Weekly Poll Winner: South Park

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't totally stoked that the voters selected South Park as their favorite cartoon comedy in last week's poll.

I'm totally stoked.

South Park just so happens to be my favorite all-time TV show. I will attempt to talk about it in an unbiased manner, isolating its true comedic value away from my own subjective inclinations.

The creation of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, South Park first aired on August 13, 1997 with the Pilot episode "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe."

The show took off in the first season, enjoying a great deal of success as it followed the lives of four third-graders, Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman and Kenny McCormick in the podunk town, South Park, Colorado.

Now halfway through its 13th season, South Park has endured several stages of development before getting to it's current stage--growing more outrageous and offensive as it progressed.

The stages can be defined both through landmark episodes and often through the development of one character, Eric Cartman, which serve as turning points in that progression.

In the first season, both the show and Cartman were tame in comparison to what the show is like now. There was a slow progression through the first few seasons which came to a climax by the 5th with two episodes: "It Hits the Fan" and "Scott Tenorman Must Die."

In "It Hits the Fan," Parker and Stone were able to add a new word to their characters' uncensored vocabulary. The word was uttered 162 times in the 22-minute episode.

With Scott Tenorman, Eric Cartman goes from bigoted pain in the ass to criminal mastermind, leaving his "friend" Kyle admitting to Stan: "Dude, I think it might be best for us to never piss Cartman off again."

Here's the clip that defines the turning point:




After "Scott Tenorman Must Die" for the next few seasons, there was a great deal of outrageous plotlines, dirtier and more offensive jokes, and way more statements made about celebrities and the shortcomings of society. Cartman is a lot crazier, too.

Through the sixth, seventh and eighth seasons, the show crept slowly toward what I would define as the second major turning point in the series: Season 9, Episode #1: "Mr. Garrison's Fancy New Vagina." In it, the children's gay school teacher, Mr. Garrison, has a sex change operation (they call it a "Vaginaplasty"), Kyle has a race-change operation (that they call a "Negroplasty"), and Kyle's dad has a species-change operation (they call it a "Dolphinoplasty").

Here's a clip:



South Park has been lucky enough in its 13 years to effectively disgrace hundreds of celebrities and illuminate dozens of societal deficiencies. What separates South Park from similar shows that pick on real people is that (in most cases) they go about it fairly, often giving both sides. Some exceptions to this are Paris Hilton, Jennifer Lopez and self-proclaimed psychic medium John Edward. I would argue that this is because Parker and Stone find no redeeming qualities in those subjects as human beings, and that--while they are valued by many--their contributions to society are, indeed, worthless.

I could go on for days, perhaps even start a separate blog, about South Park. Rest assured, there will be much more South Park to come on Laughasaurus.