South Park: Classic or Dud?

On reflection, Lion King 2 wasn't a bad movie.

reading this thread yesterday I had the idea to compile all Shakey posts into a nice bound book and present it to my 4yo as a gift and the title would be 'JUST DON'T BE THIS GUY'

your loss

sterling chance for a "just a bit of fun so let's be coll" quip spurned in the interests of rising to weak bait. for shame.

ep 2 had me dyin

definitely a step up, though admittedly I am a sucker for their Canada-centric eps. ("The Safety Dance"!) one of their best songs in a minute, too. I'm curious to see how long they'll stretch out the Garrison campaign.

It was strong again tonight, too! And extremely meta, but not in an irritating way.

Ok this has gotten better as the season goes on. I like the sci fi direction they are going w this now.

i watched an older one, it was about Thanksgiving and the pilgrims and indians were like Dune with the stuffing for the spice, it was pretty funny.

https://twitter.com/canthoupicture/status/669519051186679808

As with pretty much all sweeping criticisms of South Park, that's only an accurate description of parts of the series.

I actually think that screed is super wrongheaded. I can't think of another mainstream show that's more about challenging assumptions.

lol

I can literally tell the point they're going to make in one of their political episodes the second the subject becomes clear.

Finally someone combating false empathy with false satire

the political content is edgy weak tea garbage

Siro ‏@SkeletonSiro 17h17 hours ago

@canthoupicture @Pafiume I mean, I used to watch South Park a lot and there used to be episodes like "Cartman wants to go to a restaurant"

^^^ still one of my favorite ever episodes of tv

oh, man! cliff divers!

yeah lol casa bonita is my fav episode too

A bit more rational conversation on the reddit thread where that post was originally stolen from.

https://www.reddit.com/r/circlebroke/comments/3tsd5o/south_park_is_written_by_reddit/?limit=500

I'm actually enjoying this season quite a lot - yes, the gentrification plot is a bit broad brushed but the absurdity still works; the abandonment of various parts of the town chasing the new $. And ok, that allows the lazy hanging of Yelp reviewers off it but isn't that the sort of thing they've always done?

PC Principal is a bit of a one dimensional idea, but that frat boys have been pretending to be feminists just to get laid has been around as long as... who was that Asian guy, Mark something? Had LJ posts about girls he was at college with that were obviously him just trying to get into their pants? But frankly it's all been worth it for when he can't decide whether Jimmy's allowed to say retarded or not.

I think the overall Garrison runs for President thing is weak, and continuing to assert Caitlin Jenner was DUI at the time of the car crash is tenuous at best (although that does seem to be the only point they're making about her). Not sure where the 'Jimmy can see adverts' plot is going.

C'mon though, the ep where the kids are playing at ninjas and everybody else sees them as Daesh and the ep about Tweek/Craig yaoi are exactly the sort of 'kids do innocuous shit with real-life parallels' stories that the commenters there are claiming don't exist any more.

i stopped watching this season with that Yelp episode. i don't even like Yelp, it was just so tiresome to sit through

It was, but I don't think it was atypical. There's probably been an ep like that every season.

you're definitely right, but i guess i picked a bad time to try to get back into the show. but what am i saying, this basically happens every couple of seasons

Haha yeah, the ziplining ep.

Oh no college students acting a certain way only to get laid? Thanks to Matt and Trey for pointing out the 'hypocrisy' of this. As if they never use their cachet as cultural jesters for personal gain.

My main issue is the one-dimensional comedy of the frat. Its a funny idea at first but given the huge range of current event stories involving batshit frats I was hoping they would do more w them than just turn them into decades old right wing strawmen. There were tons pf scandals involving frat this year. Its like they ignored all this possible material in favor of remaking PCU.

unsurprised that a tldr screencap generates 1000 twitter interactions from liberal arts college undergrads who hate being confronted by ideas that conflict with their worldview. as long as the stories are still funny and interesting (which they are), and if they can still get people this upset, then by all accounts they're doing it right. south park is supposed to piss people off. there's no such thing as a person who agrees with every opinion from all 250+ episodes of this show.

there's no such thing as a person who agrees with every opinion from all 250+ episodes of this show.

xpost No kidding. They ride a dumb point too hard and I roll my eyes and wait til they hit another nail on the head. And it's often fairly clear that they themselves aren't espousing a particular viewpoint because they really believe it but because they're trying to get a rise out of someone(s).

(I spend zero time on reddit, myself.)

i don't hate sp, i watched it all the time growing up but there is a serious subset of guys (almost always) (who i grew up alongside, watching the same episodes) who basically just seemed to let sp fill in their opinions for them on everything they didn't have a personal stake in and some things they did. this sounds dramatic but it's a real thing: there have always been dudes who have seemed sort of scared to disagree with it. i was probably at that point at age 15-16, which granted was a time with a lot fewer eps and internal contradictions. but i still see it with guys my age, coworkers even in their fucking 30s. it's used as a trump card in arguments still, all the time, especially in nerd hives like reddit, and there's never anything of actual substance being brought up when it's used. it usually just sounds like "dude, you know you're disagreeing with south park, right?"

