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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Piece of the Puzzle: South Park S18 E2 - Gluten Free Ebola

In which I review the latest episode of South Park.

After last week's failed business venture, Eric, Stan, Kyle and Kenny dejectedly return to school, only to find that everyone is mad at them for how they told them off when they left.  In order to win everybody back over to their side, they promise to host the greatest party in history: with pizza, cake and Lorde.  But when Mr. Mackey convinces everybody that gluten is poison, the USDA begins quarantining those exposed to it, threatening the lives of everybody in South Park.

"We're the USDA.  Without us, people would be eating dirt and... chairs!"

It's utterly staggering to me how certain health circles insist that Gluten causes seemingly every malady in the 21st century.  Gluten causes intestinal trauma.  Gluten causes ADHD.  Gluten causes Type 1 Diabetes, Multiple Sclerosis, Schizophrenia, Epilepsy and Autism.  When droves of parents inexplicably believe that an ex-Playboy Bunny with absolutely no medical training cured her son's Autism by putting him on a Gluten-free diet, you know that something's gone terrible wrong in the American eduction system.

When the Onion was awarded the 2009 Peabody Award, it was noted that their parodies were "not infrequently hard to distinguish from the real thing."  It could have just as easily been applied to South Park's parodic brand of comedy.  When Gluten is labeled as some form of hyper-toxin that causes every medical affliction known to man, is it really so far-fetched that it could make your dick fly off?

Yes, your dick.

South Park took public ignorance and paranoia toward Gluten to what is sadly its most logical extreme.  Gluten is a disease for which there is no cure.  It must be contained at all costs.  Concerned citizens must inform the authorities of suspected Gluten users.  Those who have been exposed to the "toxin" must be indefinitely quarantined to prevent its spread.

Gluten Free Ebola is an excellent follow-up to last week's season premiere, taking on another social concern with the same irreverent audacity as it did crowd sourcing and the Washington Redskins.  While every joke may not have been a success (such as Randy singing in drag while pretening to be Lorde), the central parody is spot on.  The episode exposes the absurdity of the USDA's constantly-changing dietary standards and the public's slavish devotion to them regardless of what common sense dictates.  I give the episode an 8 out of 10 and eagerly look forward to what in-the-news topic the series will lampoon next week.

"Chicken nuggets... breading.  Burritoes... full of wheat.
Ice cream... no Gluten.  Ice cream's healthy!

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Piece of the Puzzle: South Park S18 E1 - Go Fund Yourself

In which I review the latest episode of South Park.

In South Park's Season 18 premiere, Stan, Kyle, Eric, Kenny and Butters start a company on Kickstarter.com with the expressed goal of being paid for doing absolutely nothing.  Realizing that the Washington Redskins' trademark has lapsed, they take the name for their new company, despite  the actual Redskins' owner's protests.  As their company gains unprecedented success, however, internal resentment over the name choice and increasingly radical action by a disenfranchised NFL team threaten to destroy everything that the boys have built.

The new face of the Washington Redskins.

It is truly amazing that series creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have continued to maintain the show's high quality of writing for going on eighteen years.  While small episode counts per season and keeping the episodes as topical as possible have helped, the credit rests solely on the duo's ability to transform the mundanity of trademark registration law and crowd sourcing into engaging and hilarious launching points for their characters.  Avoiding the problems of similar animated sitcoms - where the second half of the episode has, at best, a tenuous connection with the first half - they seamlessly blend the two topics into a singular comedic experience.

Only South Park could make the Washington Redskins - an organization that has been subject to constant media scrutiny and public ire - into a tragic, defeated people that only want to preserve their dignity on the public stage.  While lesser writers would have made them the butt of a few jokes and called it a day, Parker and Stone parade the team through the episode in the same, insensitive manner that the team has done to Native Americans for decades.  They aren't named after a specific tribe or region - they aren't the Blackhawks or the Illini - but a skin pigmentation.  There is shockingly little difference between naming a team the "Redskins" and naming them the "Negroes" or the "Caucasoids."  Like a patient kindergarten teacher waiting for an ignorant student to learn his lesson, South Park holds the team's hand as it walks them a mile in another's shoes.

The show additionally calls out the unassuming Kickstarker - an crowd-sourcing in general  - for making money off of what is essentially doing nothing: sitting back and raking in profits off of the hard work and fundraising efforts of their membership.  The criticism is, in of itself, lacking.  Unlike their criticisms of the Washington Redskins, Kickstarter is ultimately harmless.  They are the medium between companies (or products) and their micro-investors: a common meeting point where people know to go for entrepreneurial enterprises.   It's like complaining that eBay (or any brick-and-mortar auction house) makes a profit off of the merchandise that their clients bring in to sell to interested parties.  That being said, however, they make excellent use of the website as a launching point for the boys' interactions with the NFL, so any issue with the weight of the satire can be excused for what they manage to do with it.

The show looks to be off to another phenomenal season.  As long as Parker and Stone continue to capitalize on their proven formula for the show, South Park will continue to be among the funniest and most insightful comedies on television.  Ultimately, I would give the episode an 9/10.