‘South Park’ Accidentally Ripped Off an Internet Comedy Video
Accusations that long-running comedy shows have lifted material from internet sketches isn’t all that uncommon, just as long as the show is Saturday Night Live. But South Park, on the other hand, rarely faces charges of plagiarism. But the animated series did steal verbatim dialogue from an online comedy video one time — although it was apparently a complete accident.
The 2010 episode “Insheeption” parodied the Christopher Nolan blockbuster Inception, which had come out that summer. But in the South Park version, Leonardo DiCaprio and his crew of gun-toting mercenaries enters Stan and Mr. Mackey’s dreams while a doctor is attempting to cure them of their hoarding problems. Oh, and Freddy Krueger is there, too.
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The show pulls a lot of its material directly from Inception, including a healthy dose of convoluted nonsense about dream levels and limbo, all accompanied by acapella “BWAAHs!”
But viewers quickly noticed that much of “Insheeption” was similar to the CollegeHumor video “Inception Characters Don’t Understand Inception,” which similarly poked fun at Nolan’s overly-confusing movie. Some of the lines that South Park seemed to crib included “sometimes my thoughts of my dead wife manifest themselves as trains.” As ridiculous as it sounds, this is an entirely accurate description of what happens in the film.
In the CollegeHumor sketch, one character exclaims, “We need to move to the next dream level before these projections kill us.” In South Park, the cartoon Joseph Gordon-Levitt barks, “We need to move them all to the next dream level before the projections kill them.”
South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone didn’t deny the similarities, and immediately admitted that they had used the video as source material. But according to Parker and Stone, they didn’t realize that they were plagarizing other comedy writers by doing so. “It’s just because we do the show in six days, and we’re stupid and we just threw it together,” Stone told The New York Times shortly after the episode aired. “But in the end, there are some lines that we had to call and apologize for.”
The duo wanted to parody Inception’s “gobbledygook” and “explanations of explanations,” but weren’t able to rewatch the movie because it had already left theaters by October, when the show was being produced. They weren’t able to obtain a copy for themselves (the movie wasn’t released on DVD until December), and as The Times noted, they couldn’t find a “watchable version on BitTorrent.”
Eventually, they found the CollegeHumor sketch, and mistakenly believed that its Inception dialogue was genuine. “We thought their joke was that a lot of those lines were actually in the movie,” Stone explained, “and they were banging them against each other, and showing that the Inception characters didn’t even know Inception. That was a mistake, and it was an honest mistake.”
Parker and Stone apologized to the writers of the CollegeHumor video, Dan Gurewitch and David Young. But while they accepted the apology, others were suspicious of Parker and Stone’s excuse. “They ripped off a less popular comedy team because their Inception bootleg was not high enough quality to watch? Get an intern,” said one Village Voice writer.
Maybe someone should check to see if any internet comedy writers ever bought a failing novelty restaurant for $40 million.
