I have HBOMax until September 12th and, streaming problems aside, I want to get my money's worth out of it. Last night looking for something I could watch knowing there'd be technical problems, I came across the South Park Pandemic Special. I remembered hearing about it and kind of wanting to see it last year, partly because I was surprised anyone was talking about South Park again, and partly because we were just a few months into the pandemic's accompanying social madness, in which people cooped up in their homes were screaming routinely online at each other from both sides. If there was ever a good time to lampoon the lunacy of the American media and public, that seemed like it. Unfortunately, I found the South Park Pandemic Special to be just kind of annoying and sort of fascinatingly out of touch on multiple levels.
I'm not sure how long it'd been since I'd seen a South Park episode. Probably fifteen years, that's the last time I blogged about it. From a 2006 entry:
Matt and Trey used to be more inventive. I wish they'd retire, before the show shares The Simpsons' fate.
Well, that ship has definitely sailed. As a side note, it's amazing to recall that The Simpsons seemed well and truly creatively dead fifteen years ago and it still lurches on to-day.
South Park succumbed to a different kind of death. While The Simpsons became boring and cynical, South Park seems to have just become dumber and meaner while also pandering to a political ideology whose young adherents probably wouldn't be caught dead associating with the show. Fifteen years ago, I got in an argument with a friend about the infamous trans episode of South Park, in which the writers equated being transgender with getting surgery to become a dolphin or something. At the time, I thought one could have a discussion about where the line is as to what constitutes legitimate grounds for reassignment surgery but that the trans community seemed too small and vulnerable to deserve such angry potshots. My friend, a trans person herself, argued that the South Park episode was only meant to criticise people who call themselves trans but make no serious effort to pass and who get angry when other people call them on it. Ironically, this same friend is to-day too woke to even speak to someone as politically incorrect as myself. This is something I've found again and again in this new era--the wokest people I know are usually the people who liked deeply "problematic" humour years ago.
Now, in the Pandemic Special, writers Matt Stone and Trey Parker have portrayed the police force as violence addicted adolescents who deserve to be defunded in between a plot about Stan's father being responsible for the pandemic because he fucked the bat in Wuhan (and a pangolin). How many "defund the police" types are up for Stone and Parker's gags about kids and animals being mutilated? I'm not even sure the circles would touch in that venn diagram.
They do make a few jokes about the hysteria and hostility of lockdown culture but it's not very insightful. The episode did stream without any problems.
There's a too brief subplot with a hint of heart in which Stan desperately tries to help Butters get to Build a Bear. Stan sublimating his own anxieties into helping Butters was kind of sweet and genuinely seemed to speak to the general cabin fever experience of the pandemic among those who can afford to stay at home. But, sadly, the episode decided to spend 90% of the time with the plot about Stan's dad thinking his semen is the cure for Corona. It was just tedious, like a drunk who thinks he's really funny rambling on and on.
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