Before this summer, I’m not sure I would have put money on it that South Park was still running. The infamously crass cartoon satire that has made headlines in the past for joking about, among many other things, child abuse, suicide, school shootings, Aids and the holocaust, as well as for depicting the Prophet Muhammad, hasn’t been at the forefront of public conversation for years.
I was once an avid viewer. I remember systematically working my way through the back catalogue aged about 15 and probably doing damage to my developing brain that I will never be able to quantify. It was disgusting, unpleasant and often genuinely shocking, and thus perfectly poised to speak to an idiot teenager in her bedroom. It featured a talking poo called Mr Hankey. Nobody was doing vile comedy like South Park was. But I wouldn’t have thought that the show still had the capacity to shock or impress me. I was wrong.
In August, the 27th season of South Park began, more than two years after season 26 finished airing. Back in 2017, Trey Parker, one of South Park’s showrunners, said publicly that the show would no longer be making Donald Trump jokes, because they were growing tired of making fun of him all the time. “We probably could put up billboards—‘Look what we’re going to do to Trump next week!’—and get crazy ratings. But I just don’t care,” Parker told the Los Angeles Times. But with this new season, it seems they have changed their minds—in dramatic style.
The context for these new episodes takes a little explaining, so bear with me. In October 2024, CBS, which is owned by Paramount, aired an interview with Kamala Harris over which Trump sued the network for $10bn, claiming it had been edited to favour Harris in the election. Paramount settled with Trump for $16m, likely because it was about to be sold to Skydance Media and needed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to approve the deal, the FCC being run by a Trump sympathiser. In what many reckon was a move to keep the FCC sweet, Paramount cancelled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in July of this year, despite enormously high ratings, with Colbert being a vocal critic of the president.
Here’s where South Park comes in. Paramount signed a $1.5bn deal with the show’s creators for streaming rights and 50 new episodes over five years. The very next day, the first of these new South Park episodes was released. Titled “The Sermon on the Mount”, this episode sees Jesus Christ (as in, literally the figure of Jesus) being welcomed into South Park Elementary at the insistence of PC Principal, whose name once stood for Politically Correct Principal but who has now rebranded, in the Trump era of religious zeal, as Power Christian Principal. The parents of the town complain, which comes to the attention of Trump himself, who threatens to sue the town for $5bn. Jesus then stands outside the school, where a protest is taking place, and gives the town a warning about the president through clenched teeth. “The guy can do whatever he wants now… You guys saw what happened to CBS? Yeah, well, guess who owns CBS: Paramount. You really wanna end up like Colbert? You guys gotta stop being stupid. We’re going to get cancelled, you idiots.”
We see a photorealistic video of Trump crawling naked through a desert
The town settles for $16m and an understanding that South Park will produce “pro-Trump messaging”. And so, later in the episode, we see (brace yourself) a photorealistic video of Trump crawling naked through a desert, à la Jesus during his 40 days, and displaying his micropenis as a voiceover intones, “Trump: his penis is teeny-tiny, but his love for us is large.”
Now, plainly, none of this is clever or dignified. But then neither is Trump. It makes sense to fight dumb with dumb. And the episode seems to have hit a nerve with the president. The White House delivered an official statement, saying that South Park “is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention”. This did not deter the showrunners from releasing episode two, which features—again, forgive me, I am merely reporting—JD Vance offering to apply baby oil to “Satan’s asshole” for Trump’s pleasure.
Making fun of Trump and his cronies is easy, although going this far with it is admirable, in its way. What makes the new South Park truly delicious is the disdain it holds for its own broadcaster. In an era when companies such as Meta and ABC News seem all too ready to abandon all semblance of principle and bend over backwards to curry favour with the Trump regime, it is sincerely thrilling to see the South Park team say such a resounding “screw you” to the company that just handed them over a billion dollars to make a show that is surely now provoking agony among the same company’s executives. Bravo.
