South Park

Hint: it’s certainly more than 2008, and definitely more than 2004

You’d think, given the prices, “Book of Mormon” audiences would be more finicky

Shows from CSI to South Park are cashing in on our fascination with the disorder

I haven’t had much to say about the new run of South Park, and I don’t see much excitement about it online or in the news, either. The show goes through periods of relevance and irrelevance: it was huge in the first season, the bubble burst in the second season, and it became a phenomenon again with the movie. Right now it seems to be only marginally relevant, though it’s still entertaining thanks to the basic strength of the characters. It does seem, though, like Trey Parker and Matt Stone have become the stereotypical Hollywood writers who don’t get out much and no longer have a lot of life experience to draw on for their comedy (since they spend all their time either making the show, or just being rich and happy). Thus, in the four episodes they’ve done in this run so far, we’ve had an episode making fun of pro wrestling, not exactly a timely target. And when Parker is really stumped for an idea, he just makes fun of a reality show he watches: one of the four recent episodes was a parody of Ghost Hunters, and the most recent one was a parody of Whale Wars. Plus Parker’s usual obsession with video games:

I didn’t even think the South Park “Fishsticks” episode was one of their best, but it was an example of Trey Parker’s continuing ability to write jokes that somehow stick with you, and that you just can’t help quoting. (Some shows lose this ability; The Simpsons, even in the Mike Scully years, produced tons of lines that entered the culture, like “Save me, Jeebus!”, but it hasn’t done a lot of that lately. Or if there have been a bunch of compulsively-quotable Simpsons bits from the last few years, I’ve missed most of them.) Last night, even before Kanye West’s “Beyonce should have won and everybody should care what I think” incident, the Kanye West episode of South Park — and the term “gay fish” — was being quoted literally every half-minute on Twitter, and frequently on blogs.

I enjoyed the season premiere of South Park more than last year’s; I won’t talk a lot about it because it hasn’t aired in Canada yet (the Comedy Network will have it this Friday at 9:30), but as often happens, Trey Parker started with really easy satirical targets, the Jonas Brothers, moved on to even easier targets, “purity rings,” and finally moved on to the easiest target of all. Which is fine. South Park always takes on easy targets.

The last few South Park episodes didn’t change my opinion that this season has been disappointing, and I agree that the election episode was a one-joke thing, but I did enjoy it more than their 2004 election episode, “Douche and Turd.” That one was based on the premise that there is no difference between the candidates, a faux-hip premise that felt like a stale leftover from 1996. But watching Randy Marsh (one of the best characters on the show) decide that everything in the world is awesome and perfect because his favourite candidate won, that’s a satirical point that actually makes sense, and it makes particular sense with Randy, because he’s an idiot who over-reacts to everything. SP is almost always better when it goes for character, which is why the Randy sections of this episode were better than the Ocean’s 11 parody, and why the best parts of the recent two-parter were Craig’s deadpan meta-comments on what a bunch of assholes the main characters are. The biggest problem this season is that they’ve mostly let character play second fiddle to movie parodies — a problem that a lot of shows have when they’ve run a long time, but a bigger problem for South Park because their movie parodies are almost always exactly the same (basically, they just repeat the plot of the movie and rely on the different situation/setting to provide the comedy).

…It’s a dangerous sign when a show does an episode that feels like a rehash of an earlier episode. Especially when the new episode isn’t as good. What I’m saying is that while I’m totally on Trey Parker’s side in hating what Spielberg and Lucas have done to their franchises, this was not as funny as virtually the same story in “Free Hat.”

Tonight is the premiere of the second half of South Park‘s 12th year. (Every “season” is really two seasons, one batch of episodes in the first part of the year, and another batch in the fall.) It’s not on in Canada simultaneously, but there will be lots of places to view it.