The South Park Retrospective, Part Two

Grouping Two: The Taboo and the South Park Universe

It Hits the Fan (season five)
The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs (season fourteen)

Originally posted on January 31, 2011, on AD Forums.

The trajectory of this set of reviews and analysis was supposed to be something entirely different when I started re-watching these two episodes. (Also in the past month – my attempts to write a review for 200 and 201 were foiled when I realized I could not write one that didn’t dissolve into angry babbling.) As I mentioned in the last review, these two episodes highlighted have strong points and issues with the notion of America and its obsession with social taboos – in It Hits the Fan, the issue here is how foul language affects our society, a minor focus of the South Park film that segues into its general censorship messages; in The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs, the central theme can be boiled down to ‘The Rorschach Book’ – the satire lies with literary taboos, and how the more offensive a work is, the more likely it is to be seen as some form of art, or the more likely its messages will be muddled. We’ll still get to that, but there is an absolutely brilliant sequence in It Hits the Fan that changed my idea of how these episodes should be approached. The clip is placed below, until about thirty seconds in:

http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/152654/invading-knights

The universe of South Park is one that, while it has the same general structure as the real America – there is a poor, a middle class, and an upper class; it ostensibly takes place in a sort of everytown USA – has a very different social convention and spin. What’s interesting about the two episodes grouped together here is that not only do they tweak our perceptions of the current social climate in America, they create a unique, South Park specific climate that assumes things that, currently, would not be assumed in any shape or form.

In It Hits the Fan, the main focal point of the episode is how incredibly often the episode says ‘shit’ – it’s said 162 times, according to the convenient little counter in the corner of the screen during the episode, and written 38, according to Wikipedia. The episode beyond that, thematically, is a bit of a mess. Basically, the Knights of Standards and Practices are supposed to guard the curse words, one of which is shit, from becoming overused and bringing plagues, but the ending to this plot is very rushed and oddly slipshod. The satire of Standards and Practices itself seems to be entirely a matter of cleverness in itself, like Parker and Stone et. al said, “ooh this is clever” and never thought to further develop the metaphor because they had to end the episode somehow. I’m not going to really focus on the plotting issues here, though, because this episode exists as a showcase for two words and their effects on people – shit, which is counted in the corner, and fag. Shit is so overused in the episode proper that it confirms Kyle’s “I learned something today” segment fully – it ceases to have meaning. The second word, though, that’s an interesting one. (Before we go any further – I disdain using that word. I’ll try to limit my usage of it, out of sensitivity, to actual quotes from the episode, and when the word is completely unavoidable in explanation.)

Taking the clip above, Jimbo goes un-beeped when he says the word ‘fag’, prompted by Mr. Garrison’s completely inappropriate assertion that “only gay people can say fag” (without it being beeped). It is well established in the canon that Garrison is one of the South Park universe’s main instigators of conflict, and his attempts to lord his newfound… let’s say power but mean douchebaggery… over the town only serve to highlight his complete immaturity and lack of understanding about the very basics of his ‘identity’. In the bar, at the moment of the clip, his ability to use a new swear word is momentarily impressive to the drunk people – Randy can’t say it, nor can random mustached man. But Jimbo, in his petulant complaints that he cannot use ‘fag’ himself, manages to say it completely un-beeped. A few interesting things happen in response to this:

- Randy, Kenny’s dad, and the majority of the people around the bar, beyond pointing out that Jimbo didn’t get beeped, react as if nothing has happened. Later on in the episode, Must-Shit TV’s nonexistent plot gets them more emotional than their friend’s/relative’s accidental outing. Jimbo’s fearfulness is completely unwarranted. Hell, the person one assumes would be his partner, Ned, is so focused on the television that he doesn’t seem to register what’s happening.
- Garrison, ever the confrontational loon and annoyed that his attention has been usurped, vehemently spouts invective at Jimbo, distancing himself from his own proclaimed identity as a gay man by being, basically, a homophobe to him.

The South Park universe lays a mirror to our expectations of the United States and its social culture in this moment in an interesting way. Since the bar is largely populated by idiots (Randy) and rednecks (Kenny’s father), we would expect for the reaction to Jimbo saying ‘fag’ would be a little more pronounced than simply saying, “hey, you didn’t get beeped”… and would probably assume, through use of stereotyping, that the words spat out of Garrison’s mouth would be said in the situation by someone else. And in that way, it establishes tenets in its own universe – under-reaction to potentially revelatory situations, and over-reactions to minute circumstance. The bar, later on, also ignores such matters as a giant dragon stomping around a soundstage and Mimi Rodgers being beheaded in order to get outraged about the complete lack of plot cohesion in Must-Shit TV.

