Matt Stone and Trey Parker have done more to make our generation crueler than nearly anyone else, because they can get away with it under the guise of “this is satire, duh”, not realizing that poorly-done satire only reinforces the cultural forces it is meant to mock. When 13 year-old-kids are watching South Park, they aren’t tuning in to the little infinitesimally small lessons supposedly being taught, they’re laughing at Timmy being severely disabled, they’re laughing at sexual harassment, they’re laughing at child abuse, they’re laughing at anti-semitism, they’re laughing at people who have had sex reassignment surgery.
And the “satire” is so often pathetically weak. There isn’t a single nativist in this entire country who can’t laugh at a “der takin er jerbs” joke, because those jokes don’t actually rebut or mock the arguments made by people opposed to immigration. It’s just saying a common political phrase in a funny voice. Is that how low the bar for “satire” has been set? There’s occasionally more effective satire on the show, but not nearly enough for it to be defended on the basis of its value as satire.
But if you try to explain any of this to die-hard South Park fans, they’ll completely blow it off. They think that the fact the show upsets me simply means that the show has accomplished its purpose, never actually questioning whether or not that purpose is a worthy one. That’s why the show is so insidious: it wraps itself in this cynical layer of self-containment that prevents it from ever being pointed out for what it is: a detriment to the type of society that any decent person wants to see. South Park is far more dangerous than the Westboro Baptist Church, because South Park is something that people accept and defend.
I worked with a guy who would yell “derka derka jihad!” out of his truck at Middle Eastern people. Or refer to them as “derka-derkas.”
“Derka derka jihad” is a joke from Stone & Parker’s Team America: World Police, and it’s (in a generous interpretation) a satire on “this is what narrow-minded Americans think Arabic sounds like, silly Americans!”
But about 95% of the audience thought the joke was “Arabic sounds ridiculous, it’s not even a real language!” The movie does extremely little to discourage this. [click here if you are prepared to experience a full-body cringe] The level of satire is somewhere between “extremely subtle” and “alibi.”
I know satire is subjective and the public is hard to predict and all that, but I think an easy way to tell that the thing you’re participating in isn’t satire is when you’re inventing new racial slurs and they’re catching on.
South Park is the opposite of satire.
Here’s how South Park fans think Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal happened. Swift wondered, “what’s the most offensive, politically incorrect thing I could write about? I know! Eating babies!” He wrote an essay saying everyone should eat babies. People were very offended by this essay, which makes it funny. People thought Swift was serious but he wasn’t, kek, he was just being satirical! He fooled them!
Here’s how Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal actually happened. Swift lived in Ireland, a colonial property of England. He was enraged by the ways the English government, Irish puppet government, and Irish wealthy oppressed the poor of Ireland, causing poverty and famine. He wrote a bitterly sarcastic screed carrying their callous dehumanization to its logical extreme–with your cruelty, you might as well just eat their babies! Swift sarcastically included a long paragraph of his actual policy proposals in the essay: “Therefore let no man talk to me of other expedients,” strengthening his accusation that to pretend it was impossible to help the poor was viciousness at the level of baby-eating.
The cruel English politicians Swift was satirizing didn’t misread the satire as agreeing with them, because he didn’t just say the same things as them in a snotty voice, because that’s not what satire means. Nobody said, “Yeah, Swift, that’s a great idea, let’s go eat us some babies!” The targets of satire aren’t supposed to agree with it.
The late great Terry Pratchet was a master satirist. His works are fucking hillarious. His friend and co-writer Neil Gaiman explains what made him such a great satirist: “There is a fury to Terry Pratchett’s writing: it’s the fury that was the engine that powered Discworld.” And “anger is the engine that drives him.” Anger at what? “ Against so many things: stupidity, injustice, human foolishness and shortsightedness.” That is satire: a white-hot righteous fury at injustice, channeled into humor.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/24/terry-pratchett-angry-not-jolly-neil-gaimanNihilistic apathy and opposition to any and all political opinions and “waaahhh, those buzzkills are telling me not to call people retarded, but that’s hard and I like calling people retarded” is not a basis for satire. If you were to take every distinguishing characteristic true satire has and do exactly the opposite, you’d wind up with something like the genre South Park popularized.
“THE TARGETS OF SATIRE AREN’T SUPPOSED TO AGREE WITH IT.”
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