South Park

0:00:03.8 Landry Ayres: Welcome to Pop & Locke. I’m Landry Ayres, and today, we are going on down to South Park to have ourselves a time, and what kind of journey would it be, without the friendly faces of our four guests. These humble folks without temptation, who are joining me today include comedian, writer, and host of the political orphanage, Andrew Heaton.

0:00:25.7 Andrew Heaton: Hello.

0:00:26.0 Landry Ayres: As well as his co-​host on Losers, Pretenders and Scoundrels, as well as Stone Cold Paradise, fellow unlicensed historian, Andrew Young.

0:00:36.1 Andrew Young: Hello.

0:00:38.0 Landry Ayres: And returning to the show, we are so glad to have back, co-​founder of Feminists for Liberty, Kat Murti.

0:00:45.1 Kat Murti: Hi. Glad to be the least funny and only non-​Andrew on the show today.

[chuckle]

0:00:50.8 Landry Ayres: What made South Park stand out when it first came out? When it first premiered, what was it that made it so new and fresh and has given it the staying power, if it is the same thing? Was it just the complete, subversive, irreverent nature of the humor? Was it something else? How did it get to the sort of cultural touchstone that it is today?

0:01:17.8 Kat Murti: Well, so there was cartoon shows that were on the floor that we all know about; Simpsons already being on the air, we already had stuff like King of the Hill, which I love. But South Park, I think, took it beyond that. It was the first cartoon show, I believe, that was actually TV MA to the mainstream American audience. So this was the first time it was a truly adult cartoon show coming on on mainstream, and it was just over the top in every little way. In a way that Simpsons, it’s fun, it’s absurdist, but not like South Park. South Park is just maximalist in every sense.

0:01:53.0 Andrew Heaton: Yeah, the level of boundary… The Simpsons was great. I suppose it still might be, but I haven’t… Really, I quit watching The Simpsons when Futurama became a thing, and I haven’t really gone back. But, The Simpsons was super fun, very, very clever, made big impacts on everybody in my generation, but was not super edgy. It was, when it very first started because they said the word, butt and shut up, both of which were foreboden in the Heaton household at that time, and so I was required to watch with my parents. It was considered to risque. Whereas now, it is the standard bearer of wholesome American morality, where…

0:02:30.2 Landry Ayres: They didn’t even let me watch it in my house. It was off-​limits completely. If they could block the channel and figure out how to work through remote.

0:02:37.3 Andrew Heaton: There were a lot of people like that. South Park came out the gate different though, and I feel like South Park has… It’s matured as a series, so initially, when it first started, it really was shock humor, which was great. I started watching South Park when I was in middle school, and it was just hilariously, uproariously inappropriate.

0:02:58.0 Andrew Heaton: There’s an episode where Stan’s grandfather really wants to die, and so, is just telling Cartman these horrible things about how he dug up the corpse of his grandmother and made sweet love to it. It really was like… For a 16-​year-​old, that was a crazy level of impropriety being flouted and really funny in that capacity. So I think that that’s how it started. I think that the kick that it got was by being extremely subversive. I think that it’s remained subversive, but the subversive element of it has matured over time. So when it first started, it was just, “These are things you can’t say and we’re gonna say them,” and then I feel like it kind of went into a second phase, where it purposely enjoyed poking Democrats and Republicans. That’s kind of in the Team America era, where they consciously wanted to piss off Republicans at the beginning of that film, and then consciously wanted to piss off Democrats at the latter end of that film. And then in the mid-​2000s, it sort of matured into a really scalpel-​sharp satire of culture, to where they would go in and do some of the best political satire and certainly the best cultural satire that you could find in the United States, and it remained subversive in that capacity because there were no sacred cows. But it became a kind of targeted, “This is the thing that a group finds holy or off limits, so we’re going to discuss that,” as opposed to, “These are words you can’t say,” which is how it started.

0:04:27.6 Andrew Young: Well, and I think South Park… I would even say the Simpsons is a product of its time too, because there was a time when people wouldn’t let you watch the symptoms in your household, because… Not just because of butt and shut up, but because it was kind of pillaring the standard American family and showing a father who kinda smacked his kids around, a kid who was not on Leave It to Beaver kind to his parents. It was not… And it was paired with Married With Children, on Fox, which I found to be a really great pairing of two shows. So I know, in my house, we couldn’t watch the Simpsons and then we couldn’t watch South Park until eventually, my parents saw both shows and laughed so much that they’re like, “We can’t stop our kids from watching this, ’cause we think it’s so funny, and they know that we’re hypocrites.” And then… Yeah, I would say, the Simpsons less so, but I would agree with Heaton. South Park definitely just kept evolving and evolved into, I would say even before Team America, I think South Park, Bigger Longer and Uncut, the feature film, is such a fun example of them basically pointing out that parents blaming television for their own poor parenting is ridiculous, and that that whole movie is a lambast of kind of cultural norms.

0:05:48.2 Andrew Heaton: And a great entree into the musical genius of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and they are. Let’s be very clear about this. They are musical geniuses. They are doing things…

0:05:58.8 Kat Murti: Book of Mormon is still touring.

