If you’ve been keeping up with the new episodes of South Park that began dropping at the end of July — the five episodes that make up Season 27, and the three subsequent episodes listed as Season 28 — you’ve seen a lot of business as usual. There have been pop-culture topics du jour (Labubus! 6-7!), hot-button issues (A.I.! Gaza!), and movie parodies (a Halloween episode that featured references to The Exorcist, The Ring, The Shining, and The Conjuring). A character had a Japanese accent that sounds like it carbon-dated back to a mid-1950s Borscht Belt act. Poop and vomit were in abundance. Cartman tried to involve Butters in a suicide pact. Like we said, business as usual.
What you also have seen: Donald Trump‘s asshole. As in, a cartoon rendering of the Commander in Chief’s anus, right underneath his micropenis — an animated one, not to be confused with the googly-eyed, eerily photorealistic mini-member we saw in the notorious deepfake of the Season 28 premiere — as he spread his legs in an abortionist’s office. To be fair, he was not getting an abortion; the President was merely trying to get the doctor to terminate the pregnancy of Satan, who Trump had knocked up during one of their many, many, many sexual encounters. Yeah, that Satan. Prince of Darkness. Lord of the Underworld. Evil Incarnate. You know the one.
Meanwhile, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr projectile-defecated himself around the Lincoln bedroom, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi was last seen with gobs of human waste all over her nose, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem keeps losing her face (luckily, a crack team of makeup artists, Botox experts, and plastic surgeons reattach the melting, runaway mug to her head), and J.D. Vance has been re-imagined as a cross between Tattoo from Fantasy Island and a Bond villain scheming to occupy the Oval Office. This version of the Vice President also has sex with Donald Trump. It’s even more nightmarish than it sounds.
Imagine a run in which every new installment hits like the infamous Scientology episode, and that’s what it’s felt like tuning into South Park in real time over the past few months. Ever since Trey Parker and Matt Stone gifted the world (and Comedy Central) with the gloriously foul-mouthed animated series back in 1997, they’ve glorified in pushing the boundaries of good taste. No subject, celebrity, or ideology was sacred, which may be exactly why so many of us started taking the show for granted. They would go after whatever new target hovered in their crosshairs, milk it for easy laughs, then move on. The creators knew that was what was expected of the show. They delivered. Rinse, repeat.
After a while, the series was simply there, neither great nor horrible, tackling weekly topics and racking up one new season after the next. Occasionally, Parker and Stone would drop an extended, stand-alone epic or two (see: Post Covid or The Streaming Wars). Mostly, they did what they always did, i.e. blow spitballs and make fart noises in the back of the class. “It’s like, ‘Let’s see what happens,’” Parker said about their most outrageous ideas, in the 2011 documentary 6 Days to Air. “And then we do it, and… everyone’s just like, ‘Yeah, it’s South Park. So, anyway…’ For anyone to go up and go, ‘Did you see this thing on South Park? That was really offensive!’ — someone [else] will go, ‘Dude, shut up. It’s South Park.‘”
Politics was never off limits, of course, and after Trump was elected in 2016, Stone and Parker took potshots at POTUS by turning the fictionalized Colorado town’s teacher, Mr. Garrison, into a thinly veiled parody of the president. Even they seemed to realize that mocking someone who was already a walking, talking caricature was ultimately a zero-sum game. “It kind of takes over everything and we have less fun,” Stone admitted to Vanity Fair last year, when the prospect of a second Trump term seemed imminent. His partner made the point even more explicitly: “I don’t know what more we could possibly say about Trump.”
It turns out: quite a fucking lot, actually. Some of their initial ire might have come from the fact that their contract renewal was held up by Paramount being purchased by Skydance, a “shitshow” of a corporate merger, as they called it, that came with a million politically motivated caveats. Parker and Stone eventually walked away with a $1.5 billion streaming deal (cue Cartman saying, “Sweeeet”), but they took notice that certain parties were throwing away the rule books and engaging in passive government censorship. L’Affair Colbert had happened right before the Paramount-Skydance merger went through, and while the South Park duo don’t deal in the type of political satire that the late-night talk-show host does, they understood the implications of that cancellation “business decision” made by their own corporate overlords. Thankfully, they had leverage. For now.
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Mostly, however, it was the fact that the MAGA culture that has metastasized and infected everyday life like a particularly virulent strain of venereal disease made for a ripe target for outrage. “It’s not that we got all political,” Parker recently told the New York Times. “It’s that politics became pop culture.” Stone then explained how this unprecedented run of episodes that speak vulgarity to power are simply the latest iteration of what they’ve always done. “Trey and I are attracted to [taboos] like flies to honey. ‘Oh, that’s where the taboo is? Over there? OK, then we’re over there.’”
Which makes sense: If Trump, the various sycophants and cronies who make up his administration, and the MAGA vanguards at large are some of most thin-skinned, easily offended public figures right now, they’d be exactly the sorts of targets South Park would naturally take aim at. (“South Park has never been Matt and I sitting there going, ‘OK, what’s offensive? What can we do that’s offensive?’” Stone claimed in that 2011 doc. “We just are sort of offensive people.”) And it turns out Parker and Stone’s crude, crass ways of taking on the crude, crass authority figures making life hell for millions is one of the few ways to cut through the endless noise. People may have a hard time parsing the doublespeak and outright lies coming out of the White House and its various outposts, or understanding exactly how so many of its current policies are racist and inhumane; no one needs a translator for Trump is a horny, insecure grifter with an abysmally small ding-dong. That’s universally understandable.
The same goes for the close-ups of J.D. Vance and Trump’s O-faces during a raucous bout of sex, images which have already scarred a generation. And for Noem shooting puppies with a machine gun during an ICE raid in heaven. And for Carr, a troll who never met a snarky meme he couldn’t turn into a desperate bid for edgelord status, being covered in two tons of cat litter. And for the person who is supposed to represent leadership and the epitome of American ideals being in an abusive relationship with the Horned One. (Some may scoff that bringing back the same gag they used in 1999’s South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut is lazy, but it’s worth reminding folks that the last time they did this, it was with a dictator that the U.S. went to war with, and not a sitting president.) Those aren’t even the funniest “Oh, wow!” bits — we’d personally nominate the song played at a fundraiser, which says the quiet part out loud about the way Christianity has been co-opted by the powerful. But they’re certainly the gags that make you gag enough to pay attention.
In other words, nothing’s shocking, until something so genuinely shocking comes along that you can’t help but take notice. That line would seem like an impossible one to find and cross in 2025. Parker and Stone definitely found it, and their willingness to giddily cross it with exponentially grosser results have given us some of craziest, most fucked up and creatively satisfying South Park episodes in ages. It’s allowed Parker and Stone to do what they do best — dirty jokes, sure, but also: call out hypocrisy and extremism. They aren’t partisan, or, per their own repeated assurances, married to a political ideology. They’re just anti-bullshit, and they’re having a great time calling out a legion of bullshitters who regrettably have way too much power over all of us. The show has already addressed the “South Park is too political now” backlash, in its own self-mocking way. Both Parker and Stone have said they’re just doing this for the moment, and that next year will be different. But until that happens — bring on the Trump/Vance sex marathons and the rocket-shitting bureaucrats! We’ll take any capital-R Resistance we can get right now.
From Rolling Stone US