it isn't adherence to a single overall philosophy but literally the conclusions of individual episodes. sp doesn't have an overall consistent philosophy outside of 'if there are two extremes then the truth is in the middle' and 'if you stray too far from the middle you are at the very least embarrassing and probably bad.' which is how you get episodes that appear to be on different sides of climate change, when they're really just both on the side of not caring too much either way. i think that screencapped post is generally otm there. summing up their philosophy as a matter of 'coolness' isn't far enough, and i don't think there's any reason to call it libertarian though.

it's a fucking stupid philosophy that's really really easy for people who already don't give a shit to adapt, and it's the most general philosophy i can see that works across the majority of places like reddit, where posts making the same exact point will frequently get voted to the top and the bottom because one of them used a word that was a teensy bit too strong. out of the idk 75-100? purely political/not casa bonita eps i've watched i can probably count on one hand the number that didn't in some way amount to that? it's why the one with the mormon family was my favorite. it was so refreshing that they actually ended an episode with "the mormon family is actually nice." that actually seemed brave by their standards.

it isn't sp's fault really (other than for being completely idiotic and drained for resources 90% of the time), it's just a weird unexamined behavior men seem to have towards comedy as the end-all authority on Things (i was gonna say "young men" but fuck if boomer dads haven't been doing this with hicks and carlin all their lives). you see it with louis ck nowadays, they can acknowledge that it's all jokes but they still don't want to be seen disagreeing with him. it doesn't mean sp is off the hook from criticism, even sweeping generalizations (are people even allowed to criticize a show with 250+ eps without being dismissed as too generalized?), and "satire is supposed to piss people off" is a shit defense you can use literally any time anyone criticizes satire you like.

that's my spiel. i do spend an uncomfortable amount of time hatereading reddit.

adapt = adopt

and if they can still get people this upset, then by all accounts they're doing it right

So it is basically a win-win. If they still make a weak episode they can point to the criticism of it as a weak episode and say "Oh look we are upsetting people, satire achieved".

xpost Yes, anytime someone treats a cultural artifact as if it's espousing inviolable truth, the problem always lies with that someone rather than with the cultural artifact. I honestly don't even know how you could do that with this show since they contradict themselves all the time.

I don't personally subscribe to the "pissing people off = success" viewpoint. It's awfully easy to be offensive for the sake of causing offense.

Pissing people off is a byproduct of their success, which is making a very popular TV show and getting paid very well to do it

"dude, you know you're disagreeing with south park, right?"

haha. This is amazing. I actually wanna hear someone say this so I can laugh in their face. Strangely enough, this is exactly the kind of blind allegiance that they're laughing at.

I don't even think Matt & Trey expect people to agree with everything they say, other than that there's room in this world for more than one perspective. You can call it "centered" or "in the middle" if you want, but they people they're really attacking are those who side with the extremes and don't allow any other discussion - those who say you either agree or you're ignorant. Are they contradicting themselves or just putting the word out there that there's more than one side of every story?

Ah, standing up against those who don't allow for any discussion. Who are these people who don't allow any discussion? Do u think they watch South Park?

Looks to me like those are among those who are complaining in the Twitter link from earlier.

*the first "those" should be "they"

complaining on twitter = public discussion

I loved South Park when I was younger and dumber and I still usually enjoy it on the rare occasions when I tune in to new episodes. But that "screed" is at least 80% OTM. The show's been pushing its creators' entitled frat-boy libertarianism for a whole generation, and I am dead certain that it's caused real-world damage.

New season is great, fuck the haters

they contradict themselves all the time

that and being funny a decent % of the time are the major saving graces

how dare this comedy show not challenge my assumptions!

"This cartoon at no point challenges its idiot reddit fanbase to think outside their preconcieved opinions oh well better watch my prestige tv comedies louie and master of none which appeal to me since i like to think the characters are exactly like me"

lol whiney i literally compared sp to louis ck in terms of reddit fanboyism

the only tv i've actually watched this year is uh wrestling. and daredevil if that was this year. but i hate to challenge your assumptions of me based on literally a single post about one tv show

that entire point was in response to bjs's assertion that sp doesn't have a fanbase of people who seek to agree with its giant shitpile of positions on things, and that that somehow means it can't be criticized or something

i don't want to hold a fanbase against it but yeah if matt/trey really don't want people trying to use them as a moral compass they've done a pretty shitty job preventing it

They're responsible for other people utilizing a cartoon as a moral compass?

They've consistently been moralizing scolds via Kyle and Stan but have also reveled in being Cartman

Haven't we all tho

Haven't we all

I've never heard anyone outright say something like "dude, you know you're disagreeing with south park, right?", but I feel like plenty of people let South Park subconsciously bully away any opposing viewpoints given the way it exaggerates positions with cartoony extremes. I mean, it IS a cartoon that relies on cartoony-ness for humor, so sometimes it's hard to say whether they believe every position is as ridiculous as they're portraying it to be, or whether they're relying on taking every position to ridiculous levels simply so their cartoon show is funny. I guess this can present some problems when viewers are adopting a position they otherwise haven't cared to research beyond the wacky by necessity caricatures on SP.

a lot of the criticism of them seems to boil down to "they have different politics than I do and I'm concerned"