FWIW – I ‘Get It’ about “South Park”

Going to go a little more light-hearted here. My posts of the last few days have been just a bit, shall we say, grumpy. You’d never know it, but, really, I’m a pretty happy, positive, fun-loving guy. Love to laugh. Really! One of the first things I look for in the morning paper is the funnies.
Somewhere, some highly-credited psychologist claimed that people who love to laugh live longer. Wouldn’t know about that, I’m only 63, so the jury’s still out on that one. The picture over there (-->) gives it away, right? That camera is my other love. More about that some day.
So, for years, people have been telling me how hilarious “South Park” is. Plus, it’s gotten a gaggle of humor awards, probably up to half a bazillion by now. You can’t watch Comedy Central without being deluged with promos for upcoming episodes or promos for 24-hour-long telethons of past episodes or some such.
Now, I’m not a total troglodyte. I’ve read that to some people “South Park” is all about a bunch of trash-talking foul-mouthed kids with a satirical ‘edge’ and their misadventures. The first couple of seasons featured a running gag in which the episodes always ended the same way - with one of the characters, Kenny getting killed. “Oh, my God, they’ve killed Kenny!” Since it was a ‘cartoon’, the premise was that it was all in good fun. And further, since it was an ‘adult cartoon’ it had added panache when referring to excretory functions (at least one per episode), or other scatological references.
So, the other night my wife and I are waiting up late to catch Comedy Central’s good bye and good riddance 2006 featuring Lewis Black and two other comedians that I’ve seen occasionally. The promos said that the special would be on at 10 o’clock. Living in the outlands (Arizona), that meant that it would air at 11 o’clock. Filling that one hour hole was, predictably two episodes of “South Park”. This time, I resolved to myself, I’m going to watch and see what this is all about. Now, I “get it”.
“South Park” is really about the dumbing down and bottom-dredging humor that can be foisted off on a public coarsened since the 1970’s, a public that asks nothing more of humor than semi-constant references to toilet-oriented hijinks. The objective, of course is to make the originators, Trey Parker and some other cretin, rich beyond their wildest slacker dreams as they crank out poorly drawn cut-and-paste construction-paper figures wiggly-wobbling across the screen mouthing either obscenities or poor voice impersonations of today’s celebrities in badly written skits pretending to be social satire. And to make the cycle complete, they (Parker and fellow cretin) must be anointed as geniuses before their time. Truly, I “get it”. I’m ‘hip’. This is a new era in Comedy. At last, form has triumphed over content.
Sorry, but there never was anyone funnier than Sid Caesar.

Today is December 12th, just 768 days remaining for the Bush Administration.