Social Commentary

You may or may not be familiar with the TV show “South Park,” a cartoon series which has been on the air now for 25 years. Now, I can’t in good conscience recommend it because it’s mostly awful.

If you’re unfamiliar with the premise, four foul-mouthed 9-year-old boys get into all sorts of crazy hijinx while living their lives in South Park, Colorado. There’s no way I could get into all of the inappropriate ways the show’s creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, poke fun at everything from religion to politics to conspiracists to racism to pop culture and celebrity worship.

I used to watch it all the time, but then I had kids, and kids love cartoons, so when your son wants to watch TV, you can’t have him watching these sweet-looking ragamuffins doing and saying vile things. And eventually it dawned on me that in all honesty, I also didn’t need to see these sweet-looking ragamuffins doing and saying vile things either.

So, I stopped watching it. From 2002 or so to 2020 or so, I bet I only watched maybe 10 of the hundreds of episoded that came out during that time period (yes, sometimes I just couldn’t help myself if I happened to catch it on).

But here’s the thing… in between all the poop and sex jokes and digs at whatever the fun thing to ridicule was at the time, “South Park” acutally provides some pretty unapologetic social commentary, using thinly-veiled plot points to point out how hypocritical some religious leaders can be or how both gun rights and gun control can be

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taken to extremes. Parker and Stone have never pulled punches and aren’t afraid to make fun of nonbinary gender and point out that non-binary gender people are often pretty weird.

It’s all done with a wink and a nod and no one is safe, which means nothing is off limits, at least in theory…

Their latest effort has been a trio of “Pandemic Specials,” the shows first new episodes since COVID-19 shut down most of their production team.

These three feature-length shows have lampooned the pandemic in a way that perhaps only “South Park” could, not even worrying a little bit about stepping on toes or facing backlash from the “cancel culture” types.

Now again, I can’t really urge you to watch the show, because, again, it’s just horrible. For example, and forgive me for even typing this out… at one point it’s made very clear that COVID-19 originated with Randy, one of the shows characters, and Mickey Mouse (yep) having sex with a bat while on a trip to China… It’s all part of Parker and Stone’s criticism of Disney altering its films and shows to cater to China for its massive box office and corporate greed.

Anyway, at another point in the show, there’s a massive debate about Qanon, the web-based group that has a lot of really stupid ideas.

It’s a real group with real people. At one point, one of the characters brings up a point about them, saying, “You’ve got to understand, these people aren’t crazy.

They are simply acting on what they truly believe to be accurate information. To them, they are rescuing our country. To them, they are doing what’s right.”

And I don’t know what to say about that because I don’t know how to fix it.

But it scares me to death.