What’s ‘South Park’ Going to Say About the Election This Time?

A would-be assassin attacked Donald Trump. President Joe Biden had a series of senior moments and needed to quit the race. With all the insane plot twists that have punctuated the 2024 Presidential Election so early in the cycle, we just have to ask — what’s Mr. Garrison up to?

During the 2016 election that ended with Trump in office and a country so divided and chaotic that political comedians and professional satirists struggled to outdo the absurdity of real-life America, Trey Parker and Matt Stone put forth the best and, possibly, only great parody of the Trump campaign with the South Park storyline about perennial shit-starter Mr. Garrison running for president on an inflammatory and anti-Canadian-immigrant platform against the uninspiring Hillary Clinton. 

However, much like Clinton herself, Parker and Stone never even considered the possibility that Trump would actually win the White House, and on the eve of Trump and Garrison’s victories, the South Park creators had to frantically re-write, re-record and re-animate their first plot line post-election, the slapped-together Season 20 episode “Oh, Jeez.”

But the 2024 election has already proven to be even more eventful than Trump’s first run, and with South Park Season 27 looming somewhere in the hopefully near future, fans are wondering how — or if — their favorite show will address this tumultuous election season. ‘Member when South Park seasons always started in September?

After accidentally subjecting South Park fans (and themselves) to four years of President Garrison, Parker and Stone overcorrected in the 2020 election and skipped the Trump versus Biden campaign entirely, only committing any significant screen time to the most ridiculous bullet points from the contentious race after Biden had already taken office. In The South ParQ Vaccination Special, released in March 2021, Garrison finds that he is the unintentional figurehead of the anti-vaccine movement and the leader of QAnon.

Following what we can generously describe as South Park Season 24, which was just the Vaccination Special and its preceding Pandemic Special, Comedy Central moved South Park off of its fall schedule where the show had premiered for eight years prior and began launching each new shortened season in February. As such, Parker and Stone could have used the excuse that the 2024 election happened in the off-season, and it was too soon after the last batch of South Park episodes to return for an election arc that they desperately didn’t want to write — if they had actually put out a South Park season this past February. The last non-special South Park episode aired on March 29, 2023.

Now, almost 16 months after the conclusion of the most recent season of South Park, fans are getting antsy about the lack of a premiere date for Season 27 and want to know if Parker and Stone will take another stab at satirizing an election. In a viral thread from the South Park subreddit, fans wondered what spin South Park would put on the concerningly eventful election cycle, if they would address it at all. “They probably won’t start working on stuff until mid-October,” one fan suggested of Season 27.

Another wrote, “president garrison is about to have a wild time, poor rick.”

“They should make an episode where Mr Garrison gets shot in the ear,” one more opined.

Of course, that’s assuming that Parker and Stone choose to address the election at all, or that we even get another episode of South Park before the next president’s inauguration in January. After all, the South Park creators seem pretty preoccupied with Casa Bonita, and no potential or chosen presidential candidate has come out with a strong stance on cliff divers.