“South Park” has no business still being so relevant. Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s low-fi animated series about foulmouthed kids in an obtuse Colorado town began its life as a short film that went viral on VHS. Decades later, it somehow remains fresh and, often, eye-wateringly funny. At least one or two episodes in each season still reach a zenith of satire — a skewering of our leaders, luminaries and national obsessions so on point, you almost forgive Parker and Stone all the times they’ve disappointed you for punching down.
But it isn’t the topicality of “South Park” that best explains America. It’s the tone. Over its 26 seasons the show’s essential nihilism has seeped into the nation’s bones. You see it everywhere, from Donald Trump’s dismissal of Vladimir Putin’s thuggery to the posters of 4Chan to the pessimism of climate doomers: the delusion that because everyone sucks so hard, it’s stupid to care about anything — and that if you do suffer the fate of caring about something, the worst thing you can do is suggest that other people should care, too.
Pillorying ostentatious wokeness was core to the identity of “South Park” at least a decade before Ron DeSantis ever spoke the word, but political correctness is only one form of dogma that Parker and Stone eschew. In “South Park,” correctness of any sort — religious, scientific, pedagogical, geopolitical or whatever else — is sus.
The show’s run coincided with a period of profound upheaval — 9/11, the Great Recession, the rise of the internet and smartphones, gay rights, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, COVID. For the generation rocked by these changes, Parker and Stone’s “LOL, nothing matters” attitude offered refuge in apathy. It doesn’t matter who you vote for if one candidate is a giant douche and the other is a turd sandwich. Worried about a coming environmental catastrophe? Hah! Are you also scared of a monster that’s half man, half bear and half pig?
Parker and Stone always deny partisanship, and I believe them; “South Park” delights in the sort of both-sides-ist false balance that we in the media are often chided for. Still, they’ve acknowledged they have a lot more fun lampooning the left than the right, and their influence — or, more specifically, Eric Cartman’s — pervades modern conservatism. In the early 2000s Andrew Sullivan coined the term “‘South Park’ Republican” for edgy, young, “relentlessly anti-politically correct” conservatives who are “as appalled by left-liberal humbug as they are turned off by evangelical theocrats.” He was prescient. Owning the libs is now the right’s primary political goal. For Donald Trump Jr., “South Park” memes are the height of wit. It’s difficult for me to imagine trolly right-wing media stars like Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder in a world without Cartman.
The right’s love of “South Park” may not last. In recent years Parker and Stone have been turning the tables on their audience, reexamining outdated views and cringey tropes. Only a single family in South Park supported the show’s version of Trump Sr. — the Whites. (“Nobody cares what the Whites have to say!” yelled Bob White.) In 2018 “South Park” even acknowledged that Al Gore was right: ManBearPig turned out to be real. But the damage was done; the monster had already begun to eat the people of South Park.
Farhad Manjoo | The New York Times (Earl Wilson/The New York Times)
Editor’s note: New York Times columnists were asked to pick the one piece of culture that, to them, best explains America. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
