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Kelly Rissman
US News Reporter
The creators of South Park have made a vow about Donald Trump, who has inadvertently caused the delay of new episodes.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone have taken aim at Trump over the past 10 years, but were forced to take their foot off the gas in 2020 when they said it’s too hard to satirise the Republican presidential nominee, who was president from 2016 to 2020, as his administration is already too funny.
With Trump back in the news in a big way thanks to the forthcoming US election, which will take place in November, you would think that South Park would be prepping some jokes aimed at Trump.
This is not the case, though, with Parker and Stone, who had to rewrite a 2016 episode when Trump won that year’s election, revealing they have intentionally delayed the 27th season of the long-running adult animation so as to avoid the election.
“We’ve tried to do South Park through four or five presidential elections, and it is such a hard thing to do,” Stone told Vanity Fair, adding: “It’s such a mind scramble, and it seems like it takes outsized importance.”
While he acknowledged that the election is “obviously f***ing important”, Stone said: “It kind of takes over everything and we just have less fun.”
Parker added that he doesn’t know ”what more we could possibly say about Trump”.
Speaking about making jokes about the 2020 presidential election, which saw Trump lose to Joe Biden, Parker previously told Australian TV show 7.30: “It’s tricky now because satire has become reality.
“It’s really hard to make fun of and in the last season of South Park, which just ended a month-and-a-half ago, we were really trying to make fun of what was going on but we couldn’t keep up and what was actually happening was much funnier than anything we could come up with,” he added.
“So we decided to kind of back off and let them do their comedy and we’ll do ours.”
This will be the first time South Park has missed a new season release since the show launched in 1997.
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Meanwhile, a Kickstarter campaign created in support of a Trump film “corporate America is scared of you to see” is gaining heat.
Earlier this week, The Apprentice – a film starring Sebastian Stan as a younger version of the business tycoon – lost a key financial backer just one week after having its pre-election release picked up by Briarcliff Entertainment.
Kinematics boss Dan Snyder was reportedly left angry with scenes that show Trump having affairs and taking drugs. In the film, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, Trump is also seen to be heavily influenced by disgraced attorney Roy Cohn, played by Jeremy Strong.
Director Ali Abbasi set a Kickstarter goal of $100,000 (£75,928) – but, after just one day, he has exceeded this, amassing $156,600 (£118,920) from 2,328 backers at the time of writing.
