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been an occasional character on Beavis and Butt-head.
David Letterman, an avowed Beavis and Butt-head fan, often mentioned the
show on Late Night with David Letterman. He even provided some of the voicing
in the film, indicating his support for the Beavis and Butt-head phenomenon.
And the episode “Late Night with Butt-head” (April 14, 1994) included
a hilarious parody of Letterman’s late-night program, with Butt-head as
Letterman and Beavis as Letterman’s band-leader and sidekick Paul Shaffer.
Through such motifs, Beavis and Butt-head often went well beyond music videos
in its commentary on American television culture.
If Beavis and Butt-head sought to celebrate tastelessness, partly as a way
of satirizing the pretentious bourgeois tastes of its self-righteous critics,
South Park, which began airing the year after Beavis and Butt-head went out of
production, brought tastelessness to the level of an art form. South Park was
created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who have continued to write, direct,
You Can’t Do That on Television: The Animated Satire of South Park
129
and edit the series throughout its run, which has now stretched through nine
seasons on Comedy Central, with three more already under contract. Set in
the small, relatively affluent Colorado town of the title, South Park focuses on
the misadventures of a group of third-graders (who finally become fourth
graders in the fourth season). These are, however, anything but your typical
cartoon children. The most important character, and the one who has oddly
emerged as an audience favorite, is probably the fat, greedy Eric Cartman
(voiced by Parker), a foulmouthed bigot who hates virtually everyone. The
central point of view of the series, however, is that of Stan Marsh (Parker)
and Kyle Broflovski (Stone), loosely based on childhood versions of Parker
and Stone, respectively. The final member of the central foursome is the
impoverished Kenny McCormick (Stone), whose frequently obscene lines
are muffled by the fact that he constantly has the hood of a parka wrapped
tightly around his head. He also has the misfortune, apparently simply
because he is poor, of getting killed in nearly every episode through the fifth
season, usually in some grotesque fashion. However, in the uncharacteristi-
cally poignant “Kenny Dies” (December 5, 2001), near the end of the fifth
season, Kenny dies of a terminal illness, partly because the government has
effectively eliminated the stem cell research that might have developed a cure
for his condition. Kenny then returns at the end of a sixth season, after a
sequence of several episodes in which his resurrection is posited as a pos-
sibility. This sequence illustrates a growing tendency over the years for South
Park to include semicontinuous plot arcs, or at least for later episodes to
refer to events in earlier episodes (as opposed to much animated television,
which is entirely episodic and in which the events of any given episode tend
to have no real consequences in later episodes). In the sixth-season finale,
“Red Sleigh Down” (December 11, 2002), Kenny simply walks on at the end,
perhaps resurrected by Santa Claus’s Christmas magic, then resumes his
previous role, though he dies less frequently in subsequent episodes.
South Park announced from the very beginning that it was not going to
be conventional family-oriented animated fare. The first word of dialogue
spoken in the series is “Goddammit,” which young Kyle shouts in response
to the fact that his baby brother Ike has followed him to the school bus stop,
where he waits with Stan, Cartman, and Kenny. (The last bit of dialogue in
the episode, incidentally, is Cartman’s exclamation, “Son of a bitch!”) Soon
afterward, Cartman calls Ike a “dildo,” though none of the boys, except
Kenny, their group expert on sex and profanity, knows what a dildo is.
Kyle then proceeds to demonstrate the game of “kick the baby,” in which
he boots little Ike like a football, first into a group of mailboxes and then
through the closed window of the arriving school bus.
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Drawn to Television
The main plot of this episode involves the fact that Cartman (though
he himself thinks it was just a dream) has been abducted by aliens, who
inserted and left a probe in his anus. As a result, whenever he farts, which
he does frequently in this and other episodes, flames shoot out of his ass,
much to the amusement of the other children. Meanwhile, the aliens kidnap
Ike, and the boys spend much of the episode trying to rescue him, finally
succeeding after Cartman recalls the alien ship by signaling it using an
80-foot satellite dish that emerges from his anus. In between, numerous
local cows are vivisected by the aliens, Stan vomits every time classmate
Wendy Testaburger (Mary Kay Bergman, credited as Shannen Cassidy)
speaks to him, the school cook Chef (Isaac Hayes) sings a sexually sugges-
tive song as a way of giving advice to the boys, and Kenny is killed and eaten
by rats after being zapped by the aliens, trampled by a herd of cows, and
run over by a police car. In one classic South Park moment in the episode,
Cartman complains to his mother that their pet cat is “being a dildo.” “Well,
then,” sweetly responds Mrs. Cartman (Bergman), “I know a certain kitty
kitty who’s sleeping with mommy tonight.”
In the course of the next several episodes, the boys continue to employ
an almost unending stream of profanities, Chef continues his horny (but
often wise) ways, and their teacher Mr. Herbert Garrison (Parker), appears
more and more unhinged, as when he attempts to assassinate television
personality Kathie Lee Gifford in “Weight Gain 4000” (August 27, 1997).
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