Piece of the Puzzle: South Park S18 E3 - The Cissy

In which I review the latest episode of South Park.

It turns out that last week, Randy did actually get Lorde to sing at the boys' party.  The seventeen-year-old New Zealand pop singer is actually a forty-five-year-old male geologist living in Colorado.  Only now he's tired of living a double life: being told by his daughter that he doesn't understand her and by his female co-workers that they're uncomfortable sharing the bathroom with him.  As he struggles with his sexual identity, Cartman has a fool proof plan of his own to use the spacious girls bathroom - claim that he is transgendered and should be allowed to use the bathroom of the sex that he self-identifies with.

In its eighteenth season, it appears that South Park is broadening their crass brand of comedy to include features praised in Archer and How I Met Your Mother: incorporating tight, continuity-driven humor in which jokes are frequently references to previous episodes.  Go Fund Yourself has the boys drop out of school to manage a startup company on Kickstarter.  Gluten Free Ebola dealt directly with their social fallout at school because of the manner in which they left, which they try to remedy by hosting a party headlined by Lorde, which actually just turns out to be Randy in drag singing "Lorde, Lorde, Lorde.  I am Lorde."  The Cissy runs with what turned out to be a terrible end-gag for that episode and makes it its narrative focus: Randy is Lorde.

The premise is beyond ridiculous, even by South Park's standards.  And yet their relentlessly straight-faced insistence that he is, in fact, the famous pop singer - combined with a surprisingly earnest foray into sexual identity politics - actually makes this not just hilarious, but honestly believable.  Whereas Cartman simply uses what he reads on the Internet as an excuse to use a better bathroom, Randy is honesty conflicted by the validation and meaning he finds in his identity as a woman.  It has nothing to do with homosexuality: it's how he chooses to identify himself, how he feels most comfortable.  Stan's ensuing confusion about where he belongs further highlights the very real questions that people face when confronting the nature of their sexuality.

While the big laughs definitely came from Cartman's bathroom shenanigans, I was surprised just how much of The Cissy's humor was self-referential.  When Cartman first enters the boys bathroom, he immediately dismisses Butters' announcement that they finally let him back into school, a subject that the faculty debated at the beginning of the last episode.  When Principle Victoria holds an assembly in the gym, it's the burned-down wreck that Butters left it in when he dropped out of school.  When Sharon, concerned about the depressive state of her husband, asks him if he's just going to sit outside all day drinking beer, he tells her that "it's okay.  It's Gluten-free," since he wound up under government quarantine for not knowing that beer contained the hyper-toxin Gluten.

While South Park has always incorporated some degree of meta-humor, it was never a show that prominantly featured it as a part of its narrative DNA.  Kanye West accepted his life as a gay fish in Fishsticks and reformed to heteronormativity in The Hobbit, it was a-typical of the show to make continuity-driven jokes.  Season 18, however, uncharacteristically bring that aspec to the forefront the series' humor.  I sincerely hope that they continue to incorporate this style of meta-humor in future episodes, since it  provides a whole new avenue of as-of-yet untapped humor for them to explore after eighteen years on the air.

Three episodes in and it's safe to say that South Park is as funny in its eighteenth season as it has ever been.  It continues to branch out into new styles of humor and can even manage to transform failed jokes from previous episodes into the incredibly memorable premise of following episodes.  Overall, I give The Cissy an 8.5 out of 10.

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