Crack out the orange hoodies, people, it’s going to be a South Park summer. With season 27 set to release in July, the show has the potential to dominate the social and media landscape (wasteland) like no time before.
I have three aims with this piece of writing:
1: Explain the signs and messages the spirits have given me in order to make this prediction
2: Explain the secret sauce of South Park
3: Explain how the sauce will, in turn, save ‘The West’
1. The Signs
The Great Prophet Sam Altman (investment be upon him) doth proclaim many things. I’m no fan, but there’s no escaping that the sheer quantity of AI-authored content invading our media spaces provides a window into the imagination of humanity. After all, the things the AI sees as successful will be repeated, and ultimately it will be the clicks of the people who will train the models. There’s no escaping that the AI content generation mill is OBSESSED with South Park. Completely untrue AI YouTube videos and clickbait content around Harry and Meghan’s reaction to South Park, or more recently Rachel Zegler have gained hundreds of thousands of views, whether it be directly from the AI or people copying/commenting on the AI nonsense.
This means any poor soul stuck in the scrolling or autoplaying habit will not be able to escape many of the things we already know are coming from South Park. This includes an episode on the Diddy Parties, already mentioned before in South Park by Satan, when he was worried about his halloween/sweet sixteen being upstaged. There’s also rumoured to be an episode on Ketamine, which has been very much in the news lately due to the public’s collective interest in Elon Musk’s subperitoneal health. At this point, it’s probably the time to point out the most recent South Park episode (as opposed to specials), which showed the RALLYING of MAGA to be something of a drug people can’t escape, which is combined with actual drugs to create a scenario of supporting Trump to be more like being in a group of alcoholics who always want to hit up the next club instead of just admitting how scared and lonely they are. Back in February 2023, South Park already had the entire Musk narrative arc written.
The ability to change so much of South Park so near to their deadlines has always set them apart, and this season will not be ‘in the can’ like every other adult animation. This season is going to be a live organism reacting in real time, delivering the hottest of hot takes week to week, shaping social media outrage along the way. It’s going to be wild. Also, Gen-Z icon HOOK of All Elite Wrestling (Tazz Jr. for the semi-initiated, take my word for it for the uninitiated) wore a Kenny hoodie at the Pay-Per-View, and that counts as a sign.
Honestly though, how cool is Kenny? That iconic circle in the design is a huge part of the iconography in South Park, and the shapes of the boys do the classic Disney job of making the characters completely recognisable in silhouette. It’s so easy to do one reversal on the ‘swearing and fart jokes’ element of South Park and talk about their philosophical depth, but it’s even easier to not recognise the visual flair in early South Park. For many of us millennials, seeing and hearing so many of these disturbing things are core memories, and it’s remarkable how much nostalgia South Park has to offer to people of pretty much any age. It’s easy to forget how tempting it is to watch things you’re not supposed to. In these PC days (shout out PC Principal, Strong Woman and the PC Babies), sticking your head above the parapet to say it would be ridiculous to replace Cartman with an attractive adult woman of colour is enough to trigger the average person into some kind of reactionary internal anxiety of seemingly endless depth. Many commentators accuse South Park of shirking debate by presenting both sides negatively with all their extremes, but this is an incredibly reductionist and flat out incorrect notion.
One example of this is from the PC Babies, who cry at anything which makes them feel uncomfortable, leaving the babies incapable of enjoying live-action Mulan because they believe that it’s irresponsible to have a discussion on the gender politics within the narrative without properly representing trans issues inside the discussion on gender performativity. These aren’t ham-fisted straw man arguments being put into the mouths of the PC Babies, these were the actual conversations going on at the time, and the show doesn’t really criticise these thoughts at all, if anything the show kind of respects them. Deep down I’ve always felt a sense of warmth from the show towards PC Principal’s bro-liberalism, even if it does show him as somewhat absurd. I feel a genuine anxiety from the artists that their early work and other things the show has done will be seen as unacceptable and dated to their children, which I think is prevalent in the creators’ desire to point out that its own first 3 seasons aren’t worth watching. South Park have been masters of the media space since 1997, and nothing has changed. This is a show that, if nothing else, understands outrage.
2. The Sauce
Do you remember when Rick and Morty ruled the world? You know, back in the days before Justin Roiland got himself spectacularly cancelled (his favourite cartoon was South Park), and also before all Dan Harmon did was talk about how great South Park is? When McDonalds actually did reintroduce Rick’s favourite sauce, weirdly enough from Mulan, again, crazy people went absolutely crazy. At this point, Rick and Morty had the sauce. Of course, it wasn’t just about a nice tasting sauce, but it was about buying into the ideology the show had, a sort of bipolar megalomania combined with a hint of hedonistic isolationism. To me, Rick and Morty were perfect in the era of the social media bubble, when people were tightly tucked away in their digital safe spaces, away from the trolls and dragons of 4chan, before the ideology of the messageboards took over news outlets and social media apps. How many millions of Rick Sanchez bongs lined the cupboards of students during the 2010’s? All the time this was going on, South Park were making the weed. ‘Tegridy weed, to be precise. Set up against the swathes of celebrities shilling crypto, it’s hard not to get on board.
The character of Randy (Stan’s dad) is becoming much more of a self-insert character over the years for Trey Parker, who has written and directed every South Park episode, refusing to hand the keys off to a larger staff who could churn out more content. When disaster hit America, Randy too fled the city to his safe space, starting a weed farm with his friend Towelie. However, when disaster hit South Park in The Streaming Wars, Randy found his old geologist self and went back into the business of telling people what the fuck to do.
