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.
Satire and irony are very real concepts, but it seems that at least half of what gets called satire or ironic just means, “We want to do the same old shit, but we don’t want to take responsibility for it.”
I always say that in order to determine what something means, it’s important to look at who it’s resonating with. Sometimes, I’ll be watching a video or reading an article that’s giving me a really bad vibe, and I won’t quite be able to figure out what’s bothering me about it until I scroll down to the comments and I see the kinds of people who are agreeing with it. Intention matters, but so does interpretation. And if your work is resonating with racists and sexists and transphobes, then maybe you should take a closer look at what you’re writing.
This. And if you don’t do that and you do continue to profit of producing this material that racists and sexists and transphobes love, do not go around claiming what your true intentions are.
QueerAnarchism 