0:06:00.0 Andrew Heaton: Book of Mormon’s brilliant and the music’s fantastic. If it weren’t funny, I would still enjoy the music.

0:06:06.4 Andrew Young: Yeah, they have such a brilliant sense of what constitutes a good song, and then what makes it the perfect kind of song to create a satire of a particular subject. Even when you have a song like Uncle f****r, to open… Pretty much open your movie. It’s such a… The song itself is so simple, they’re just repeating that phrase more or less over and over and over again, but then they have a breakdown that is just farting, a fart break down in the middle of the song, and it’s so well, I guess orchestrated is the word that we’ll choose to use, but it’s so well put together that it’s musically inspiring, in addition to being just funny because it’s fart humour.

0:06:48.4 Andrew Heaton: And then the blame Canada song is great. And also, South part doesn’t tend to be super absurdist, but it does… When it does deploy it, it’s really funny. In the world of South Park, it’s just established fact that Canada is an ethnic group, that Canadian is an ethnic group, just the same way that English people and Scots and Germans are, and you can be racist if you don’t like Canadians, and they have very distinctive heads. I find that… And they never draw attention to that, it’s just established. It’s a very funny thing.

0:07:17.4 Andrew Young: I would disagree with you on one thing, Heaton. No, I think South Park tends to be absurdist a lot. I think that’s what makes it so successful is that they take their…

0:07:26.4 Andrew Heaton: Point taken.

0:07:27.6 Andrew Young: Yeah, they take their… Anything that they’re going to pillory, they’ll take to the furthest possible conclusion, which I think is… When we talk about satire, I think successful satire requires absurdism. I think you have to go so far away, that your audience has trouble thinking that you’re being serious, which… To go to the original Jonathan Swift, you have to talk about eating babies in a very literal sense, for your audience to not be like… Or at least the majority of your audience to not be like, “Oh, he’s serious.”

0:07:56.8 Kat Murti: Right. I think it sort of started out as just an attack on PC culture, which was why they were taking it to that far extent, but that’s what makes all of the satire good, and the fact that they didn’t focus just on attacking PC culture, that’s sort of what shapes how the episode’s flow and the types of humor that they use, but there’s really… It attacks everyone and everything, there’s nothing sacred. And that’s what makes it good. It doesn’t feel as if, “Oh, you have to fall into this camp or that camp to enjoy South Park,” you just… If you’re a human who lives in America and have some basic understanding of how the culture works here, South Park will be funny to you.

0:08:34.6 Landry Ayres: Well, that’s really interesting that you mentioned that. The sort of central tension of the show, if you can nail one down, and the sort of motivating force behind it is that nothing is sacred, nothing is off-​limits. Everyone is up for ridicule, no holds barred and that lack of boundaries really is itself, the only boundary, if you can consider it that. That’s the value that the show kind of supposes and builds itself upon, which is really interesting, considering that Matt Stone and Trey Parker are some of the most famous, or maybe not most famous, but perhaps I think, the most successful libertarian comedians, at least in the recent couple of decades, I would assume. And they’ve kind of been on the fence, over the years, whether they would identify with that label or whether they identify with any label. There’s times when they have sort of implied that it’s not quite fitting for them, and other times, where they think it is probably the most apt of those that we have. Is South Park kind of a libertarian show? What values of that ideology are shown within? And is it really an embracing of libertarian ideology or does it just manifest is a rejection of the institutionalized, conservative and liberal dominant ways of going about politics and culture?

0:10:11.1 Andrew Young: I think, by default there, they attack systems. Their entire philosophy seems to attack accepted systems or accepted beliefs and norms, and I think there’s parallels to that in libertarianism for sure, because fundamentally, libertarianism has a skeptical nature to it in terms of believing and trusting institutions that we’ve been told we have to trust. And I think that there’s a cross over there, whether or not that manifests itself as like a political ideology, I don’t know. But there are definitely people who attack overall systemic thinking.

0:10:47.8 Kat Murti: Yeah, what I think is really interesting here is, there’s actually a political term that’s come out of the show. Andrew Sullivan coined it now almost 20 years ago, but South Park Republican, and it’s this idea of what really is almost a libertarian. It’s sort of more fiscally conservative individuals who also push back against PC culture, who aren’t really the moral majority church-​goer types, who don’t really like the more lefty causes, but also don’t like the more right-​wing causes, and I think that that’s kind of where Trey Parker and Matt Stone fit. They’ve said that they’re not libertarians, but if they had to be labeled, they would be most close to be libertarians.

0:11:34.7 Kat Murti: I think that’s what it is. It’s not that… The show isn’t a vehicle for ideology, the show is just… I forget which one of them said it, but I really hate conservatives and I really hate liberals. And so it’s like they’re just across the board, they’re there to push back against the power structures that are there. What they see is the things that are not acceptable to criticize, and that’s what makes the show good. So I don’t think that it’s exactly libertarian. There’s not a libertarian consistency or ideology, but it’s against these established power structures, which then has the sort of libertarian flow to it.

