This article contains spoilers from the newest episode of South Park.
All is not well in the republic. With a particularly nasty presidential election, an escalating online gender war, racial tensions exploding throughout the country, many fear for the future of this great nation.
So what better way to calm everybody the hell down than watching four little cartoon kids make the gravely serious absurd one night a week.
The new season of South Park could not have come soon enough. With a particularly deflated Daily Show and non-influential SNL, cutting political satire has been hard to come by. But the first episode of South Park’s 20th season has certainly filled those large shoes. With the nation craving some kind of water cooler political comedy, all weight rests on South Park.
The first episode parodies how our obsessive reboot culture plays into national politics. The episode pokes fun at both the absurdity of feminists putting the new Ghostbusters on a pedestal while ridiculing some of the bigotry nostalgia can engender.
Cartman is given insincere lines like “Girls rule, women are funny, get over it,” while he attempts to stave off a “gender war” by making feminist remakes of other timeless classics. The show also introduces the hypnotizing yet reactionary “member berries” meant to symbolize America’s addiction to nostalgia, which at times leads to intolerance routed in reverence for the past.
Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protest is also mocked to great effect, without ridiculing any of the issues the protest stands for. Like how the children’s parents only go to their kid’s volleyball game to see who takes a knee during the anthem, then hurriedly leave before the game begins. The protest is eventually defeated when JJ Abrams “reboots” the anthem to allow people to sit or stand without making a political statement.
For the election, South Park brings back its giant douche and turd sandwich metaphor from the Bush/Kerry race. Stan shakes his head, exasperatedly wondering how the country wound up in this situation once again. Hillary (turd sandwich) is losing to Mr. Garrison (giant douche, and stand-in for Donald Trump). South Park plays the middle, to capture the nation’s pain at being provided once again with two terrible candidates, while still taking head-on mind-bogglingly insane nature of the Trump phenomena.
When scanning the reactions to last night’s episode on Twitter, it becomes apparent that South Park achieved the impossible. They created a show that a divided nation can all enjoy. Feminist beardos and alt-right blowhards sang the show’s praise, taking certain elements of the episode as affirmations of their beliefs.
2016 has been an absurd spectacle in political theater. The country spent three months arguing about a Ghostbusters reboot, we have a presidential candidate funnier than most of the people who satirize him, and everything from the national anthem to frog memes have become political. Thank god for the return of South Park, a show that can bring the country together to laugh before we all break down and cry.