Trey Parker and Matt Stone Say That ‘South Park’ Has Run Out of Ways to Make Fun of Trump
Trey Parker and Matt Stone have semi-officially confirmed that Mr. Garrison’s political career will not be the main plot line of the next season of South Park. After all, how could he possibly top his last term? Nuke Canada twice?
When Parker and Stone first devised their strategy for satirizing the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump’s chaotic campaign must have seemed like a gift from Mormon God to the South Park writers’ room. South Park already had a selfish, bigoted, impulsive and explosive authority figure on its roster, and turning Mr. Garrison into an anti-Canadian-immigrant demagogue was a more natural transition than any one of Garrison’s many gender swaps over the course of the series.
Then, the unthinkable happened — Trump actually won. Parker and Stone famously and frantically had to rewrite the first South Park episode post-election at the eleventh hour, having assumed that Hillary Clinton couldn’t possibly blow the race against such a comical character, much like Clinton herself. South Park then spent the next four years and four seasons reeling from their (and America’s) decision to turn a South Park character into the president of the United States.
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In a rare interview with Vanity Fair, Parker and Stone revealed that, rather than expose themselves and South Park to the possibility of another unwanted four-year character arc, they’d rather retire from ridiculing the upcoming election as well as its candidates, with Parker commenting, “I don’t know what more we could possibly say about Trump.”
“We’ve tried to do South Park through four or five presidential elections, and it is such a hard thing to — it’s such a mind scramble, and it seems like it takes outsized importance,” Stone said of his and Parker’s decision to abstain from election parody this time around. “Obviously, it’s fucking important, but it kind of takes over everything and we just have less fun.”
Back in July, we postulated that, given the recent release schedule of South Park seasons and the show’s treatment of the last general election cycle, Parker and Stone may very well skip the 2024 presidential election and return to their regular programming in the the new year without so much as a single punchline about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, President Joe Biden’s surprise retirement and the meteoric rise of Vice President Kamala Harris to the top of the Democratic ticket. The past two seasons of South Park have each started in the month of February, and, though Parker, Stone and Paramount couldn’t pull together a measly six episodes at the beginning of this year, the South Park team admitted that fans will have to wait until 2025 for Season 27.
While Parker claimed that what will be a two-year gap between the last shortened season and the new one was mostly about “waiting for Paramount to figure all their shit out” (Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery are still in the middle of an extended legal battle over the streaming rights to the show), the duo admitted that South Park missing the window to cover the 2024 election in real time is more than just serendipity.
“Honestly, it’s on purpose,” Stone said of the timing, later explaining that he believes the show has been weighed down by its past overemphasis on political satire. Compared to coming up with new episode ideas based on Trump’s executive decisions, Stone says, “It’s just way more fun to be like, Oh, Cartman’s going to dress up like a robot.”
Fun for them, maybe — but those episodes are a lot less fun for Cartman.