0:12:11.3 Andrew Heaton: Yeah, I think it’s either adjacent or it’s kind of… There’s a vague libertarian flavor to it. I think it depends on how we wanna talk about libertarianism. I think libertarianism does tend to be very concerned about the accumulation of power and the deployment of force, and in that capacity, South Park is always taking pot shots at whoever is in power, culturally or politically. Although, as you all point out, Kat and Andrew, they’re not dogmatic about it. A lot of libertarians, if they were sitting down to write a program, would not make fun of corporate malfeasance because it’s, “Well, but the corporation did it, everyone blah, blah, blah, NAP,” and would quit writing jokes about it. But they’ve never been hamstrung by that, they do not have sacred libertarian cows that they must maintain. It’s never ever been a part of it. But I think what you can say about them is one, Andrew, I’m gonna say Landry, to your point; yes, they are a kind of willful rejection of Republican and Democratic bandwagoning. That does not automatically make you libertarian. You could be something else. You could be a monarchist, you could be a communist, you could be something else.

0:13:21.3 Andrew Heaton: So, that, in and of itself does not make them libertarian, but I do think that they broadly fall into a world view that is comporting itself with libertarianism. What I mean by that is, relying on Arnold Kling, an economist that I quite like, progressives tend to understand the world in terms of oppressor versus Victim. And if you watch MSNBC, that could be the subtitle to every single story they have, is little guy gets stepped on, that’s everything. And if things don’t enter that world view, they don’t really compute for progressives.

0:13:52.7 Andrew Heaton: Conservatives, their tagline is, civilization is under threat. Any Fox show you watch, civilization is under threat, can absolutely be the sub-​heading to it. So conservative humor tends to be more like King of the Hill, where there’s the patriarch figure who is common sense, who’s pushing back against the idiocy of pencil-​headed over-​thinkers and that kind of thing. So I would say, King of the Hill is actually more conservative in its outlook, whereas libertarianism, according to Kling, and I think this is pretty accurate, in terms of how libertarians see the World and express the world is coercive versus voluntary. Now, that’s not something that they’re returning to, on a regular basis, it’s not something that seems to animate them, but I do think that they seem to have a sense of humor, that more comports with that kind of world view, and they’ll kind of wink at it occasionally. Kat you bring up, I think accurately, that they’ve sort of said like, “Look, we’re not really libertarians,” but in 2016, they said, “Between Trump and Hillary, we would vote for Gary Johnson if we thought he had a chance.”

0:14:53.1 Andrew Heaton: So they’re sort of vaguely there, but it’s also the reason they’ve been able to be successful. So me being very funny and swimming in libertarian circles, every year or two, some millionaire goes, “We should have a libertarian show that’s very popular,” and my response is, “You do, it’s called South Park. It’s very good at tackling those.” And they’re like, “Well, no, no, we wanna have a funny libertarian show,” and there’s sort of two kind of libertarians. There’s libertarians that think freedom works pretty well and central planning doesn’t work very well, and so let’s default on freedom and be skeptical of government. And then there’s the other group of libertarians that carries a manifesto around in a plastic Walmart sack, about why all voluntary force is permissible but no other voluntary… If it’s not… I have to stop the car on the way to Disneyland, because you have to discuss this right now. And those guys aren’t gonna be great at writing comedy because they’re gonna have to have those sacred cows that they never touch, ever, ever, ever under any circumstance. And the more sacred cows you have, the harder it is, to write comedy. And Trey Parker and Matt Stone are not beholden to that.

0:16:00.0 Kat Murti: Yeah, so I think that what’s good about South Park is that it started out as this anti-​PC show, and so as a result of that, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, people referred to them as conservatives. As a conservative show, they were conservative, humorous, and they pushed back against that. That’s when they first said that if they were going to be labeled, they would be more libertarian, that they don’t accept that label either. And I think that that’s kind of really what the show was about, because they do attack things like… They have the… I forget his name, but the principal, PC bro…

0:16:38.6 Andrew Heaton: PC Principal. Yeah.

0:16:40.9 Kat Murti: PC Principal. Yeah. He’s fantastic, and he really… He’s kind of a character that a lot of modern Republicans would really like, and at the same time, to show also attacks organized religion, Satan is a recurring character. It attacks people who want to censor shows like South Park, for how vulgar it can be, and so it’s really… It’s not trying to get in the pocket of anybody, and I think that if they really were true to an ideology that they were trying to push, it wouldn’t work. If anything, their only ideology is irreverence.

0:17:15.9 Andrew Heaton: Well put. That was a much more succinct version of the babbling monologue that I just had.

