This post contains spoilers for the Season 27 premiere of South Park, which is streaming on Paramount+.
Nearly three decades after South Park debuted, its creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone are still capable of displaying impeccable timing.
The animated comedy’s 27th season premiere, “Sermon on the ‘Mount,” arrived a week after CBS canceled The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, apparently to appease the Trump administration and grease the wheels for a merger between CBS’ parent company Paramount and Skydance Media. It came only a few days after Parker and Stone closed a new five-year, $1.5 billion deal with Paramount for South Park streaming rights, which meant that this would be the first new episode to be made available the next day on Paramount+, rather than on HBO Max. And it debuted the night before Parker and Stone would be appearing on a panel at San Diego Comic-Con. The stars have rarely aligned as perfectly for the duo to take a shot at the biggest possible target, at a moment when they have the biggest possible spotlight on themselves. And boy, did they take advantage of it.
“Sermon on the ‘Mount” starts out focused primarily on parochial matters within its small Colorado hamlet. Cartman is dismayed to learn that the presidential administration has canceled NPR, which he listened to solely to laugh at all the complaining liberal voices on public radio. As other symbols of wokeness fall away — including PC Principal now bringing the literal Jesus Christ into their school, and re-dubbing himself Power Christian Principal — Cartman goes through an existential crisis. Because if no one is espousing liberal values anymore, then his own persona stops being transgressive. Meanwhile, Stan’s father Randy argues that Jesus appearing at a public school is illegal, and convinces his redneck buddies that perhaps the president has pushed his agenda too far. They assume POTUS is Mr. Garrison — who functioned as the show’s stand-in for Donald Trump in the late 2010s — but he’s retired from politics to spend time with his boyfriend Rick.
From there, the action shifts to the White House, where an animated version of Trump — with a photorealistic head and a floppy mouth (usually a South Park signifier for Canadians) — is portrayed, in short order, as: an unapologetic con man pushing a fundamentalist Christian agenda as a cover to steal money from the government and the American people; a whiny narcissist who threatens to sue anyone who doesn’t suck up to him and is in denial that he has a micropenis; and an all-around dictator who — like Saddam Hussein in the movie South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut — is literally in bed with Satan. And the devil is no happier in this relationship than he was back then with Saddam. He’s arguably even more miserable.
It’s a blistering, no-holds-barred attack on Trump — including animated full-frontal nudity of the aforementioned micropenis. And it comes at a moment when so many in the media — Parker and Stone’s corporate bosses in particular — are terrified of pointing out that the president is acting like a fascist, or that the only cause or person he seemingly has ever cared about is himself. The episode is unsparing on Paramount, portraying various CBS News reporters as scared to say anything that might antagonize POTUS and invite a lawsuit. It turns out even Christ has only come back to South Park because he was sued, and he’s as unhappy about all the crimes being perpetrated in his name by Trump as everyone else in town. (The episode’s title is a play on the name Paramount.)
Comedy Central/Paramount +
Randy’s friends claim that this isn’t what they signed up for when they voted for Trump, arguing that compassion for other people isn’t bad, and that it’s OK to care at least a little about the environment. Eventually, though, they’re sued into submission, too, and ordered to pay him millions of dollars, as well as record a PSA supporting him. Unfortunately, what they come up with seems likely only to further enrage Trump, both the lightly fictionalized version on the show, and the actual version who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Cut to an AI-generated live-action scene of Trump wandering in the desert, gradually stripping off his clothes to reveal his naked, obese body, until he collapses in the sand and his micropenis appears, with googly eyes and a squeaky voice that says, “I’m Donald J. Trump, and I endorse this message.”
On the one hand, it feels ironic that Parker and Stone are the ones to go this hard after Trump, since the governing philosophy of South Park for so long was that caring about anything is stupid, and that there’s essentially no difference between America’s two main political parties — an attitude that’s filtered down to multiple generations of people who grew up watching the show, and thus helped to create an environment where a self-involved, delusional grifter like Trump could get elected twice. That said, Parker and Stone have occasionally demonstrated regret over that attitude: In 2006, they ruthlessly mocked Al Gore’s attempts to warn people about climate change, then did a 2018 episode where the satirical target was now climate-change deniers, while Gore got a literal apology from the characters.
But Parker and Stone’s long history of making fun of earnestness in many ways makes them the ideal delivery system for an episode like this. Colbert was canceled because the president has thin skin and despises anyone who tells jokes about him, but Colbert was also preaching to the converted. That it was South Park bringing this savagery — not just making fun of Trump, but being so blunt and unsparing in its critique of him — is going to have far more impact, and get more attention, than a famously and unabashedly liberal TV host saying the same things. (Though I doubt any of the current late-night shows would have given us a talking, googly-eyed phallus.)
Desperate times mean you can’t afford to interrogate the credentials of everyone who takes your side, even if it’s only temporary. Parker and Stone can be so politically elusive that it wouldn’t be shocking if the next episode had a subplot about AOC in a bikini contest, so the duo can once again insist that their chief goal is to play devil’s advocate to whatever the conventional wisdom of the moment is.
The White House issued a statement complaining about the episode, but at the time of this writing, Trump himself has yet to respond. Certainly, anything he says or posts will only draw more attention to this unflattering portrayal, but his impulse control on this kind of thing is historically not strong. Meanwhile, Parker and Stone will be speaking to 6,000 people later today in Hall H at the San Diego Convention Center, with their words being instantly beamed out all over the internet. Given their traditional disrespect of authority — including that of the people who pay them — it wouldn’t be surprising if they dropped this episode in part because they knew it would throw a monkey wrench into the FCC’s approval of the Skydance deal, and/or because they’re actually hoping Trump will try to sue them: $1.5 billion is the definition of “fuck you” money, and litigation would only put more eyeballs on the episode, not to mention on a show that’s rarely talked about anymore with as much volume and frequency as it was in the Nineties and aughts.
At precarious moments like this, certain things need to be said out loud, even if they’re being packaged with juvenile dick jokes. When so many of their peers are too scared to offer even a mealy-mouthed version of criticism, Parker, Stone, and South Park just went for it. Motivations don’t matter. Late in the episode, Cartman calls off his suicide attempt after Butters helps convince him that there’s always hope for a return to the world where Cartman’s hateful trollery will again be a minority voice pushing back against the mainstream. May we all hope for the same.
