Going into Season 21, South Park co-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone revealed their new strategy: ease off Donald Trump and go back to the sillier stuff, like “fart jokes.” Their plan for Season 20 got blown up when Trump got elected, they said, since it’s hard to make fun of someone who is inherently so ridiculous—so this year, they hoped to look beyond Trump without “actively leaving [him] out” of the show.
But given Wednesday’s premiere, it’s clear South Park can’t quite help trying to cover the president—or at least, the political landscape his election fomented. Case in point? This season kicked off with a white nationalist demonstration that directly echoed the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. So much for fart jokes.
In South Park’s world, the protesters were demonstrating against what actually caused their economic disenfranchisement—big tech corporations and automation—though they were still waving Confederate flags. (The show chose to leave those symbols unremarked upon, beyond a joke about how much people who wave Confederate flags around love to wave Confederate flags around.) On the other side of the aisle, we have Randy and Sharon Marsh, who oppose the rally not because of the flags or because of the protesters’ underlying racist ideas (which bubble to the surface only once, then are quickly dismissed with a tossed-off “what the hell was that?”)—but because it’s disrupting their new HGTV-esque reality show, White People Renovating Houses.
Eventually, Randy convinces all of South Park to give the unemployed protesters jobs as substitutes for voice-controlled smart appliances like the Amazon Echo—but naturally, the men aren’t as good at that job as the actual machines were. This leads to arguments between them and Randy, including one in which Randy tells a frustrated Alexa stand-in that he should have gone to college if he wanted to be qualified for a better position. Eventually, the two sides make good when Randy makes over a protester’s home, complete with Confederate flag throw pillows. For those looking for a “message” in all this, it appears to be that basically, there’s been violence on many sides.
South Park has long loved mocking anyone who holds beliefs too dearly—an impulse that can lead to sharp comedy, as long as the world is stable enough to allow for cynicism. But its long-held “everything is bad!” mentality rings differently at a time when a lot of people care about an awful lot of things, and with good reason. So if the show is going to bother being topical—if it’s going to purposefully invoke a divisive and violent moment in recent American history—it had better come prepared to actually engage with the thing it’s riffing on. Unfortunately, this premiere shows that the series still doesn’t seem to have learned its lesson. After 30 minutes of not saying much of anything at all, it closes with an empty, snarky wink: “No matter how bad the country gets,” Randy says, “you can always count on white people renovating houses.”
There were some hints of the old South Park tucked away in this premiere—including some choice scatological humor and a plum “they took our jerbs!” reference. But overall, it collapsed under the weight of trying to have it both ways—to put its finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist without taking a strong stance. If we know anything about South Park, though, it’s that this show can be entirely unpredictable; maybe next week will scrap attempts at topical humor altogether and lean completely into fart jokes. Frankly, bring on the gas.
