South Park made fun of the election throughout the entirety of 2016, lampooning both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Given the recent controversies with Trump’s executive orders as president and the left’s reactions to everything he does, you’d think that Matt Stone and Trey Parker would want to keep the show’s focus on him.
But they have no intention of doing so, and will instead scale back the number of Trump-related storylines in the show’s 21st season this year.
Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald, Parker expressed Trump fatigue. “I’m so Trumped out already,” he said. “I’m so done. For me, it would be nice to have a show that has nothing to do with that.”
Parker and Stone are currently in Australia to open their Tony-award winning musical The Book of Mormon. They arrived just as Trump got off his contentious 25-minute phone call with Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull. The Australian media has been eager to talk about the U.S. President since then, and hit up the South Park co-creator with questions about him.
In the last season, cast regular Mr. Garrison served as an analogue for Donald Trump, going up against a very inept Hillary Clinton eager to give him the presidency through sheer incompetence. Garrison won the position despite his own attempts to sabotage himself.
The creators of South Park were not expecting Trump to win, and wrote the episode, which aired the night after the election, around a Hillary victory. They had to quickly rewrite the episode to reflect Trump’s win. As such, most of the scenes were well off the mark.
“We were really trying to make fun of what was going on, but we couldn’t keep up,” said Parker in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “It was, like, what was actually happening was way funnier than anything we could come up with. You know what I mean? So … we decided to just kind of back off and let them do their comedy and we’ll do ours.”
“We’ve been grappling with this … because in the middle of the season it seemed likely satire kind of overcame reality,” said Stone in the Morning Herald interview. “[In] the cheap version of satire you take what’s going on and do an extreme version to show how ridiculous it is … This [past] year became like, ‘How can you write something funnier than that?’ Real life is overrunning it.”
Parker and Stone say that they won’t have to record any new shows until August, when the show returns. They say they plan to “kick it up a level” and hinted that they’ll go beyond just making fun of old men in politics.
“South Park can only represent old white guys in so many ways,” said Stone.
Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken media critic. You can reach him through social media at @stillgray on Twitter and on Facebook.
