“I don’t know what more we could possibly say about Trump,” Trey Parker, one of the creators of South Park, told Vanity Fair shortly before the US presidential election of 2024.
The magazine took this to mean the series was “about done with satirising the Republican candidate”. If that was the team’s intention, then intervening events have brought about a change in strategy.
The candidate became president again. The president flailed like a maniac. Some of the metaphorical broken crockery belonged to South Park’s corporate master.
The Comedy Central satire has rarely been so explicit in its attacks on an individual as it was on Trump in the first episode of the 27th season. Broadcast on July 23rd, Sermon on the ’Mount – a reference to both its guest star Jesus Christ and Paramount, the cable channel’s parent company – began with a characteristic double-edged dig at Trump’s war on the liberal media.
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Eric Cartman, perennially bigoted id-monster, is outraged that the administration has cancelled his favourite show on National Public Radio. We are encouraged to believe South Park’s creators are equally appalled at this curtailment of cultural expression, but most of the laughs come from Cartman, hitherto a hate listener, ranting about the unintentionally hilarious enemies he will no longer get to snort at. The show is, he explains, “where all the liberals bitch and moan about stuff”.
Jesus turns up to evangelise at South Park Elementary. The town’s residents wonder if that is strictly constitutional. “I didn’t want to come back,” the risen Lord eventually mutters fearfully to assembled multitudes. “But I had to because it was part of a lawsuit and the agreement with Paramount.”
This references Trump’s recent suit against Paramount over an episode of the news show 60 Minutes, broadcast on the conglomerate’s CBS network, and allows wider connection to be made with capitulations to the president’s legal Panzerkorps elsewhere in the media.
All of that was typically bold – The Simpsons’ erstwhile digs at its own Fox network were generally more playful – but it was the depiction of Trump himself that really got media-watchers gasping. Like their version of Saddam Hussein, he is seen cosying up to a giant, oddly sensitive Satan, who expresses himself unimpressed by the imperial crown jewels.
“I can’t even see anything, it’s so small,” the Lord of the Flies says of Trump’s penis. At the close, now bespectacled and talkative, the first member dangles from a hyperrealistic, AI-generated version of the naked Trump.
How do we know this attack struck home? Because the White House said it didn’t. “This show hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention,” a hopelessly needy White House statement whined. “No fourth-rate show can derail President Trump’s hot streak.”
Asked, at the Comic-Con event in San Diego, what he made of the response, Parker, sitting beside his collaborator Matt Stone, did not break a smile before snapping: “We’re terribly sorry.” The reply needed no ironic intonation to confirm its insincerity.
And they are not finished. There was no episode this week, but a teaser trailer for next Wednesday’s outing has Trump feeling up Satan’s leg at a public event. South Park isn’t loosening its jaws from this hambone.
Why does this matter more than the countless volleys that have come Trump’s way over the past decade? A glance (just a glance, I promise) at the increasingly feeble Saturday Night Live gives a few clues. The sheer flaccidity of the sketch show’s satire is one factor. Another is that sense of us knowing which wet-liberal safe house the SNL team emerge from each miserably predictable weekend. These skits are not intended to irritate the Maga base. They are there to comfort those already certain of their own cosy opposition.
Remember the execrable “cold open” that had a white-clad Hillary Clinton – in the supportive form of Kate McKinnon – warble Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah to a blubbing audience straight after the real Hillary lost to Trump?
Such obsequiousness towards a politician (any politician) would be inconceivable on South Park. Over the past 28 years Stone and Parker have made a virtue of wrong-footing those who think they have the team’s politics nailed down. Way back in 2005, scores of leftish critics raged that Team America: World Police, their now-classic “Supercrappymation” feature, spent as much time slagging off liberal celebrities as attacking the administration.
“People assumed that Trey and I were going to devote every frame to bringing down George Bush,” Stone, laughing, told me at the time.
One side has never forgiven them. The other may not forget their current jihad against Trump. But that uncertain political territory is the best place for satirists to pitch base camp. Nobody should feel safe. They could be after your penis next.
