I never thought South Park would be so directly on the pulse
Where has this author been?! South Park is notoriously written and aired in the same week. The show has literally had its pulse on pop culture since at least 2006 when they really had it down on writing, recording, animating, and airing in a week.
They used to do that. Since their specials i think they take their time more
Super unpopular opinion, I can’t relate to South Park anymore, even the old episodes I used to love are kinda painful. Maybe I’m old. But the old episodes of the Simpsons still hold up, the old South Parks feel out of touch to me
One thing that really rubs me the wrong way nowadays is that South Park loves mocking people who want to change things, good or bad. Look at how they endlessly ridiculed Al Gore for being mostly right about climate change for example
They also apologized to Al Gore in later episodes for being right, then made ManBearPig (climate change) a central character.
Southpark has always mocked everyone. One of them even said in an interview years ago (paraphrasing here) that if they hadn’t gotten to someone yet, let them know so they can rectify the oversight.
This is also why I like Bill Maher and Jon Stewart. neither of them give a flying fuck and will call out bullshit even if it’s someone who they agree with otherwise.
Honestly I watched some old episodes recently and felt the opposite. I miss the weird out of left field humor of the first few seasons, before they got obsessed with being a cardboard filter over making fart sniffing libertarian gotchas in their characters voices. They got way too into giving their take on current events, which are basically always just “libs bad lol isn’t caring about stuff cringe???”. I miss when the Loch Ness monster wanted $3.50.
Havent watched SP but humor changes.
There was a time when joking about racial stuff was funny.
In the earlier days a german sweet called “Schaumkuss” (marshmallow glazed with chocolate) was called a “Negerkuss” (transl.: Nigger’s kiss)
At the time it was appropiate.Culture and humor is always changing. You could make as many terrorist jokes as you wanted but queue 9/11 and suddenly you had to be careful about the target group and culture.
Europeans would maybe smirk at 9/11 or terrorist joke (maybe not even those since the IS attacks in Paris, Brussel, etc.) but an american would knock you a peg deeper into thr ground.
Also this all depends on the context.I think that’s true but South Parks humour has also changed over time. That’s the nature of satire - it lampoons human folly and vice, including the ideas of offence and moralising which are so often borne out of hippocracy.
You mention taboo topics like 9/11 as if it’s a no go area but actually that has been a rich source of comedy and satire due to the level of hippocracy displayed around it. The hippocracy of Uber patriotism, religious nationalism, racism (you mention people having to be careful about the target and culture of jokes, but many groups found the exact opposite after 9/11 - certain ethnic and religious groups were all tarred with the same brush, particularly in the US) and more. Even the idea of self censorship out of fear of causing offense. Some of this is being replayed right now with a contemporary conflict.
South Park is in a similar tradition to other satire such as Private Eye in the UK, or The Onion, or various other TV shows. South Park is just a sometimes more extreme version more willing to be deliberately offensive. But satire moves with the times like any other type of humour.
I believe you mean hypocrisy?
I am not into the whole satire topic beyond the extra3 show in Germany so knowledge of current satire topic was limited.
Interesting to know that the whole 9/11 taboo is slowly being lifted again and processed differently.Thanks for the insight!
SP was always just unfunny and cheap to me, never enjoyed it or it’s jokes. Agree with The Simpsons though, can throw on like any random episode and it’s good watching. Gonna add Futurama in here, I find that great but most of the jokes in it are self-referenced, so it’s better to watch them in order.