[music]

0:17:23.8 Landry Ayres: If you really take it to heart, it’s kind of tough to… It’s kind of… I wouldn’t call it an nihilistic, but it certainly doesn’t make you feel cool for being passionate about things. Any time you start to really believe in something, you’re like, “Well, now I’m opening myself to get made fun of for whatever reason,” and to a certain extent, I think it’s healthy for every person, to be understanding of not taking themselves too seriously. But is there a line that they won’t cross and should there be? And maybe it’s not to imagine it like a line you shouldn’t cross, ’cause we’ve established that there are no boundaries for them, that that’s antithetical to their mission, to consider it that. But, is there something that they will not broach or that would be… Would turn this on its head? Because it really does make you think like… It has this sort of stereotypically Gen X, don’t care about anything, it’s all meaningless type of humor, and it had a strange impact. I’m thinking of all of the kids that I grew up with, who grew up…

0:18:45.0 Landry Ayres: Not with the super early South Park that really understood that it was pushing boundaries to actually say things against the institutions and media and expectations, but really all they heard was Cartman yells at all the other kids and calls everybody gay slurs and we’re like, “He’s funny he can get away with it.” And then you have shows like Rick and Morty, which I think are very different and very smart and irreverent in their own way, these are not the same show by any means, but people took the wrong things from it, it has… What I sort of refer to as like a fight club kind of syndrome.

0:19:25.3 Landry Ayres: They released the McDonald sauces for Rick and Morty years ago, and sure, McDonald’s didn’t do a good job stocking these sauces, but it became this big internet meme that people expected to just be terrible so these workers at these fast food places, ’cause you couldn’t get your Szechuan sauce and kind of embodying this like Nothing matters Rick Sanchez kind of attitude. So it’s this weird… I get a weird feeling and I feel conflicted about these shows because I wanna say that I really value and am supportive of this, like no one should take themselves so seriously that they cannot joke about themselves, but on the other hand, does a show get so big that it needs to understand the significance that it has on its audience. And maybe this is something… I think you’ve talked about this before, Heaton, the sort of difference in improv and stand-​up comedians, the sort of de-​ontological and utilitarian mindset about, “Does your comedy do something or does it just exist?” What do you make of that? And is it a responsibility that the content maker should care about or should they just say, I make this, I have a message, what you do with it and what you take with it is your own business.

0:20:46.5 Andrew Young: Well, I was just gonna say, to the first question, whether or not there’s a line that they won’t cross, I don’t think consciously that there is one, I would assume that like anyone, they have their own various ingrained biases that might lead them away from talking about a particular subject, but I think by default, their reaction to what they see in the news or on social media or what have you, is someone’s taking something to an extreme that I think is too much and ridiculous, I’m gonna find a way to make fun of that thing and I don’t think it’s necessarily always passion. People can be passionate about things and they’re not gonna go after everyone, it’s when they see it crossing the lines of common sense or crossing the lines of thoughtful passion into blind passion. I think that’s when they go for it, and I don’t really think they… Just based on interviews and based on the sheer volume of the work of things that they’ve made fun of, it doesn’t seem like there’s anything that they’re not willing to touch because it’s a sacred cow. That’s the impression I get.

0:21:55.3 Andrew Heaton: So I agree with that. And I’m glad Landry that you brought up Rick and Morty, because Rick and Morty is occasionally painted as a libertarian, funny cartoon, it is not. The creators of Rick and Morty Dan Harmon are emphatically not libertarian. He is a Hollywood liberal. What they are is nihilistic, that is what they are doing, and they’re up front about that, that Rick is a nihilistic. It’s not that he is anti-​Democrat and anti-​Republican, but loves free markets and individual freedom, it’s that he just hates everything and doesn’t believe that anything has meaning. Right, so these are two different things. And in that capacity, I do think that South Park has a touch of nihilism to it, it has a nihilistic flavor to it, I don’t think that makes it bad, however, there was a whole Twitter thing about a year and a half ago about how South Park poisoned everything and made everybody nihilistic. And it’s sort of a yes, but yes, I do think that South Park takes the piss out of anything that takes itself seriously or is even enthusiastic about it, but I want there… I don’t mind there being humor like that, I think that the response of that is incumbent upon us, it’s how we react to this.

0:23:08.6 Andrew Heaton: So for example, when I watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, two or three times in a row, I can tell that I talk louder around people, I just yell at people more because that’s what all the characters are doing. Well, it’s a funny show, it’s okay that they’re yelling at each other, but it’s not okay for me to just yell at people because I’ve been watching it. I should have the presence of mind as the consumer of this media to go, “That was funny, and those people are dirt bags and the humor is coming from them being dirt bags and that it’s inappropriate for them to be dirt bags. I am not gonna go be a dirt bag.” And the other interesting corollary to all of this is we’re now seeing a kind of… What would you call it? Like an earnestness push back against South Park and you can like these things simultaneously and still… But I think we reach kind of peak snark maybe about three years ago, where it was really cool to not like things, and if you liked things, you had to do it ironically. If you were in Williamsburg five years ago, and you’re writing a bike, you’d be like…

0:24:03.5 Kat Murti: I think this is more like 2008.

