‘South Park’ Holds the Most Obvious Guinness World Record Ever
We know for a fact that Trey Parker and Matt Stone couldn’t have stuffed South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut with more profanity if they tried — because they did.
When Parker, Stone and Paramount Pictures first submitted the 1999 film to the MPAA for evaluation, the dubiously diligent censors sent back the film with a dreaded, unmarketable NC-17 rating due to excessive profanity. The South Park team then re-edited the franchise’s first feature length film to make it more palatable to the movie business’ most venal finger-waggers, only to get another NC-17 result. Then, Parker and Stone made even more cuts to the cuss words. Another NC-17.
Eventually, the South Park duo got fed up with the back-and-forth and asked the MPAA to tell them exactly what prevented South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut from getting a passable R-rating, and the agency noted that the most recent cut of South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut contained over 400 swear words. Parker and Stone responded by sending in a new version with only 399 curses. It passed on the sixth try.
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South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut premiered to the world with a preposterous but somehow toned-down volume of curse words on the way to big box office returns and innumerable sneak-ins from underaged fans, but there’s one accolade that the film earned that we can’t imagine another movie ever topping: In 2001, Guinness added South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut to its annual records book under the entry for “Most Swearing in an Animated Movie.”
If any pearl-clutchers are aghast that there’s even a record for such an achievement, don’t blame Guinness — blame Canada.
According to Parker and Stone, the only reason they were ever able to brute-force their way into an R-rating with 399 profanities punctuating each and every scene of South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut is because Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros., the film’s domestic and international distributors respectively, are both members of the MPAA and have considerable influence on the trade association that determines what markets each and every movie can and cannot reach. Paramount, WB and the MPAA have all denied the obviously veracious accusation, and Stone called the MPAA a “bumbling, irresponsible organization.”
After South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut premiered and hordes of underaged South Park fans snuck into the films’ screenings, just as the movie itself predicted, MPAA president Jack Valenti publicly expressed his regret upon allowing the film to premiere in theaters across the country with a measly R-rating. In the aftermath of the record-breaking profanity, the MPAA began publishing detailed descriptions of inappropriate material in addition to their ratings of each film, mistakenly believing that “excessive swearing” would ward off potential viewers of a South Park movie.
Perhaps the MPAA should have forced Parker and Stone to inform their audience that “No uncles were fucked in the making of this movie.”