So what is the South Park sauce? The South Park sauce is ’tegridy. It’s the real thing, it’s not some focus tested marketing product, it’s a genuine, heartfelt sentiment mixed with the optimistic vision of comedy as a unifying force. Just because that sentiment takes a third position on many issues does not mean that the show avoids debate. A lot of the time the points aren’t about sides to pick but about illuminating different elements of our thought which don’t make sense or contradict themselves. It’s a show that deeply understands how ideas and ideology works, and part of that can be found in the origins of the show.
The way I understand South Park is seeing every episode as a ‘very special episode’. These were a phenomenon in the 80’s when popular tv shows would do special one off episodes on issues in society, which range from paedophilia in schools to drugs and featured a lot of traumatising content for children, as well as many messages which weren’t properly reflective of reality. Seeing how much Mr. Garrison, the kid’s teacher resembles George Bush Senior in the pilot as he attempts to influence children using Mr. Hat (essentially a cartoon) in the same way Senior did by having cartoons spread his anti-drugs messaging opens up this line of thinking. Is it possible that South Park in its early years was everything people said it was? Is it possible that in some way, the show knew it was reaching children and used this to leverage the humour, offering controversial takes to the children in the meantime as a joke on the paranoia of activist parents in the 90’s?
The benefit of this is when it comes full circle, with their episodes on the Jonas Brothers (who are recently getting loads of publicity purely from reacting to this decade old episode) or QAnon or Prime energy drinks offering the kind of biting satire only possible from people who are just that little bit mad. Where the left looks down on these influencers and admonishes them, South Park eviscerates them whilst offering a way back for those who were tricked. South Park isn’t afraid of big emotions and big questions.
3. How ‘The Sauce’ will save ‘The West’
At the end of the commentary for Season 11, they sign off with the phrases ‘god bless’ and ‘praise christ’. Honestly, there’s no irony to this at all. Religious thought has played a huge part in the success of Parker and Stone, with the Book of Mormon winning 9 Tony awards. Critiques of atheism and even militant agnosticism have been as prevalent in the show as critiques of the Catholic Church or Scientology. For all the projected ‘meanness’ in the satire of the show, it was only in 2016 that there’s any real lack of optimism for America and the future of the West. It’s a surprisingly patriotic and positive show, most of the time, and this aspect is usually lost on people who watch the show in some kind of anxious daze waiting for the show to declare on one arbitrary side over the other (Yes, but surely we do have to vote for the Turd Sandwich, right? TELL EVERYONE TO VOTE FOR THE TURD SANDWICH).
Only recently has the left started to learn the basic tenant of forgiveness. In one run of episodes, Cartman gets a girlfriend, who he alienates and mistreats constantly, because he’s a racist self-involved bully. Over time, Heidi, his girlfriend, smartens up and leaves him, but her female friends can’t resist mocking her and making her feel like an idiot for ever falling for his bullshit. Ultimately, the lack of landing space alienates Heidi and leaves her susceptible to re-education by Cartman, and eventually turns into a racist, anti-semitic asshole much like her boyfriend.
There’s a lesson to be learned here. Yeah, maybe the PC Kids have a point about Mulan. Hell, maybe there’s multiple things to point out about Mulan which render it problematic, including possible involvement by Chinese government sensors and marketers in the writing process (something that wouldn’t happen to a show with ‘tegridy). However, when this kind of argument is given to someone who has an emotional attachment to Mulan, it actually offers no alternative space aside from self loathing and some kind of deranged liberal guilt. In a sense, we’re simply invading their space and insulting them and fucking off back where we came from. Is it any wonder these talking points don’t gain traction?
The reality is, these anti-woke right wing arguments were easy to understand and offered a landing pad which promised nearly infinite victimhood (perhaps the largest currency of personality) and combined it with Peterson-esque self-help bullshit based on simple truths to devastating effect. The reality is, the left has a kind of boycott mentality which HAS to drop if it wants any chance of power in the coming years. Without a sense of wider solidarity and commitment to wider ideological forces like Patriotism and Pride, we offer no real ideological base for people to find appealing enough to leave their boxes. Big stories sell, and if we just tank the idea of Nationalism and Patriotism to the point of flinching every time we see an England flag, we’ve already lost. Nobody wants this old story of guilt and privilege, it’s time for something new.
It’s funny how Russia will point at America or the UK and proclaim us hypocrites for admonishing them for their invasion of Ukraine only a couple years after giving up our coup attempts in Afghanistan. We know better though, because we understand that as democracies, the people marched in their millions against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is possible to sit around and pitch some kind of religiously framed guilt about slavery, but it’s also possible to celebrate the key moments in British history where we stood up against slavery, and champion the abolitionist movement as well as trade union movements, women’s movements, etc. There are always multiple stories in a democracy, and it’s impossible to tell the story of Vietnam without mentioning those who opposed it, who themselves became American folk heroes like Muhammad Ali.
Regardless of what our countries have done in the past, there were always people working against it. For every Vichy government, there was a resistance. This is the secret sauce of South Park, and this is what we need on the left as we prepare to fight the ideologies of fascism. Instead of burying our dominant white cultures and histories, we can reclaim them and purpose them in an optimistic way. We can connect the dots from the suffragettes to the cotton worker boycotts to The Blitz to Attlee to the welfare state and beyond. If we can’t find ways to channel the anger and rage of the average person in our democracies, someone else will.
It’s time to really start thinking about our sauce, our landing pad. It’s time to come out of our safe spaces and trust ourselves to be strong enough to be challenged, mocked, and laughed at. We need a change in mentality, we need South Park.
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