OTOH, if being TG is better than being a fag, then that means that Eve is my superior in social acceptability, so there’s some upside for her!
In any event, I’m sure that Matt and Trey are getting quite an earful from TG folks for the thumpheaded approach they used on the show.
Honestly, Eve, I think you missed the point. Mr. Garrison is just a mutilated man. He never was transgendered.
Yikes–that sounds pretty miserable. Mostly I regret not getting The Comedy Channel, but sometimes i"m pretty okay with it.
Matt and Trey don’t really do much for me most of the time. Their movie had some pretty glorious moments, and the mooing of the cows in the anal probe episode was pretty great, but that’s about it.
They’re just entirely too pleased with themselves most of the time.
Daniel
I may be biased because I love South Park, but I think a lot of people really missed the point of this episode. First of all, SP exists to make fun of everyone – gay, straight, black, white, Jewish, atheist, Mormon, everyone. SP takes the piss out of everybody.
The point of the episode, as I saw it, was that Mr. Garrison is profoundly messed up. He hates himself for what he is (a gay man) so he tries to turn himself into something he is not (a woman) but only succeeds in messing himself up further. He is insensitive towards Mr. Slave, telling him to “stop being gay” so they can be what Mr. Garrison envisions as a normal heterosexual couple. Even at the end, when Stan and Stan’s dad discover it’s more important to be who they really are, Mr. Garrison remains stubbornly delusional. He’s convinced himself that even his current mutilated state is better than being a “fag”.
He was never really a woman. He is a sad, deluded person who needs serious help. Mr. Garrison doesn’t understand that he needs to accept himself for who and what he is, rather than trying to change himself into something more “normal”.
The point I got from it was that men who get surgery to become women, whites who get surgery to become black, and people who get surgery to become dolphins are all equally deluded and pathetic.
Yeah . . . we’re either punchlines or murder victims. We’re pretty much where gays were, pre-Stonewall.
I don’t see how the rest of the episode as described supports that idea. I don’t see how anything South Park has ever done supports that idea. It’s interesting, but where do you get it from? Given the opinions Parker and Stone have expressed in the past (“we hate conservatives, but we hate liberals more,” yada yada) I think this episode would be consistent their outlook. If you’re right, most of the show’s fans don’t even know what the guys are saying.
I made a comment here, found that I was generalizing, started a new thread, had that fail and started a new thread in MPSIMS, http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=306949 where it might get more serious responses. I see there are now people saying that SP is sometimes unfair to the side you think they should be supporting, i.e. Transexuals are not monsters. I just think that trey and Stone can be jerks sometimes. Here is a rerun from my new thread, showing examples of them showing strawman arguments in place of the "mock the left wing” part of an episode.
Trapper Keeper
The kindergarten election just goes on and on. That is how I felt about the real election, but it does not reflect reality. Here, it is made to look like recounts are about not admitting you lost.
The Death Camp of Tolerance
A gay teacher, Mr. Slave becomes the new teacher. He appears to be along the lines that having a gay teacher will lead to “moral decadence” Mr. Garrison is given his “Courageous Teacher” award and his attempt to shock the very tolerant crowd doesn’t work. Irked at their tolerance of his behavior, he reminds them all that tolerance and acceptance are two different things; you can tolerate something and still be pissed off about it.
Red Hot Catholic Love
This one clearly show it is bad for priests to molest kids. Yay! Good message. However, it also says that getting “under god” removed from the declaration of independence is a bad thing. feh. I have seen this one. It end with people deciding: “After all, without religion in their lives they’ll just go around spewing a bunch of crap out of their mouths.”
In conclusion:
feh.
Have Parker and Stone ever made fun of Libertarians? Or Objectivists? That I’d like to see. And lord knows there’s a wealth of material there. Might hit a little too close to home for P & S, though.
That’s how a lot of people felt about the Florida recounts, and I would not be at all surprised if that’s how Parker and Stone felt about it.
I know that one must’ve bugged you personally, but I’m not sure it was meant to be taken literally.
“Too close to home”? Do you mean that P&S are Libertarians themselves? Or that Libertarians in Colorado are more dangerous than elsewhere?
The former, if I am not mistaken.
As I suspected. Here we go:
They stuck it to Atlas Shrugged pretty good in the chicken-lover episode.
Oh, I’m pretty sure I get it. Two untalented clods tumbled to the idea that offensive content is considered avant garde, and that could be used to deflect criticism of their hack jokes, sloppy writing, poor characterization, half-baked animation, and misinformed attitudes. And further, there had to be a satirical message imbedded in all the shock to avoid it being labelled as mere shock humor. So after the grossouts subside, one kid turns to the audience and tells you what you’re supposed to take away from this. “Remember - family’s important!” Repeat the formula ad nauseum, and maybe nobody will notice at 10 PM that the show has no value.
And it worked amazingly well. Scan this thread again and consider how many otherwise intelligent, thoughtful people have bought into South Park. This is, I think, the truly offensive thing about South Park: it’s somehow become a cultural touchstone and, dare I say it, a sacred cow despite being flyblown garbage. How many responses are there that suggest there’s something wrong with you if you don’t find mindless swearing, rampant stereotyping, and sadistic fantasies hysterical? How can you misunderstand the all-important Springeresque final thought hammered home in the final three minutes? Is there really something wrong with me that I find Kenny’s routine death disturbing, and not a great running gag? That there’s something fundamentally wrong with someone who finds this funny, no matter how much they quote Ayn Rand or the Book of Mormon or whoever their defense is this week?
