Tuesday, March 20, 2007

South Park

I'll register my agreement with Jen on the idiot creators of South Park. I stopped watching that show a while ago, not because it stopped being occasionally funny, but simply because of the narcissistic, comedy-snob attitudes of Trey Parker and Matt Stone. I'd differ with Jen on one thing though... I'm not sure their problem is as much a "macho gender" thing as it is just being ipso facto assholes. I guess I'd add to her argument that being FOR the prevailing power establishment (i.e. George Bush) does not make you "funny" and it sure as hell doesn't make you "counter-culture"... it just makes you a freakin' moron who doesn't have the balls to read and inform himself.

Case in point: their episode on Katrina (which I came across after I had written this week's 'toon) called "Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow." The targets in this episode are people who suggest that the severity of the storm might have had something to do with global warming, and that George W. Bush might have had something to do with the disastrous failure of leadership in the federal government's response to the tragedy. At the same time, they compare the city's poor blacks to beavers, with the parody exclamation "George Bush doesn't care about beavers."

... cuz there's nothin' funnier than ridiculing global warming and making fun of the victims of centuries of poverty and institutional racism.

3 comments:

Jen Sorensen said...

Hey, thanks for the nod to my South Park rant. I agree, they seem to be standard-issue assholes above all else. But in the Rolling Stone article, there's all this talk about not being a "pussy" and punked-out lefties being "faggots" -- you really get a sense of tough-guy machismo on their part, a rejection of anything that could be perceived as weak or stereotypically feminine. Of course, it's hard to tell where the assholishness ends and the macho posturing begins. It's all part of the same stupid package.

Good point about how supporting the establishment elites hardly makes them counterculture.

Brubaker said...

I lost faith in "South Park" over that episode where George Bush had to explain the constitution to reporters.

I mean, even Chuck Asay knows reality more than Trey and Matt.

Abell Smith said...

I think their kind of machismo is just that... posturing. It's a facade-- that fake, white trash machismo that is used to hide the fact that they lack intellectual content and are afraid to think for themselves.