0:24:05.6 Andrew Heaton: 2000… I’m always behind on this, but you see someone on a bike and they’re like, “Isn’t it funny that I’m riding a bike? Isn’t it stupid?” And you’re like, you could just like a bike right, and you’re seeing this on the flip side in humor, right now. Ted Lasso and the Detroiters are great examples of earnestness being funny, and it’s actually kind of, I think a bit biking in our culture that people who like things unapologetically are amusing to us, that someone that just is really excited is inherently funny, and that’s very different than the South Park model. Right. But I think they can both co-​exist.

0:24:33.8 Andrew Young: I would say the Good Place.

0:24:35.8 Andrew Heaton: Hmm?

0:24:36.5 Andrew Young: The Good Place is another example of that.

0:24:37.4 Andrew Heaton: Yeah.

0:24:38.3 Kat Murti: Honestly, I’m kind of taken aback by the fact that anyone would suggest that South Park has made people nihilistic. South Park came about at the end of the 90s, and that sounds very… A historical… If you look at 90s culture in general, or as Landry used to put it. The whole Gen-​X generation that was steep denial-​ism well before South Park. But I wanna go back to what you called almost the Fight Club problem, because I think about this all the time, there’s so many great pieces of pop culture, Fight Club Chief amongst them… American Psycho, Rick and Morty is a good one. I love Batman, the Joker as a character is another one that it’s almost like people glob on to them and miss the fact that these characters are meant to be the punch line.

0:25:26.7 Andrew Young: Or villains.

0:25:28.9 Kat Murti: And… Or villains, right. The Joker says, why so serious? And these… And there’s so many people who are out there repeating that exact line and they’re taking it very seriously, they’re completely missing the fact that this is like, we’re… The creators or the show, the media is making fun of that character, is kind of lampooning it in a way. And of course, we’re not talking about Batman, so I won’t get too much into the joker. It’s not quite a lampoon, but at the same time, that is kind of the approach here. Eric Cartman, yes, he throws out gay slurs and slurs of all kinds and is just generally an Unlikeable character, you’re not supposed to watch Cartman and want to be Cartman. You’re supposed to watch Cartman and be like, “Oh, he’s representing all the terrible-​ness in our society,” and yet somehow he’s… Because he’s out there doing this, we can also see that it’s not just him who’s terrible, it’s not the people who are so openly terrible, there’s a lot of other terrible-​ness that’s… Because he’s this crazy over the top character that we’re able to see that even these other aspects, the more PC aspects of folks who aren’t yelling out the slurs can be pretty terrible as well.

0:26:37.0 Andrew Young: Well, and I think that’s kind of how they avoid being just an nihilistic show, because Cartman is someone who doesn’t really believe in anything but himself, and often times… Sometimes he wins, but oftentimes he loses or ends up being made the fool, so they kind of walk the line sometimes, and having some of their… Or like Randy is another character who is an idiot obviously, but leans into doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons and gets… Loses pretty heavily because of it, so I think they get away with being…

0:27:10.6 Andrew Heaton: So there’s a kind of morality art there?

0:27:11.9 Andrew Young: Yes.

0:27:13.1 Kat Murti: Yeah, I think there is a message. I think there is a message. I don’t think that the purpose of the show is to have a message, but even within all of those episodes, they go over the top, but there’s something that’s sort of at the core there that is kind of reasonable. It’s because they get out to this maximalist, no bounds, the worst possible example of whatever we’re talking about today, that you see, okay, so there is something in the middle that kind of makes sense.

0:27:38.6 Andrew Young: Right, I think that comes from… They understand story so well, they have such a solid understanding of what makes a compelling and satisfying story that you can’t walk away from a South Park episode not… Feeling as though you’re empty, you feel fulfilled, and by doing that, it inevitably kind of works against nihilism because to truly feel fulfilled; fulfilled in a story arc of an episode, you have to walk away with some sense of satisfaction and South Park, the movie is an example of that too. By the end of the movie, it’s all Kumbaya, and everybody is happy, everybody loves each other, and they realized that Canada is not so bad, and Terrance and Phillip are all friends. Like it’s a very positive ending in a movie that is making fun of all kinds of things.

0:28:26.6 Andrew Heaton: To piggy-​back on a prior comment as well, Kat, I’m glad that you brought up the general impropriety of Cartman. There is a form of humor, which is laughing at something which is inappropriate, so like the example of this would be, when we’re laughing at Cartman, who is for saying something anti-​Semitic to Kyle, it’s not because we are like, Ha-​ha, The Jews, at least it shouldn’t be. It’s laughing because one, the anti-​semitism is in and of itself ludicrous, we can see that it is crazy on some level, but then beyond that, or like Terrance and Phillip doing fart jokes and things like that, it’s not that the fart jokes are funny, it’s that it’s just ridiculous how far they’re taking this thing you’re not supposed to say, and we’re sort of… We, the audience are laughing at… Yeah, that is very inappropriate. It’s kind of prototypical dead baby joke kind of thing, where you’re laughing at the…

0:29:24.1 Kat Murti: The awkward laughter.

