It’s hard to feel sorry for Eric Cartman. While all four of South Park’s leading fourth graders are foul-mouthed little assholes, it’s Cartman who the show often portrays as genuinely malevolent. But in the most recent episode, “Sermon on the Mount” it’s Cartman who is the first to object to, and the most deeply affected by, the excesses of the Trump administration.
The episode holds a mirror up to institutional capitulation to the evil of the Trump administration, but it begins with Cartman despondent that his favorite NPR show (to laugh at) has been canceled by the president.
What follows is as scattershot and low brow as the South Park I remember from my college days, back when the show’s politics were still kinda anti-religion and pro-gay rather than kinda anti-woke and pro-MAGA. Cartman’s depression at the death of woke forms the B story, while the A story has the rest of the town rising up against Trump for imposing Jesus (the literal guy, who is a character) on their elementary students, only to back down under pressure in the form of Trump screaming “I’ll sue you!”
There’s a feeling of catharsis to the A story. For all its absurdity, at core it’s just reflecting exactly what we’ve seen in the first few months of the second Trump presidency. The president has unilaterally declared the end of the previous cultural era, repeatedly ignored or broken laws that ought to have protected the freedom of his opponents not to go along with it, extorted settlements from his ideological enemies, and the most powerful people and institutions in the country are simply knuckling under.
The catharsis of the A story, of a kinda MAGA-coded cartoon reflecting reality in ways most liberal-coded institutions haven’t been, may briefly ease the pain of watching it all unfold for many in Blue America. However, for my money it’s the B story, where the death of woke lands Cartman in a deep depression and he decides to kill himself (ineffectively, with the emissions from an electric car), that feels a bit more chewy.
The bugbear of South Park in recent years has been the excesses of wokeness. Predictably this has meant being extremely unkind to trans people, perpetuating the myth that including trans women in sports means allowing men to dominate women athletes.
Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have followed the trend of describing cultural clashes over what is too offensive for mass culture as an attack on their free speech. As with other figures from the right, the show took the position that right wing speech can only be free if no one from the left ever criticizes it.
In the episode, Cartman realizes that woke is dead, and it leads to an identity crisis. In a world where everyone is expected to be racist and homophobic and spewing slurs he’s lost the only thing that made him special. His role seems obviously that of a self-insert for the creators, and as such, the subtext betrays a longing for a world so recently dominated by woke, and the ability to tweak and make fun of wokeness safely.
What this subtext leaves out is agency. Cartman in the show’s world didn’t cause the death of wokeness or even wish for it. He’s one hundred percent innocent (much more so than the character is in many storylines). He wanted to laugh at NPR’s sad African lesbians, he’d never dreamed of canceling them!
At no point does the show hint that the excesses of the anti-wokeness crowd or their years of work conflating criticism and cultural change with censorship could ever have contributed to this new era of outright government censorship and repression. There’s a sense of sorrow, but no hint of responsibility.
Of all of the cultural products of anti-wokeness, South Park is so far the first to have treated the free-speech absolutism they once espoused as a principle worth standing by in the Trump era. Maybe that should be enough. But I can’t stop thinking that they’re the ones who did this! They made wokeness into the culture’s greatest bogeyman. They demonized minorities asking for equal treatment, pooh-poohed social change, perpetuated lies, and coddled a growing reactionary movement who, despite its violence and its open Nazis, were never taken seriously.
The widespread belief that NPR lesbians and trans women in sports were a greater hazard than Nazis and extremist Christians was the most catastrophic failure of conventional wisdom in my lifetime. I’m glad South Park is willing to risk cancellation to tell the truth about this Trumpist world we’re stuck with, but I can’t resist the urge to say: You assholes caused this.
Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media.
I never saw South Park as having gone anti-woke. I took it as a pivot in how they approached their satire. From that perspective, to me it was as scathing as ever.
Maybe you never saw them go "anti-woke" because at the time they were using outdated terminology to go "anti-PC" with the entire season they dedicated to Politically Correct Principal
Bang on. Bigotry for me, not for thee.
South Park was never even slighly MAGA wtf. The world is not an us vs them thing, making fun of certain aspects associated with wokeness every now and then doesn’t automatically make you a Trump supporter. Are we fans of the same show?
This is not very well written and your bias clearly shows. Luckily like three people are reading this. I sincerely hope you try harder and get better.
It’s an opinion piece, clearly labeled, but thanks for your thoughts I guess.
lol any criticism of the now extremist woke movement is silenced 😂
Woke has become a malevolent parody of itself, with a narrow corridor of accepted opinion.
If you’re blaming south park for this, you have issues. Maybe look at the people we voted in, or those who voted for them, instead of a show cartoon on a channel called ‘comedy central’
The fact that you expect cartoons to be held to higher standards than our politicians speaks more to you than it does anything else. South park and the boundaries they have pushed and fought in court have been one of the few things cementing the absolute right to parody anything. Yes, they can be crass, and they definitely aren’t liberal, but what do you want them to do? Honestly. What would you have written? I can guarantee whatever it is, it’s not going to be funny — which is the only point of this cartoon. Again… it’s a cartoon.
"perpetuating the myth that including trans women in sports means allowing men to dominate women athletes"
Myth?
If a "person who has male genitalia" decides to use women’s clothes, compete against women on any sport, and wins…
This sounds like REALITY, not MYTH.
Trans women have been competing for decades, under guidelines that ensure their biology has changed sufficiently so as to compete equally. In all that time, there have been no trans women Olympic medalists or World Champions. Their rate of winning is far less than you’d expect given their prevalence in the population.
One trans woman won one significant college level race and people lost their minds. But if trans women were participating at equal rates to their existence in the population and they had no advantage they’d win a few medals every Olympics.
So yes. A myth. One you’ve swallowed wholesale.
I think this take is spot on. I was a huge fan of South Park before the PC Principal era. In the earlier seasons the show skewered all comers but maintained a semblance of a moral center along the lines of "don’t be a douche" (most of the time at least). In the later seasons the show started to seem like it was mostly just nodding along to right wing talking points. The anti-woke stuff just seemed like punching down at minorities. And it’s hard to be funny when you’re punching down and mostly agree with the anti-woke narrative you’re making your show about. This season, on the other hand, is funnier because South Park is punching up at the powerful again.
I think the show’s big mistake was in thinking that "woke" actually did represent the powerful and needed to be taken down a peg. When in reality, "woke" is more just a bunch of minorities and other disadvantaged people who cobbled together a little bit of political power and cultural capital to ask that they be treated with a little more respect and fairness. In contrast, the anti-woke crowd is the historically powerful groups who didn’t like having to give up any little bit of their dominance or especially being told that they shouldn’t look down their noses at groups of people they’re accustomed to feeling superior to. And as the Trump eras have demonstrated, any "woke" power that minorities and the disadvantaged could wield was pretty tenuous and illusory in the face of those with real power.
This is not to say that there aren’t funny jokes to be made about "woke." I think there are. But when the driving force of the show became about going after woke, the dominant narrative was just the powerful punching down, and that makes for weak comedy.
Great piece that was thought provoking. I disagree with some takes but this piece made a lot of valid points.