shamwowxl:

pervocracy:

afloweroutofstone:

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.

something I noticed where I grew up (in a fairly liberal state, if not a progressive community) was that people who were on paper opposed to racism, homophobia, etc., felt like South Park gave them permission to laugh at jokes and caricatures that were racist or homophobic because ‘oh it’s not ~really~ like that’. yet if you take out the 1 minute moral at the end of the show, it is 100% “like that”. like, these were people who HATED bush, opposed war in the middle east, but laughed at the same “derka-derka” joke because south park gave them a pass. it’s the same vibe as the “everyone’s a little bit racist” song, as long as people didn’t feel that they personally crossed this invisible line into Real Racism, the racism of South Park was ok. of course, the definition of Real Racism was so nebulous that the goalposts could basically always be moved to give oneself a pass, and anyone who disagreed just needed to learn to take a joke. because SP made fun of everyone equally! never mind about the fact that in the context it was created in the people being mocked aren’t on equal ground and can’t equally withstand the consequences of said mockery! satire!