, or spoofed Tom Cruise and the famously litigious Church of Scientology.
Now, here were massive American corporations, Ivy League universities and media institutions — entities with power, tons of cash and more gravitas than a cartoon whose characters include a talking piece of poo — pre-emptively knuckling under to a vengeful president and his lawyers. Parker and Stone seemingly decided that if no one was going to say anything, they were going to say everything.
So far, it’s working. Like any long-running show, “South Park” has had highs and lows. It’s gone through diffident stretches when Parker and Stone seemed bored, filling time with pop-culture parodies. The new episodes feel re-energized, especially the premiere, a comedic cluster bomb that detonates in an A.I.-generated “P.S.A.” depicting the president as a Christ-like figure lumbering nude through a desert.
Beyond the crackdown on media and academic speech, the new “South Park” also focuses on the people who feel more free than ever to speak up in the new order. Eric Cartman, the show’s Magic 8-Ball of offensiveness, begins to realize that “woke is dead”: People are free to spew the kind of slurs and insults that used to get him yelled at. A classmate steals his material — anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, kneejerk sexism — to start a hit podcast. Cartman has won, and he’s miserable. “You can just say ‘retarded’ now, nobody cares,” he moans. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
It’s as if Parker and Stone asked for freedom from wokeness, got too much of it and, like cigarette-stealing kids forced to smoke a whole pack, feel queasy. A satire with one Cartman is transgressive. A world full of Cartmans is just mean, sad and boring.
I don’t want to suggest that “South Park” is now a dutiful arm of liberalism. That would be both off-brand and unfunny. I assume it will do something to infuriate the people now cheering it, maybe in its next episode, certainly eventually.
But for now it is targeting its fire in one direction, aiming below the belt. The premiere depicted President Trump nude, with comically tiny genitalia. The second episode portrayed the never-camera-shy Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, as a grotesque creature held together by Botox and cosmetics, her face sliding off her skull like a xenomorph when not attended to.
It’s crude; it’s vicious; it’s a little gross. And it may just be the kind of satire this era deserves. This raunchy, body-horror comedy homes in directly on the vanities of an administration that is fixated with its image — specifically, with displays of virile masculinity and exaggerated femininity.
There is something almost premodern about the show’s vulgarity — it’s less like something from a late-night sketch show and more like something archaeologists would find graffitied on a wall in Pompeii. (A running gag in the new episodes is an official portrait of President Trump as a Roman emperor, his toga flapping open to the wind.) Here, the shock is partly the point — namely, that free people should be able to mock, even demean, their leaders.
Of course, you could counter that Parker and Stone are free to mock. They have become very rich doing it, and, unlike Colbert, no one is taking their show off the air yet.
But this, too, is part of the meta point. It is still a free country. You can still say what you want. So why are so many powerful institutions behaving like it isn’t and they can’t? If a few bratty cartoon kids can peel off the emperor’s clothes, what are the grown-ups so afraid of?
The show has a theory for that, and it’s also about money. In the premiere, big institutions — up to heaven itself — are brought to heel by billion-dollar litigation. Later, Mr. Mackey quits ICE despite the pressure to swallow his qualms and go along with things he doesn’t believe because he needs to “make my nut” — that is, pay his bills.
It’s the same story either way: Everyone’s got to make their nut, even if some people’s nuts are bigger than others. Maybe it takes bleep-you money to buy your freedom. But maybe, “South Park” is telling us, freedom comes from deciding that your self-respect is priceless.
James Poniewozik is the chief TV critic for The Times. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics.
The post Eric Cartman, Welcome (for Now) to the Resistance appeared first on New York Times.