0:29:24.7 Andrew Heaton: Yeah, you’re laughing at the extent at which it’s taken, and in that capacity, when people get offended by South Park, you sort of have to remind them, right, they’re not making an earnest anti-​semitic joke, that would be a different thing and a thing that we should indeed crack down on. They’re making fun of how awful it is that this awful character is making an anti-​semitic joke, we’re laughing at that… How ridiculous he is.

0:29:50.6 Landry Ayres: You brought up the sort of Twitter tirade about South Park turning people nihilistic a few years ago, and I think around the same time in a very similar conversation, someone really had the gaffe to basically make the same argument about Michael Scott on the office, and they were like his character made it seem like so many of these things that you could do in an office would be appropriate, and we laughed at him, and I was like, No, the joke of Michael Scott is that he says these things that would never be okay. And yes, he still has his job, but we are laughing at how ridiculous it is, and we have someone like a Jim character or someone else…

0:30:37.0 Kat Murti: He’s supposed to be the bad boss.

0:30:37.4 Landry Ayres: Right. He’s a bad boss. We have the Jim character to ground everything and look at the camera and reflect and say something to the audience to say, “Can you believe that this is going on?” But you also get the sort of understanding of that is that Michael Scott as a character learns and grows over time, he gets closer to the other cast members and he sort of changes and he sort of…

0:31:04.1 Landry Ayres: He softens up around the edges and they bring in other characters to fill that space and that role within the dynamic of the other characters, whereas South Park, I don’t know, it kind of has that Simpson’s idea of like the characters don’t really change or grow or learn from their mistakes, too much episode to episode, and that’s part of the formula of the show, that’s part of how it works. And there’s a dynamic that makes that really, really interesting… What does that do that gives them the ability to sort of push boundaries in a way that if their characters have this sort of grounded-​ness in reality and the ability to change and learn from their mistakes, that the other doesn’t?

0:31:49.2 Andrew Young: You can’t get away with having each episode build off of the last episode and still have ignorant characters from episode to episode ’cause… You can to an extent, but at some point when you’ve dealt with, say religion or you’ve dealt with a political party or the insanity of celebrities, if the characters are advancing from episode to episode, you lose the ability to pretty much make them stupid again without your audience feeling like, Oh, this is a betrayal of where we’ve watched this character grow to. And now I will say it’s not a show like Always Sunny In Philadelphia, it’s similar in a lot of ways, and that, yeah, they advance certain story arcs of the characters, but the characters never learn anything really at the end of an episode, so they get to keep doing that…

0:32:41.6 Kat Murti: But everyone just keeps getting worse…

0:32:43.2 Andrew Young: Yes!

0:32:43.6 Kat Murti: Right, that’s what’s good about that show.

0:32:46.4 Andrew Young: So in South Park for example, the world doesn’t really grow all that much except for when they do long season arcs, where like, Oh, now we have PC Principal and he’s here forever, and now we have Tegridy Farms and it’s here forever, but those characters really… I don’t think they’ve ever aged or changed grades or anything like that, so you’re allowed to basically… You have your little controlled experiment test case to put your culture and political ideas into and just push it back out and you don’t have to… You don’t have to change it for the changing times of the characters.

0:33:22.0 Kat Murti: So South Park has been on the air almost 30 years now, and in that time, the character started in third grade, they’ve gone on to fourth grade, that’s a really long time to be through two grades. So in a certain way, they are kind of…

0:33:34.5 Landry Ayres: We didn’t all matriculate at the same rate as you, Kat, some of us had to go through these grades a few different times.

0:33:41.4 Kat Murti: A few different times, right. But yeah, that’s a long time to be in two grades, and yet there is still change. Your first several seasons, Kenny dies every episode, then Kenny dies and stays dead and then comes back and now he’s kind of a new, less flat character. Butters, who is this very earnest character at first, doesn’t even talk, he’s just this Leave It to Beaver parity, and then because he’s that leave it to Beaver parity, they’re able to do so much more with him, he’s almost like a main cast character at this point.

0:34:16.0 Andrew Young: Yeah, I think so.

0:34:20.1 Kat Murti: So I think that there’s just… And that’s true, I think of Tolkien, of Chef, of a lot of the different characters, and the reason for that is because it allows them to explore new story lines, new aspects, new perspectives, I think, even in a universe that doesn’t change that much, and it does change. PC principal wouldn’t have made as much sense if he had been in the early… In the late 90s, early 2000s episodes, he wouldn’t have been a character, that person, those ideas didn’t exist in the same way.

0:34:53.9 Andrew Young: And I think that’s actually… That’s what has made the show so smart is that it evolved from its chief jokes being potty humor, and how many times and how many different ways they could kill Kenny in an episode, and bad advice from Chef and other parents and things like that to a show that said, “Alright, well, how are we gonna change? We know that we’re annoyed or otherwise frustrated with the way the culture is taking itself… Either taking itself too seriously or basically repressing other ideas by trying to make itself the chief thought that we’ll just fold that into our story arcs.” And at the risk of almost killing themselves from season to season based on some of the behind-​the scene stuff, it seems like it’s worked really well for them and it’s kept them fresh, it’s rare that the episode is doing the same thing as another episode, they’re finding a different comedic way of going after something, and I think it keeps it really, really fresh.

