. . . Which does not negate Dr. Stanley Biber being a real person and a very well-known surgeon in the TG community—in Colorado, which evidentally got under the South Parkers’ skin. Google him. Considering what they had him saying, I think he has a good lawsuit on his hands. They weren’t just making fun of him (like Sally Struthers’ being fat, which is also “hilarious”), they had him spouting factually incorrect, anti-transsexual propaganda.
Yes, that’s it. If we don’t like cheap toilet humor and uninspired, obvious punchlines to infantile jokes, we must be “…pathetic humor-impaired Pinks…” :rolleyes:
Humor takes more than just a willingness to skewer sacred cows and roast them over the fire. It also takes timing and finesse. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, or Caro & Jeunet’s Delicatessen are classic examples of political correctness-defying satire that is funny and inventive. “South Park”, in contrast, is simple-minded and obvious; an appeal to the mentality of “if it’s shocking or involves bodily fluids, it must be funny.” Swiftian parodies they are not.
I’d be a lot more impressed if they could manage an R-rated (or X-rated) variation on “The Simpsons” instead of wheeling out the obvious sacrifical lambs and anal-raping them with red-hot pokers in hopes of getting a shocked laugh now and again. South Park is to real satire as Chris Rock is to Lenny Bruce.
Stranger
Here’s my take on the episode of South Park in question. Bear with me, it rambles a bit.
Mr. Garrison is not transgendered. He never, that I can recall, expressed the notion that he was a woman trapped in a man’s body. He is, instead, a very screwed up individual. To wit, he was devastated that his father never molested him as a child.
Then comes along Kyle, who, in my opinion, really represents the transgendered. He feels like a tall, black kid. He’s always felt like one. The doctor surgically alters him so that he looks like on the outside how he feels on the inside. Sadly, he only looks like how he feels; it’s all form, and no function. He can’t play basketball with his new body. While a post-op, transsexual has a vagina, of sorts, she still lacks the internal organs most women have (uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries, etc.). She can’t play basketball–have children-- (historically, what separates women from men, simply speaking, of course). In other words, it’s all form, and almost no function.
Where Matt and Trey slipped, is not understanding that the form is as important, if not more, than the function.
[sub]Yes, I know not all women want to have babies. That’s not the point.[/sub]
Yup, just like Matt ‘n’ Trey said: we’re “freaks,” “surgically mutilated men.”
But hey, it’s better’n bein’ a fag, right?
P.S. I was slamming Matt ‘n’ Trey, not UrbanChic, who understands the matter at hand.
I agree with Sweetfreak here. SP is only shocking if they insult a position you belive in, which, if they haven’t yet they wiil.
I find SP hit or miss on funny, Critters and NAMBLA are two examples of funny as hell. But I have never found it to be shocking or insulting.
Upon what possible grounds?
Before you answer, may I suggest you peruse the Supreme Court’s decision in Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, and that you recognize its holding does not only apply to sleazy televangelists.
Damn… someone beat me to citing Larry Flint’s famous case… 
Oh, and add me to the list that says South Park only offends if it is a position you hold dearly. If funny if the joke is on others, but if its on you… that won’t fly.
Brilliant show and I hope it continues for many more years.
I’m usually a fan of subversive TV, but South Park has never appealed to me… I’ve always found it simply irritating.
Unfortunately, a lot of people—including some right here on the Board—really do believe that transgendered people are nothing but delusional, surgically mutilated, self-hating gays. And now that a popular show has come right out and said that . . . well, I really try to be a good sport, but not many black people can sit through Birth of a Nation without squirming. And Matt ‘n’ Trey are no D.W. Griffith.
You are missing the point of Southpark. Week after week, they prove that people will laugh and continue to watch the foulest rudest concepts possible, yet in kid cartoon form. They lampoon one side so people say ‘haha’ then they lampoon the other side, and the people laughing are now getting made fun of. They have made a multimillion dollar empire at everyones expense, using crude and witty situations. They take everything shallow, bad, good, etc that television stands for, and vomit it back all at one time. In short, genius.
The only show like this that does it (10x) better is (sorry Simpsons, you fell off) Family Guy. To me, its just smarter and funnier while still being really crude and un PC.
I’ve listened to some Lenny Bruce albums. He was funny, and insightful – but I get more real belly-laughs out of Chris Rock. And when you’re evaluating comedy, isn’t that the supreme, all-trumping measure of success?
BOAN was not meant to be funny, or even ironic in any sense. OTOH, National Lampoon used to do a lot of humor playing off ugly racist stereotypes – and I would have little regard for a black person who couldn’t laugh at that material. (Most blacks of my acquaintance could.)
Feh. Stang’s or Drummond’s material makes Stone & Parker look like Bil Keane, and you know it.
Put another way: It might be retarded to laugh at transgressive humor just because it is transgressive. But it is infinitely more retarded, and Pink besides, to reject transgressive material just because it is transgressive.
I was a good sport and laughed when Futurama and Popular and I’m with Her poked fun at the subject.
But if that episode of South Park was a Doper, it would be banned both for “hate speech” and “being a jerk.”
Personally, I don’t get any belly-laughs out of Rock; I find him grating and obnoxious. Carlin, on the other hand, uses shocking statements as a way of highlighting hypocracy, and he does a lot of clever things with language. Bruce was good at tossing out joke grenades; things that offered a chuckle at the time, but just became funnier the more you thought about them.
So, no, a belly-laugh response to a shocking statement isn’t " the supreme, all-trumping measure of success" in comedy, at least not in my book. I guess shock sells ad time, but I prefer well-thought out humor to cheap gags. I’ll take Keaton over Chaplin, or “Real Genius” over “Revenge of the Nerds” any day.
Perhaps your argument might be slightly more compelling if you’d stop referring to everyone who doens’t get your sense of humor as “pathetic” or “Pink”. I guess that’s to be expected from you, though.
Stranger
South Park is pretty gay positive, from what I’ve seen. Big Gay Al, friend to all, is one of the few not-messed-up adults on the show.
Which makes it even stranger that they’d be so hateful and misinformed about transsexuals. They’re all for blacks, gays, cripples, kids with ADHD . . . Hell, they even had a few sympathetic Canadians! Except for Scott, he’s a real dick. But transsexuals, atheists (and people with asses instead of heads) are beyond the pale for them, I guess. I kept waiting for the heavy-handed moral, or the twist, or the payoff, but it never came: just, “Well, it sure beats bein’ a fag!”
My life sucks so much right now that I watch TV to cheer myself up. Let’s just say I did not go to be cheerful last Wedneday night.
If you want transgendered-friendly TV, there is some out there. A CSI episode a couple of months ago was about a murder of a transsexual. It offered a rather sympathetic portrait of the transgendered community of Las Vegas – not funny, of course, but sympathetic. I remember a Law & Order: SVU episode with a similar viewpoint.