I’m ALWAYS Exposing Myself!

Whew! Well, at least I can still work for the CBC!

In “Exposing Ourselves in South Park,” Tessa Sproule admits the unadmittable: she is a South Park fan. Well, me too! In the mire of mundane, laugh-track riddled sitcoms, reality-based swill and depressing news broadcasts, South Park is one of the only things I miss about cable.

It all started way back in high school. Back then, South Park came on right about the time the cops were breaking up our bush parties, so the show was a nice little capper to the evening, but nothing Earth-shatteringly relevant. Early episodes often featured Jimbo and Ned, baby Ike (let’s play kick the baby) or made fun of celebrities (Mega-Streisand). Although amusing (especially for my adolescent male counterparts), there was nothing particularly subversive about their social commentary and I left the show behind when I departed for university.

Flash-forward a few years and add a husband with a penchant quality comedy and I was reborn a fan of Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Cannibal the Musical, Orgazmo (“Nobody quotes Dickens in my apartment! This is my house!”) and Team America: World Police (we watched this with my parents and they were both crying-laughing. My husband also has a colleague who rented this film for his 11 year-old son because of the cute little puppets and only learned of his horrible mistake when he heard the boy singing “America, fuck ya!” in the shower later on): these movies all led me back to where it started and hastened my decision to give South Park another chance. Turns out it had been doing some growing up right along with me.

Gone were the cheap laughs…okay, that’s not true, but now the cheap laughs were foil for topical issues such as stem cell research (“You’ll never catch me, Hack-man!”), environmental responsibility (electric cars that will make you so pleased with yourself, even your farts smell good), AIDS (how did Jarod from the SUBway commercials lose all that weight?) religious freedom (Christians, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Muslims and Scientologists have all been called out at one time or another) and racial sensitivity (“Trust us, Token. You can play the bass”). This blog post hasn’t the room for me to catalogue all the issues these guys explode, so I thought I would concentrate on a relatively recent foray into the outrageously ironic: the opening episode of Season 11.

For some intellectual (seriously, though, no joke at all!) commentary on this episode, check out this neat little site. I completely agree that context makes all the difference in the world. The intent of the author means nothing if it is not explicitly clear to every audience sans author explanation (right, Debbie?). But is this true of satire? Yes and no. Ideally, we would all be intelligent enough to discern even the deepest irony. Unfortunately, there are many people out there who just call it like they see it, which is why South Park, on its own, can be so dangerous.

My pre-teen cousins are allowed to watch Family Guy but are explicitly banned from watching South Park, an issue I am working up to debating my Aunt and Uncle about. Whereas Family Guy is nothing more than a predictable series of pop-culture references infused with raunchy humour, South Park actually has something to say about the society we are living in. I don’t really think either show is appropriate for these kids to be watching unsupervised, but I’d be more than happy to take the time out of my day to watch some carefully chosen South Park episodes with my cousins and engage them in conversation instead of letting them flounder for meaning on their own. That is what I think Parker and Stone intend: to make us think about what we’re watching, what we’re doing and, most importantly, the legacy we’re leaving for future generations. Parker and Stone are our generation’s Jonathon Swift and South Park is their own Modest Proposal.

What did I learn this week? My brain is filled with a whole lot of television episodes!