A smaller example of this takes place in the beginning of the episode, when Kyle decries the idea of HBC saying ‘shit’ on television as a ratings ploy, like that time Terrance and Phillip had a same-sex kiss on TV. Honestly? You still can’t do that on actual television without a huge firestorm of controversy. The sheer amount of press given to Glee over their depictions of gay romance – or lack of, in the case of Santana and Brittany’s fans vs. the show runners – contrasts greatly with the nonchalance both Stan and Kyle give to what would surely be a momentous event in television history in our current time, especially considering that Terrance and Phillip is, ostensibly, a children’s show. (Or something. Is anyone clear on this?)

Similar ideas of the universe are explored in The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs, but by taking the opposite tack – tackling something that a small set of America, primarily literary scholars and AD, and using that microcosm to explain both our universe and their universe. The plot is much more tightly wound together in Scrotie McBoogerballs than in It Hits the Fan, dealing with the four main boys being assigned The Catcher in the Rye in class, despite the fact that it has naughty language and convinces people to kill (like poor Butters). When confronted with the fact that Catcher in the Rye is about a whiny little fucktard who hates everything, our four main boys write a book that they’re certain will be banned, filled with disgusting imagery that makes people vomit uncontrollably. Vomit functions the same way as ‘shit’ in It Hits the Fan, the distracting factor that the casual viewer will distinguish the episode with.

The showcase here, though, as it illustrates our world, is the extent to which people will go to create illusions of meaning in even the most meaningless of pursuits. Scrotie McBoogerballs, as a novel, is devoid of any merit according to its true authors, but hailed as everything from a conservative-bashing screed to a scathing indictment of health care in the US. It’s true of anyone who reviews anything anywhere at some point – we project our own life’s experiences onto a piece of entertainment, and instead of appreciating a moment of resonance, we twist media into a confirmation of our views. Glee, again, shares this Rorschach-like quality, but I can go ahead and say that my nagging confusion over Daniel Tosh’s amorphous, contradictory sexuality makes me view Tosh.0 in a lens it probably shouldn’t be viewed in as well. (Also, I’m writing all this about a show that some people think is inane and devoid of meaning.) In demonstrating our own foibles of understanding, the episode also reflects the reactions to the ridiculous and mundane being opposed to how one would normally act. No one seems to care that Sarah Jessica Parker is dead at the end of the episode – as she is ‘ugly’ – but the world is turned upside-down by a book. The difference here, compared to It Hits the Fan, is that a book changing the pop culture landscape and offending large swathes of people interpreting it in differing ways is not only a logical idea for our landscape (opposed to a dragon mauling people on Must-Shit TV), it’s happened with a variety of books. Harry Potter is obvious, but the closest analogue I can make is to Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, the Amy Chua nonfiction book that started a culture clash last year with its views of how to raise talented children and garnered a large amount of critical discourse about its content.

Both episodes, of course, tackle the issue of taboos. It Hits the Fan is less elegant in its exploration than Scrotie McBoogerballs, but both seem to regard the central causes behind the profane and taboo as largely random and nonsensical. The proliferation of ‘shit’ comes from network greed and, the episode argues and upholds simultaneously, unnecessary envelope-pushing; the origin of the nauseating titular novel comes from the childish idea to give J.D. Salinger a big ‘fuck you’ for not writing a dirty enough book. (I do want to say that it’s quite awesome that the four boys decide to write a whole book instead of just doing what I assume most kids would do, either go on the Internet and find smut or find another banned book to read. Taking destiny into their own hands!) Once the taboo is broken, however, in the South Park universe, the taboo is broken to its utmost – there is no slippery slope, just total saturation of shit and excreta. It equates taboos with something inherently silly, like a fad or a craze, in that everyone is in on the madness (except Mr. Garrison, whose job is to remain off from center no matter what he’s doing), everyone takes their behavior to obnoxious extremes, and everyone is too enthralled with their object (‘shit’ or their novel) to listen to what passes for ‘reason’ in the episode proper (rune stones, actual reasoning).  This method of subconsciously equating societal taboos with something as inane as, say, Pogs, has a numbing effect, something pointed out in It Hits the Fan, and makes it that much easier, as an audience, to wonder why people get so worked up about it. It’s an effective storytelling method, though it cannot carry all of It Hits the Fan.

(An interesting note – I know it’s insanely cruel to mention this, but the rapid change in public opinion on the Kardashians after their wedding disaster really does change the tone of the ending to Scrotie McBoogerballs for the worse. It’s hard to imagine Butters weeping so openly over Kim in a post-Humphries world.)

Having set the ground rules for taboos and the universe of South Park and its citizens’ hang-ups, next time, we’ll dive into two controversial episodes of South Park, Trapped in the Closet and Fishsticks, and talk about how the South Park universe deals with the notion of celebrity. I’m going to say these reviews will probably be once a month, since they take quite a bit of thinking and ruminating on to make even the remotest of sense. Happy January all!