Offensive Humor and the Lessons to Be Learned in South Park By

No Offense: Offensive Humor and the Lessons to be Learned in South Park

By Travis Kolb

Offensive Humor in South Park

Animated television sitcom series South Park has received much criticism since its debut in 1997. South Park is a show known for its vulgarity and offensive humor, which has caused a large divide between those who love the show and those who hate it. But once you look past the blatantly offensive humor, South Park always portrays an underlying message behind each episode that speaks to certain social issues that go far beyond nine-year-olds swearing. This paper summarizes three articles that support the notion that South Park uses offensive humor in a way that relays a deeper message that forces the viewer to look past the offensive nature of the show and actively engage in the topics and issues they are trying to illustrate.

“Contentious Language: South Park and the Transformation of Meaning” by

Marcus Schulzke explores how South Park treats language that is considered to be taboo. Schulzke believes that “the meaning of words and their power to offend is a central theme in South Park” (2012, p. 23), and the way South Park uses offensive language contests the meaning of offensive words. Schulzke focuses on one particular episode that has received a lot of criticism: “The F Word.” “The F Word” refers to the word fag, and the episode disputes how the meaning of the word has transformed over time. In “The F Word,” the conflict arises when the children of

South Park use the word fag pejoratively, but not in reference to homosexuals. This creates a large misunderstanding between the children and adults in South Park and the typical shenanigans that occur on South Park ensue. However, “the clearest and strongest argument the episode invokes is that the word fag has already undergone a shift in meaning. It is regularly used as an insult against anyone deemed annoying or unpleasant, without any sexual connotation”(Shculzke, 2012, p.28). The article

2 Offensive Humor in South Park points out that the meaning of a word is only determined by the way it’s used and the intention of the speaker. But, the way a word is used could be completely changed if enough people shifted the way they think about that word (Marcuse,

1964).

“Beyond a Cutout World: Ethnic Humor and Discursive Integration in South

Park” by Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx delves into how South Park uses offensive ethnic humor in attempt “to show such prejudice as a systematic, social problem, not one that can be blamed on certain ‘bad’ individuals” (Sienkiewicz & Marx, p. 1).

The article also argues that South Park must be viewed in a discursive context that references the media, politics, entertainment, and pop-culture in order to understand the underlying messages about stereotypes and prejudice the writers of

South Park are getting at. For example, “South Park character Eric Cartman’s campaign against the ‘the filth of the common Jew’ is funny because anti-Semitism is ridiculous, not because Jews really are worthy of disdain and degradation”

(Sienkiewicz & Marx, p. 3). Another example this article points out occurs in the

“Imaginationland” trilogy when the American government wants to nuke our imagination because Muslim terrorists hijacked it. In both of these cases, South Park uses ethnically offensive elements not to be absurd, but to make a statement about how these stereotypes and prejudices are discussed and depicted in the media.

Sienkiewicz and Marx also assert that previous analyses of offensive humor in animated sitcoms, such as South Park and The Simpsons, were studied at the surface level while ignoring the underlying meanings portrayed in a discursive context.

3 Offensive Humor in South Park

“Religiosity in South Park: Struggles Over Institutional and Personal Piety

Among Residents of a ‘Redneck Town’” by David W. Scott talks about how South

Park distinguishes religion and religious issues. Scott argues that “[South Park] cannot be dismissed as merely vulgar humor aimed at antisocial adolescents.

Instead, South Park resonates with a growing cultural animosity toward hypocrisy, religious hierarchy, and intolerance” (2011, p. 162). The article points out how

South Park uses religious figures (mostly Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim) as characters that typically have characteristics contradictory to their established image and are faced with situations that either question or trivialize their own nature in order to expose the divide between religious and institutional practices. One example Scott points out is the episode “Do the Handicapped go to Hell?” In this episode, Father

Maxi, the catholic priest in South Park, scares the boys into thinking that they will suffer eternally in Hell if they don’t participate in the Catholic sacraments. This posed two questions for the boys: First, is heaven limited only to Catholics? This causes conflict among the children of South Park because their friend Kyle is Jewish and they don’t their friend to go to hell (except for Cartman, of course). And second, can their disabled friend Timmy, who cannot complete the sacraments because he is only limited to enthusiastically saying his own name, go to heaven? This goes even further and poses the question to the audience whether or not they should help those who can’t help themselves and are in need, even if it means going against religious traditions.

These three articles clearly argue that the offensive nature of South Park is used as a tool to communicate a larger message that holds significance toward social

4 Offensive Humor in South Park issues. The viewers of the show should look past the offensive nature, whether it’s the reason they like the show or not, in order to comprehend the main idea of each episode. David Scott makes a good addition to this argument when he states that

“critics who dogmatically politicize this program as a cause of declining cultural values are merely playing into the societal moirés the program most often ridicules”(2011, p. 162). So whether it’s dedicating an entire episode to the word fag, using offensive ethnic stereotypes, or poking fun at religion, viewers of South

Park should always be on the look out for a lesson to be learned in every episode.

5 Offensive Humor in South Park

References

Marcuse, H. (1964). One Dimensional Man- Studies in the Ideology of Advanced

Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press.

Schulzke, M. (2012). Contentious language: South Park and the transformation of

meaning. Journal of Popular &Television, Vol. 40, (22-31). Retrieved from

http://web.a.ebscohost.com.lib-

e2.lib.ttu.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=9&sid=dbd6f973-8d31-

4e3b-b092-1da548cdeee0%40sessionmgr4003&hid=4104

Scott, D., (2011). Religiosity in South Park: struggles over institutional and personal

piety among residents of a “Redneck Town”. Journal of Media & Religion.

10(3), (152-162) Retrieved from http://web.a.ebscohost.com.lib-

e2.lib.ttu.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=14&sid=dbd6f973-8d31-

4e3b-b092-1da548cdeee0%40sessionmgr4003&hid=4104

Sienkiewicz, M., Marx, N., (2009). Beyond a cutout world: ethnic humor and

discursive integration in South Park. Journal of Film and Video, 61(2), 5-18.

Retrieved from http://web.a.ebscohost.com.lib-

e2.lib.ttu.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=12&sid=dbd6f973-8d31-4e3b-b092-

1da548cdeee0%40sessionmgr4003&hid=4104&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3Qt

bGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=ufh&AN=37564154