0:35:56.7 Kat Murti: And… To the freshness point, I think what’s really interesting about the show is that unlike most TV show, not just animated shows, they’re not actually planning out the episodes before the season, all of those episodes are being filmed in… Oh, not filmed, but are being created in under a week for the most part, some of them only a couple of days, and so they are fresh because they’re responding to the news of the week, the current things that are… People are getting a little bit too invested in, in the creator’s view, and so I think that that also the fact that it is very much informed by what’s happening in the world around it, even if the South Park world itself doesn’t change that much, I think that kind of does… It injects that freshness.

0:36:42.2 Landry Ayres: I’m curious about that. And by the way, if listeners have not seen the really, really great short documentary that, I think, it was a Comedy Central production, Six Days to Air that sort of follows them for a week before they produce and release an episode. It’s a really, really fascinating behind the scenes look. I believe the entire thing is on YouTube at this point, so you should check it out, but because they are trying to focus on things minute to minute, there are of course, classic episodes and ones that you can revisit all the time, and this is really just a personal opinion that I’m curious about, have any of the past episodes, if you’ve ever revisit them, felt dated or that they’re not part of the cultural conversation anymore, or do you think that they as sort of writing staff are really good enough that they can find the sort of invaluable evergreen part of those conversations and latch on to them and kind of tease those out?

0:37:37.9 Andrew Young: I haven’t done a deep dive in a while, but I remember a few years ago, I saw an episode… An earlier season episode, I’m like, Oh, this doesn’t hit with me quite like it did, and it was not… It was an episode that had been created after they made the switch to pull from the headlines as their Chief model for creating content. So as with anything, if you forget the cultural context of what the episode is making fun of, it’s gonna lose a little bit of steam, but I think by virtue of the fact that they are using allegory to deal with… They’re mapping whatever the cultural thing is on to something else.

0:38:23.2 Andrew Young: And then it’s up to the audience to be like, Oh, I know what you’re talking about, when you’re talking about smug as a gas that’s released when people are too full of themselves, that… That still holds true a lot of the times, you can still laugh at that just as an absurd context that they’re applying to this particular concept.

0:38:45.0 Andrew Heaton: I got nothing to add to that, I agree. I was thinking the episodes that I go back and watch every once in a while aren’t particularly… Now, I guess they are, actually, now that I think about it, the funniest episode, in my opinion, the two that I love, I love the one with Awesom-​O, which is where Cartman is pretending to be a robot in a cardboard box in order to get this thing that he wants… And it’s just this wonderful episode of this horrible character being tortured, and there’s a good comic balance to it, but it’s very funny. I love that episode, and then the other one I love is where the… Cartman goes forward in time in order to play with the newest Nintendo…

0:39:24.5 Andrew Young: A PSP, right?

0:39:27.2 Andrew Heaton: PSP, And so we’re seeing this back and forth between the future, which is like this war between sea otters and this cult of science, and then going in the past, and I guess at this point, Mr. Garrison is… I don’t think they would have said transgender in that era, I think they would have just said he’d had a sex change operation, so he is now Mrs. Garrison and there’s Richard Dawkins in this lurid sex affair with Mr. Garrison, I suppose Richard Dawkins is no longer the cultural touchstone and standard bearer of militant atheism that he was, but I still think it’s a very funny episode, I don’t think you have to know who he is to have it work.

0:40:12.1 Kat Murti: Well, and I think there’s ones like for instance, is the Guitar Hero episode, right? And I really like that episode, and I do think it came out at a time when Guitar Hero was a really hot game, everyone was playing guitar hero, it was sort of like this not just for gamers type thing. But what I think is good about it is Randy trying to impress his kid with the fact that he can play these songs on an actual guitar, and they’re like…

0:40:39.7 Andrew Young: Who cares, yeah.

0:40:41.2 Kat Murti: Get out here. Well, we don’t care. Yeah, play it on the video game, right. And that’s a timeless message. Anybody who has a kid or has even just doesn’t have a kid, but has just gotten a little bit older, can start to see like, Oh, all the stuff that I thought was cool is somehow not cool anymore, it’s just… That’s something that you’re gonna keep seeing.

0:41:00.1 Andrew Young: Yeah. That inability to keep up.

0:41:01.0 Andrew Heaton: The trick there, by the way, ’cause I have mastered this, is to never at any point in your life believe you are hip, there has been no point in my life where I thought I was cool, I always thought I was funny and animistic atavistic, and I can just keep rolling. I’m not having to deal with any of this weird Boomer buying a Porsche, I’m cool, I’m the fun dad bull **** that a lot of them are doing. And I was driving my friend’s kids to a show, he was already at the show, and I was driving his daughters there, and they’re both teenagers, and they’re getting into teenagers speak of all the stuff, and I thought… I thought I was gonna go, Oh my gosh, ’cause back in the day when I was a teenager, teenage girls were really good at making me feel out of touch and ridiculous.

0:41:50.7 Andrew Young: I can vouch for that, Heaton.