Apparently so. “Well, you’re just upset because your beliefs were challenged! You’re being too PC! You’re not open to different opinions!” No. I’m not open to cynical manipulation by hacks. Walloon notes that South Park has a reputation as gay-friendly, mostly due to a gay character who isn’t a complete fuck-up. Well, dears, I am more homo than 2% milk, and I still hate this show. I don’t want to be associated with Stone and Parker in any way. They are repulsive, loathsome lowlifes. I am better than they.
Eve, let me say I hope you’re better soon. You’ve truly spun my head. I always assumed that you were in fact a very aged Dorothy Parker, and that you faked your death decades ago to move to whatever private little town Elvis and Amelia Earhart call home.
And thank you, Hail Ants, for your contributions. Not only do I finally have definitive proof that you and Airman Doors USAF are different people, but now I know I should cancel that game of pickup I had scheduled with Maya Angelou. After all, she is black and will totally dominate my game.
I don’t have cable, so I haven’t seen the episode yet. I keep hoping that I’ll spot some dimension everybody else missed and that it wasn’t the hateful, factually incorrect* condemnation of transexuals that it seems to be.
And I liked Critter Christmas.
It
*You want scientific evidence transexuals aren’t just ordinary people with delusions? Click on the links for neurological evidence that their brains are not the same sex as the rest of their bodies.
http://www.gires.org.uk/Text_Assets/maletofemale.pdf
http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~gjdlab/pdf/JNeurosci2002NIH.pdf
I think Askia summed up this last episode better than I. It was more about Mr/Mrs Garrison being a sick, depraved wierdo. They made fun of him as a transexual the same as when he was just gay, i.e. they had him walk around with a leather-clad S&M partner or had him ask his father to sexually abuse him. The same way they make fun of everyone, black, white, gay, straight, rich, poor etc.
Going to ridiculous extremes is a hallmark of satire, especially SP. Any one thing is usually a mix of soapbox preaching and over-the-top humor, in varying proportions. However, in South Park’s case they almost always put the emphasis on the humor. And something I hate about really good satirical comedy is the inevitable, guilt-ridden fallback to a schmaltzy, sentimental ending. The Simpsons does this, SNL does this etc. And I hate it because its completely fake. I know SP is a joke. That’s why I love that they deliberately do the opposite of this. They start doing a “I’ve learned something today” ending, but then instead they punch out with a really offensive, but brutally funny stinger ending, like Garrison’s “…than a fag!” line. Or Woodland Critter’s “…except for Kyle who died of AIDS” line.
In terms of satirical comedy, its almost impossible to offend me, as long as its true satire. Websites like www.Pointlesswasteoftime.com or www.theonion.com are like this. And so is South Park. I don’t subscribe to the snobbish, just being outrageous makes it avent garde, attitude. And if you are offended by it and I’m not, that doesn’t mean I’m better than you. But, at the same time I will not, for one millisecond, accept the notion that SP is or has ever been hatespeech.
Also let me add a bit of a mea culpa regarding the blacks/jews basketball thing. What I meant was, statistically, there are more blacks and few jewish people currently playing. I am not a sports fan, basketball least of all (I think that’s pretty obvious considering I had no clue it once was dominated by jewish players). Why blacks dominate it now? Got me. I wasn’t implying some stupid ‘they’re genetically programmed for it’ nonsense.
Yep, I always wonder about people who get upset when Mr. Garrison is slammed. Mr. Garrison IS a sick, depraved wierdo. He is just one who likes to think that he is part of a certain group, whether gay, transgendered, whatever. He’s probably none of those, but wants to be a part of the group, so he can feel different from everyone else (and give them lectures about stuff).
And, even though don Jaime thinks that there is a fundamentally wrong with me, I still love the show for being rude, crude, and assaulting everything under the sun. South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut is one of my favorite movies of all time, and I’ll be sure to pick up the Season 5 DVD when it comes out :).
“Anti-Political Correctness” translates to safe, status-quo, and reactionary.
In SP’s sake, it’s also just laziness… it’s easier to trash easy targets and make really lousy, unreflective “comments” than to write genuine stories about the kids. They’re good for about one really good episode a season (like the Ninja episode), and the rest is filler. Which doesn’t mean some people aren’t amused, but some people are easily amused.
Remember that one where they sent some trauma specialists to South Park to tell people their loved ones’ remains were being desecrated by necrophiliac grave robbers, and as AV aid, one of them shoved his fist in and out of a jar of vaseline, so that it made these hideous squishing sounds, meant to conjure the image of some deviant buggering a mouldering corpse?
Heh. Heh-eh-eheh. That was cool.
You people are still going ON about this?
Jumping Jesus On A Pogo Stick, don Jaime, you took the absurdly wordy around to say, “I’m offended by that humor.” Five little words!! Times three hundred!!
Seeing as how the POINT of satire is to push the envelope and the vanguard of satire is a 300 year old essay endorsing cannibal infanticide as the rational remedy for famine, I’d say that so-called inappropiate potty-mouthing and juvenile shock value prickled sensibilities aren’t really the problem as much as some basic humor snobbery here. THAT’S RIGHT, I CALLED YOU “HUMOR SNOBS.” Airman Doors! Eve! All you SD detractors with your daintily extended pinkies on the remotes, desparately trying to find reruns of Frasier! don! You’re bitching about characterization in a cartoon! You’re bemoaning Kenny’s deaths and resurrections. Boo-hoo hoo for fucking Kenny. He’s gonna outlive you! He already makes more money than you.
Clearly our mileages in humor vary. Why not just accept that and move on? When South Park’s day is invariably done and gains some perspective by passing time, we’ll see more clearly its influence and satirical aims.
:: Cranks up the Isaac Hayes ::