Tricksters or Treaters

The Cartoon Creator Tricksters:

No one is safe, not religion, politics, prejudice, cliques, sex, and celebrities. Current fads are demonized; tough topics like abortion, gun rights, and government conspiracy are depicted by using the innocence of fourth grade boys to show the ridicules aspects of American politics and social culture.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone the creators of South Park use their creative powers to allow the viewer to escape into tales of “seemingly impossible situations,” that happened to be at times all too genuine realities.

In their episodes they usually have a stereotype and by the end of the show they show the two extremes to both sides. According to John Leland in “Hip: The History,” “The trickster goes on anybody’s side” (180), with Parker and Stone, they take this to the extreme.

The episode where Kyle’s family move to San Francisco pokes fun at people who find it “hip” to purchase green cars, or hybrids, and they were so smug they enjoy the smell of their own farts. This shows extreme green mentality can be taken too far. Leland says, “Where you find smugness, you find something worth blasting” (178), this is what Parker and Stone are famous for, and the pun was not intended.

Even episodes that deal with religion, like the one where Cartman turns the popularity of The Passion of the Christ into a revival of the Nazi Movement, this episode says that Americans are easily swayed to prejudices and bigotry.

Leland says, “Tricksters pick on the weak as well as the strong” (169), Parker and Stone do the same. Not even the disabled community is safe. In the “Cripple Fight” episode, it takes our view of disabled people as frail and fragile and turns it on its ear. Or the one where Nurse Gullum has an unborn fetus attached to her head, the message of this episode was how disabled people do not want to be put into the spot light, and want to be treated like everyone else.

One of the main reasons the South Park creators are tricksters, is you think you know what their message is at the beginning of the show, but by the end even you are not sure what the message is, only that you may agree with them, this is the power of the con artist. They cut though the social mores and play within the grey areas of each episode. By using humor, wit and the ability to manipulate language they take stereotypes of American culture and undermine the rules of society.