This, the year of our Lord 2k16, marks 19 years since the first episode of South Park (Friday, 10pm, Comedy Central). For its 20th season, which begins this week, a trailer has been released featuring a voice actor repeatedly saying: “We’ve been there”, soothingly, to panning shots of a well-adjusted suburban kid’s landmark moments – birth, first day of school, uni – while the show’s most vulgar output plays in the background. The message from creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker is that South Park has won the war. It’s now an all-American entity, one that’s outlasted the moral panic that surrounded its early seasons. Stone and Parker are staging a churlish sit-in on modern culture, and they’re not going anywhere.
If, somehow, you’ve missed the last 19 years of Stone/Parker output, let’s stop here for a quick refresher. The show has drawn horror from almost everyone with a mouth capable of forming itself into a shocked “O”. From Christian groups, Muslim groups, the entire nation of India (where it is banned outright), and from self-appointed guardians of TV the Parents Television Council, who called it a “curdled, malodorous black hole of Comedy Central vomit”.
At any point during the show’s run, Matt and Trey could have toned it down. For the sake of an easy life, they might have thought twice about showing the Holy Virgin Mary squirting menstrual blood into the Pope’s face, perhaps. Whether you admire their refusal to compromise or see it as hard-headed is really a matter a personal opinion. Either way, this attitude is apparently a recipe for great comic success and enormous riches. Part of Parker and Stone’s triumph comes from taking risks, like playing around with a continual, series-long theme in the most recent season with new character PC Principal, a pumped-up enforcer of politically correct culture, who savagely beats any child willing to disobey his edicts.
As a good Guardianista I should pull my cardigan tight and frown at such mockery of liberal values. It does, though, underline Stone and Parker’s career-long insistence that it’s not “the thing” they hate, just the way society reveres “the thing”. Let them have this: while other cartoons contort themselves to keep a footing in popular culture (hello, Simpsons guest stars), South Park effortlessly proves that its pathologically dismissive humour is the only type that remains fresh. Where animated comedy is concerned, there seems to be two choices: overzealous displays of puerile offence, or a fawning lapdance at the feet of the zeitgeist; and if, God forbid, you grasp for both, the result is Family Guy. South Park then, is a precious thing.
Unsurprisingly, the trailer released to coincide with the show’s 20th run doesn’t give much away about what to expect: after all, this is a show that builds an episode from scratch less than a week before broadcast. My hope is for a slant towards episodes starring infant sociopath Eric Cartman, The previous political correctness-themed season could have made some changes in that department, but when you’re making a moralising epic all about the cost of offence, you can’t have someone like him around rocking the boat. There isn’t a lot to love about Cartman: the bullying, the xenophobia, that time he got a fellow pupil to eat their parents. But evil has an allure, and he’s part of the furniture now. Like a parasitic wasp burrowing into your frontal cortex and settling in – and, like South Park itself – he’s here to stay.