0:41:52.6 Andrew Heaton: And I thought, Oh, this is gonna be even worse now that I’m looking at 40, these teenage girls talking about that, I’m gonna feel so… And the more they spoke, the more I thought, Oh, I’m now old enough to know that what you’re saying is frivolous bull **** you don’t realize it yet, but I know that whatever… The weird trend you’re discussing is complete… You’re just blah, blah, blah, beanie babies, except it’s been updated and I don’t have to care about any of this, and I delivered them safely without a car accident.

0:42:18.4 Andrew Young: Unfortunately, Heaton did say to those girls, what you’re talking about is frivolous bull **** get out of my car.

0:42:23.6 Andrew Heaton: Yes I did park the car, and yelled that’s frivolous bull **** and I made them come back and read Balzac or some other philosopher, and that was the rest of the show. [0:42:33.9] ____.

0:42:36.1 Andrew Young: I can vouch for the fact that in middle school he was already thinking about getting some sort of membership to a royalty club where he could sit in a smoking room with many leather-​backed books behind him.

0:42:49.1 Andrew Heaton: And I have accomplished that goal.

0:42:50.5 Andrew Young: Yes.

0:42:51.1 Andrew Heaton: And I think the best thing we could shoot for is I think it’s entirely possible that what I am no longer even the tiny minute public figure that I am, and I’ve just quit doing all of that, maybe in my 60s, I will be ironically hip, that might happen, I might be like a farm team, William Shatner at some point in my life, and that’s the best I could shoot for.

[music]

0:43:11.8 Andrew Young: I didn’t wanna mention one thing, we talked about Randy just a little bit, and Randy Marsh… I’m sure I’m not alone in this is one of my favorite characters in the whole show. Because he is the character who is trying to be hip and trying to be caught up and trying to be like a head of the curve and always does it in the worst possible way and always looks like a fool. Tegridy Farms is such a brilliant example of him trying to get on the… He’s trying to get on the vape train, on the pot train, and just doesn’t know how to do it properly, so he comes off looking like a complete idiot. They did another one…

0:43:51.9 Andrew Heaton: The ethos of his character is he is the feckless band-​Wagoner…

0:43:57.4 Andrew Young: Yes.

0:43:58.1 Andrew Heaton: And so we can all like… As opposed to just being earnestly passionate about something, he just really wants to do the thing everybody else is doing, and he lacks the moral fortitude to do it in a good way, and so we all wanna laugh at that because we all dislike the phonies, right.

0:44:13.7 Andrew Young: Yeah, there was a recent Tegridy Farms episode where he’s at a convention for pot salesman, and the speaker at the convention says something along the lines of, We now accept that the best way to be a successful marijuana business, it’s to be a diverse marijuana business, and he just cuts randomly in the audience going… And then he realizes that he needs to hire an African-​American person on his board just to be hip with the current pop culture, and then of course, he does it in a completely wrong way.

0:44:52.2 Kat Murti: So someone who has worked in drug policy for since 2007, has worked along with a lot of these dispensaries, it’s just that that’s not even a parity, that’s actually how… What’s happening a lot of the times. So that’s hilarious.

0:45:07.4 Andrew Heaton: I kind of tuned out of South Park, not out of opposition to it, I just kinda quit watching it and have not really felt compelled to watch it again around like maybe 2018, it’s about when the Tegridy Farm stuff started, I just… I haven’t really dipped in much since then, am I missing out… Should I… Should I catch up?

0:45:25.0 Andrew Young: Well, I’ll say this… It’s great, it’s a little harder sometimes to pop in because they’ve kind of switched to a model where the seasons have an arc as well, so they have individual funny things to it…

0:45:38.9 Andrew Heaton: Really?

0:45:40.1 Andrew Young: Yeah.

0:45:40.6 Andrew Heaton: Wow.

0:45:41.5 Andrew Young: They’ve gotten to where they’re folding in like longer stories that are happening over the course of many episodes in addition to the small episode stories that are happening, so I think it makes it a little more difficult to just pop in for one or two.

0:45:53.8 Andrew Heaton: Okay.

0:45:55.1 Andrew Young: But it can be more satisfying too…

0:45:57.1 Andrew Heaton: Also, I tend to eat ice cream when I’m in the bath tub and watch stuff, so it’s either gonna be that or Star Trek: The Next Generation, maybe I’ll binge that.

0:46:03.8 Andrew Young: Again.

0:46:04.2 Landry Ayres: Next time on Pop & Locke Star Trek: The Next Generation, but everybody’s at a bathtub eating ice cream.

0:46:10.9 Andrew Young: I’m there for it? 100%.

[music]

0:46:16.3 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to get more Pop & Locke content is to follow us on Twitter, you can find us at the handle at popNlocke pod that’s pop the letter N Locke with an E like the philosopher pod. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen, and please rate and review us if you like the show, we look forward to unraveling your favorite show or movie next time, Pop & Locke is a project of lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org and is produced by me, Landry Ayres. To learn more, visit us on the web at lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.