When South Park parodied Christopher Nolan’s Inception in the 2010 episode “Insheeption,” viewers were quick to point out that Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s take on the film was very similar to a CollegeHumor video that was posted online earlier that year. The video in question, written by Dan Gurewitch and David Young, was modeled on a scene from Inception that features an “extraction” team capable of infiltrating people’s dreams and explaining the complicated aspects of their job to a new team member.
The South Park episode includes dialogue that, in some cases, is identical to the CollegeHumor parody, like when one character tells another, “Sometimes thoughts of my dead wife manifest themselves as trains.” Here’s a side-by-side comparison:
Gurewitch initially responded by saying that he was conflicted about the whole thing because of how much he adored South Park. He went on to suggest that perhaps it was an homage, but expressed some doubt after considering that his sketch wasn’t quite culturally significant enough to be on Parker and Stone’s radar.
Another possibility Gurewitch brought up was that a staff writer could be to blame for the lifted dialogue. However, a couple of days later, Stone confirmed that he and Parker had, in fact, taken those lines directly from Gurewitch and Young’s video.
The Time ‘South Park’ Got Caught Stealing Jokes From CollegeHumor
According to Stone, the cribbing wasn’t intentional, though. As he tells it, he and Parker were looking to satirize the complexity of Inception’s dialogue in their episode. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to find a movie theater still showing Inception by then, and the film hadn’t yet been released on DVD. They also couldn’t find a copy of the movie online, so they decided to seek out other parodies. That ultimately led them to the Gurewitch and Young sketch, which they assumed accurately represented the film’s dialogue.
“It’s just because we do the show in six days, and we’re stupid, and we just threw it together,” Stone told The New York Times two days after “Insheeption” aired. “But in the end, there are some lines that we had to call and apologize for.” Gurewitch updated his blog following his conversation with Stone, stating that he accepted the pair’s apology. “All is well,” he wrote at the time, “and we’re going to meet up with Matt and Trey when they’re in New York.”
The post That Time the ‘South Park’ Guys Ripped Off a CollegeHumor Video appeared first on VICE.
