Half of the people in the English department at my community college share a guilty secret that we’ve been hiding from our students for years: We love South Park.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s shameless, politically incorrect cartoon, which boasts the highest rating of any program on Comedy Central, is the cause of surreptitious note passing in faculty meetings and smothered bursts of laughter at the corner table in the teachers’ lounge. We giggle as we recount one of our favorite episodes, “Osama bin Laden has Farty Pants.”
“Did you see the one where Timmy, the kid with cerebral palsy, joins a rock band?” my colleague Mario asked me one day before his Chicano-studies class. “Totally hysterical.”
I looked around to make sure the dean of language arts was nowhere in sight. “I saw it. I love Timmy’s disabled pet turkey.”
My younger brother is disabled. I taught job skills, led physical therapy, and changed diapers for this population in schools and group homes for 10 years. When Parker and Stone introduced the spastic Timmy in his wheelchair, along with a turkey that can’t lift its head off the ground, I howled with delighted recognition.
Mario, who hails from Mexico, sympathizes with my conflicted feelings of pleasure and guilt. Together, we watched an episode in which the citizens of South Park (a “quiet mountain redneck town,” according to the full-length feature film) battle over what holiday to celebrate in December. The conflict turns into an ethnic war. “What can we do to clean up this town?” cries the mayor. The third-grade teacher, Mr. Garrison, raises his hand. “Can we get rid of all the Mexicans?”
Mario and I exchanged a wide-eyed look before he hit the floor laughing and went out to buy the South Park movie for his wife’s 30th birthday.
It’s fascinating that my academic colleagues -- who deliberately choose literature that reflects a variety of races and cultures so that their students might become more accepting of diversity -- actually go out and rent the South Park episodes that they missed on TV. The four main characters -- Jewish Kyle, the eternally doomed Kenny, girl-crazy Stan, and rude and rotund Cartman -- insult everybody. Their creators blithely leap over the chasm between political correctness and plain badass humor. They pick on gay people (I’m thinking of the effusive, Hawaiian-shirted Big Gay Al, and Mr. Garrison, the elementary-school teacher, who’s in love with a hand puppet that he calls “Mr. Hat”). They disparage the disabled and disfigured (Timmy, along with Stan’s drooling, headgear-encased older sister, are cases in point). Every character, from Cartman’s prim-voiced, porn-star mother to the illiterate Officer Barbrady, is a target for derision.
So why do my colleagues and I adore these cartoons? Why do we congregate, chortling, over episodes of “Cartman’s Mom Is a Dirty Slut” and “Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo”? Are we hostile at heart? Educational hypocrites who preach tolerance in the classroom and then go out and practice the opposite after office hours?
My generation has been schooled, and in turn schools others, to be on guard against prejudice and hate. We’ve taken political correctness to a level mimicking Orwell’s thought police, where as much as an upward turn of the lips at an off-color joke becomes suspect. South Park allows us to blow off steam, so that we can go out in the real world the next day and treat people not with forced and formal politeness, but with honest and thoughtful compassion.
Parker and Stone poke fun at prejudices by going so far over the top that we’re really laughing at the stupidity of it all. We’re bombarded with characters like Kyle’s meddling, New York-Jewish mother and the Vietnam-veteran Ned, who talks through his tracheotomy hole. The hackneyed images are blown so far out of proportion that they’re ridiculous. My colleagues and I understand that South Park is really making fun of us -- both the people who recognize the ignorance-based stereotypes that humanity has cultivated, and the people who buy into those stereotypes.
Someone once said, “We laugh so that we may not cry.” I look out every day at my students, many of whom are impoverished, abused, and otherwise insulted, and I do want to cry. I watch South Park because it makes me laugh. Its creators work hard to combat prejudice by showing us how comic we are when we act out of ignorance. We feel compassion for the Mexicans whom Mr. Garrison hopes to remove from his town. We love Principal Victoria, who has to get stoned in order to sit through yet another year of the third graders’ performing their Helen Keller Thanksgiving play.
My parents and grandparents despise South Park, not only for its insults but also for the crudeness of its humor. Disgusted, they watch my thirtysomething siblings and me clutching each other and guffawing in front of the television as Terrance and Phillip fart their way through a song.
“That cartoon is coarse and ugly,” my parents say. I would remind them that in 1387, Chaucer made readers laugh with his depiction of flatulent characters in The Canterbury Tales. And 213 years later, Shakespeare delighted audiences with Beatrice and Benedick, caustic-tongued sparring partners whose insults could give the South Park boys a run for their money. From the beginning of comedy, intellectuals have stepped down from the upper classes to revel in lowbrow humor. Parker and Stone make no apologies for the kind of language and stereotypes that have entertained us for centuries.
Those who protest against South Park miss the point. It’s the audience -- not the subject matter -- that is the butt of the joke.
My grandfather asks, “How can you laugh about a kid with cerebral palsy, and then tell students to be more tolerant and inclusive of the disabled?” He’s missing the point, too. In the episode he’s referring to, Timmy becomes the boys’ hero. There’s a scene in which the disabled turkey curls up next to the sleeping Timmy, and the boy puts his arm around him. It’s such a poignant moment that every time I see it, tears come to my eyes.
Recently, I showed a clip of South Park to a class on ethics in film. The older students shook their heads at the foul-mouthed humor. The younger ones cracked up.
“Why do you like this show so much?” I asked an 18-year-old Latina, careful to hide my own enthusiasm. “It’s real,” she said. “Some people really are that prejudiced. ... They’re so stupid that they’re funny. It doesn’t help to get all worked up about it, you know? It feels better to laugh.”
Melissa Hart, formerly a lecturer at Ventura College, teaches English at Laurel Springs School, in Oregon. She is the author of Long Way Home and My Ear Is My Only Courage (both published by Windstorm).
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 9, Page B5