“South Park” Skewers a Satire-Proof President

There’s a authorized technique often called the small-penis rule, whereby an writer who writes a personality primarily based on an actual individual can doubtlessly evade a libel swimsuit by giving stated character a small penis—the logic being that, with a purpose to sue, a plaintiff must tacitly admit that the outline of his manhood is correct. This rule technically doesn’t apply to the most recent episode of “South Park,” by which the sequence’ creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, make completely no effort to anonymize President Donald Trump, however one wonders if the logic of embarrassment nonetheless holds. Trump is portrayed as a deeply insecure chief who actually will get into mattress with Devil, his obvious lover. (“I’m not within the temper proper now,” the Satan tells him. “One other random bitch commented on my Instagram that you simply’re on the Epstein checklist.”) Most notably, the Trump of “South Park” is endowed with a penis so small that Devil says he “can’t even see something.” If the precise Trump have been to retaliate, as he so usually does, he’d be taking part in instantly into Parker and Stone’s palms.“South Park,” amazingly, is in its twenty-seventh season. It’s the second-longest-running animated present on U.S. tv, behind “The Simpsons,” and simply essentially the most offensive. Since its première, in 1997, the cartoon—which follows a bunch of profane elementary schoolers within the city of South Park, Colorado—has managed to piss off practically each political group, pop-culture fandom, and spiritual denomination. A Season 12 episode by which two characters gown in yellowface and maintain up a P. F. Chang’s additionally contains a scene of Indiana Jones getting raped by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, a reference to the travesty that was “The Kingdom of the Crystal Cranium.” To the extent that the present has any “beliefs,” it’s that each one beliefs are asinine, whether or not they’re held by the left or the suitable. Environmental teams criticized the sequence, in 2006, for portraying Al Gore as a delusional determine obsessive about an imagined monster named ManBearPig. The present was banned in China, in 2019, for mocking Chinese language censorship, and the creators famously acquired dying threats after depicting the Prophet Muhammad.Though “South Park” has declined each in high quality and in reputation over time, it’s nonetheless useful sufficient that Paramount lately paid $1.5 billion for unique streaming rights to the sequence, and for Parker and Stone to make one other fifty episodes. The studio has lengthy been within the technique of merging with Skydance Media—a deal that was in a holding sample for a couple of 12 months, till Paramount agreed to pay sixteen million {dollars} to settle a lawsuit that Trump filed towards its subsidiary CBS’s “60 Minutes.” A couple of days earlier than the F.C.C. lastly permitted the merger, Stephen Colbert, the host of “The Late Present,” on CBS, referred to as the settlement a “huge fats bribe”—after which his present was cancelled, ostensibly for monetary causes. All of those are essential plot factors within the newest “South Park” episode, “Sermon on the ‘Mount,” which is now obtainable on Paramount+.The city of South Park has its fair proportion of Trump supporters, albeit more and more disillusioned ones. (“I voted for him to eliminate all of the woke stuff,” one man says, “however now that retarded faggot is simply placing cash in his personal pockets.”) Some mother and father are particularly upset when faith is launched on the native elementary faculty—within the type of Jesus Christ himself bodily exhibiting up and milling round. When the mother and father name the President to complain, he says that he’s going to sue the city for 5 billion {dollars}, organising an prolonged riff on Trump’s standing as a serial litigant. (All through the episode, he additionally threatens to sue individuals who make reference to his unlucky penis.) However Parker and Stone’s true focus is media cowardice, which turns into clear when a fictionalized “60 Minutes” runs a phase on the showdown between Trump and the city of South Park.The anchors are visibly anxious. “Oh, shit,” one says, because the information broadcast begins. “The small city of South Park, Colorado, is protesting towards the President. The townspeople declare that the President—who, who is a superb man, nice man, we all know might be watching—and, uh, we’re simply reporting on this city in Colorado that’s being sued by the President.”His co-anchor cuts in: “To be clear, we don’t agree with them.”“We predict these protesters are complete retards,” the primary anchor provides.The demonstration is interrupted by Jesus, who flies onto the scene, Superman-style. He palms everybody bread. “Simply eat the bread, and hear,” he says, and so begins his Sermon on the ’Mount: “I didn’t need to come again and be within the faculty, however I needed to, as a result of it was a part of a lawsuit and the settlement with Paramount.” He explains that Trump “can do no matter he needs now that somebody has backed down,” including, “Do you actually wanna find yourself like Colbert?” He tells the people who they should shut up, or else “South Park is over.”Donald Trump poses an actual conundrum for comedians. He’s an limitless wellspring of fabric, however what he says and does is inevitably extra absurd—and infrequently extra compelling—than any satire could possibly be. Parker and Stone realized this early on. They initially handled Trump by having one of many present’s recurring characters, a former schoolteacher named Mr. Garrison, act as a surrogate; he ascends to the Presidency by promising to construct a wall, and step by step turns orange. However the showrunners shortly discovered that, as Parker put it, “what was really taking place was manner funnier than something we might provide you with.” So that they pivoted to the opposite defining problems with our time: Kanye West’s antisemitism, ChatGPT, the COVID-19 pandemic (on this case, attributable to a personality’s resolution to have intercourse with a bat in China).The Paramount drama has prompted “South Park” to go after Trump extra instantly than ever earlier than, however the gags, which all too usually come again to his anatomy, or his penchant for memes, aren’t precisely revelatory. The sharpest joke is a meta one: the final time we noticed Devil in mattress with somebody was within the 1999 movie “South Park: Greater, Longer & Uncut,” which depicted an abusive relationship between Devil and Saddam Hussein. (Hussein was the abuser.) Fairly than concoct a brand new playbook for Trump, Parker and Stone have returned to an outdated one.Trump’s existential risk to comedy has one other dimension, one which intensified after his reëlection, as figures like Shane Gillis and Tim Dillion gained mainstream enchantment: it’s onerous to make boundary-pushing statements when there are not any boundaries. This downside is very urgent for Parker and Stone, they usually confront it by way of the angst of South Park’s resident provocateur, Eric Cartman.The episode opens with Cartman turning on a radio station, the place he’s met with the sound of static. “Mother, one thing’s flawed with my favourite present,” he complains. “Nationwide Public Radio, the place all of the liberals bitch and whine about stuff.” His mom informs him that Trump has cancelled NPR. Cartman is devastated: “That was, like, the funniest shit ever.”Later, Cartman confides in his good friend Butters, who’s extra of a snowflake sort. “Woke is lifeless,” Cartman says, sadly. “You may simply say ‘retarded’ now, no one cares. Everybody hates the Jews. Everybody’s fantastic with utilizing homosexual slurs.”“That’s not good,” Butters replies.“No, it’s horrible!” Cartman says. “ ’Trigger now I don’t know . . . what I’m speculated to do.”At first, it didn’t appear to be “South Park” had a solution to this query; Cartman, unconvinced by Butters’s assurances that “woke” is “nonetheless on the market, someplace,” forces him right into a suicide pact. The 2 of them sit inside a automobile, parked in a storage, with the engine working. The scene is foreboding—till it’s revealed that the automobile is electrical.The townspeople, in the meantime, negotiate a settlement with the President, who agrees to a sum of $3.5 million. (“We’ll simply have to chop some funding for our faculties and hospitals and roads and that needs to be that,” one girl says.) However there’s one situation: as a part of the settlement, the city additionally has to have interaction in “pro-Trump messaging”—an obvious reference to latest studies that Trump has demanded the identical from CBS. What follows is real shock comedy, and a therapy of Trump that feels unique. The city’s first P.S.A. is an A.I.-generated video of Trump—a live-action one, not a cartoon—trudging by a desert. He proceeds to take off his garments, although he leaves his gown sneakers and sock garters on. “When issues warmth up, who will ship us from temptation?” a voice-over says. “Irrespective of how scorching it will get, he’s not afraid to struggle for America.” Trump lies down within the sand, and his micropenis, which has googly eyes and a mouth, slowly turns into erect, earlier than saying, “I’m Donald J. Trump, and I endorse this message.” The P.S.A. is labelled one in every of fifty, leaving open the chance that, in the midst of the forty-nine “South Park” episodes nonetheless to return, we’ll get forty-nine extra.Is that this an excessive amount of? In all probability. But there’s an age-old custom of political vulgarity, of which Trump himself is a practitioner—it’s the crux of his enchantment. And, though the White Home put out a press release condemning the “South Park” episode, it additionally appeared to acknowledge that Parker and Stone have a spot on this custom, too. “The Left’s hypocrisy really has no finish,” a spokesperson stated. “For years they’ve come after ‘South Park’ for what they labeled as ‘offense’ content material, however out of the blue they’re praising the present.” Although it’s onerous to say that an A.I. dick joke is deserving of “reward,” it’s refreshing to see what occurs when satirists are keen to play on the President’s phrases, deepfakes and all. Probably the most placing features of Colbert’s firing is that his comedy, whether or not you prefer it or not, wasn’t all that offensive; “The Late Present” is commonplace liberal fare. However, by eliminating that downside, Paramount has created a brand new one. They’re paying Parker and Stone greater than a billion {dollars} to place out the identical message as Colbert—quite a bit much less politely. ♦