The satirical, irreverent, oftentimes offensive adult cartoon “South Park” has been trending recently because it dared to make fun of the transgender movement. This led to many social media users wondering if the show is secretly conservative or, at the very least, if the writers are willing to take a sane approach to hot-button social issues.
Fans started circulating a few clips highlighting the madness of the trans movement and the people involved in it.
One of the more popular scenes from a 2005 episode of the show paints the character Mr. Garrison (who is on a mission to become Mrs. Garrison) as delusional and oblivious. It’s the sort of content that would never get approved in today’s political climate.
The episode “Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina” first aired on March 9, 2005, per IMDb. In it, the quirky teacher heads to a Planned Parenthood clinic to procure an abortion after he realizes he hasn’t gotten his period following a gender reassignment procedure. The episode also reveals some brutal truths about abortion.
“Looks like I need an abortion,” Garrison tells the Planned Parenthood doctor, who responds in confusion, “An abortion?”
“Yeah I’ve got one growing inside me, now are you going to scramble its brains or just vacuum it out? If you want you can just scramble it, and I’ll q**** it out myself,” Garrison tells the doctor.
The doctor explains to Mr. Garrison that he’s “physically unable to have an abortion because you can’t get pregnant,” following up with, “You can’t have periods either, you had a sex change Mr. Garrison, but you don’t have ovaries or a womb, you don’t produce eggs.”
“You mean … I’ll never know what it feels like to have a baby growing inside me, and then scramble its brains and vacuum it out?” Mr. Garrison asks.
“That’s right,” the doctor replies.
Mr. Garrison says, “But I paid $5,000 to be a woman, this would mean I’m not really a woman, I’m just a guy with a mutilated penis.”
Like so many other characters on “South Park,” Garrison is complicated and often self-contradictory. He is portrayed as a gay man who eventually goes through the process of “becoming a woman,” then attempts to revert back to being a man. At various points in the show, he dates both men and women, plus exhibits signs of racism and homophobia.
In the same episode, Kyle gets surgery to become tall and black so he can play basketball and Kyle’s dad Gerald gets talked into surgery to become a dolphin.
“There’s nothing crazy about a person wanting to look on the outside the way they feel on the inside,” the doctor says while trying to convince Gerald to get the procedure.
Casual fans of the show and people who never watched it before want to know if Garrison and the others are some thinly veiled conservative rant against the trans agenda from way back in 2005. There’s not a black-and-white answer to that. But the show is masterful at pointing out absurdities even decades before those ideas became mainstream.
One of the most popular aspects of the show is its ability to mock everyone, including both the Left and Right. Unsurprisingly, “South Park” creators insist that the show doesn’t take sides politically; they just hate everyone. But critics had been noticing the show’s tendency to mock liberals more than conservatives for years, which led to terms like “South Park conservative” and “South Park Republican.”
The animated sitcom was created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone and remains one of Comedy Central’s highest-rated programs ever. “South Park” follows four grade-school boys — Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski, Eric Cartman, and Kenny McCormick — as they grow up in a small Colorado town.
It features copious amounts of profanity, dark humor, and frank satire. Parker and Stone say “Monty Python” was one of their main sources of inspiration for the show, which premiered back in 1997. Since it began, there have been 321 episodes (including television films) of “South Park” spanning 26 seasons.
Every time a modern show or movie mocks Christianity, critics inevitably bring up a glaring fact: they do it to Jesus, but they’d never show the same disrespect to the Muslim prophet Muhammad. But for “South Park,” that’s not technically true. The series was boycotted after making fun of Mormons, Scientologists, Catholics, and Jewish people over the years, but then they did the one thing that’s almost never done. They took a risk by targeting Muslims.
An image of Muhammad was shown in the episode “Super Best Friends” (2001). Then in 2010, Parker and Stone took on the topic again in the episode titled “201.” Before the episode aired, the NYPD increased security at the Comedy Central headquarters as a response to threats the network received. The network wound up censoring images of Muhammad with a black “censored” box, despite the creators disagreeing with the decision.
“That was one of my most disappointing moments as an American; the American press’s reaction to the Muhammad cartoons. It was completely wimpy,” Stone told The Huffington Post in April 2010.
“Cartoonists, people who do satire — we’re not in the army, we’re never going to be f***king drafted and this is our time to stand up and do the right thing. And to watch the New York Times, Comedy Central, everybody just go ‘No, we’re not going to do it because basically we’re afraid of getting bombed’ sucked. I was so disappointed.”
Stone summed up his feelings succinctly in 2005, saying, “I hate conservatives, but I really f***ing hate liberals.” This type of sentiment led critics to dub the “South Park” creators as likely libertarians.
The duo also mentioned that making fun of liberals is fun because it’s more taboo and no one else does it. It’s like making fun of Muhammad, in that way.
“Ripping on Republicans is not that fun for us only because everyone else does it,” Stone told The Huffington Post. “It’s so much more fun for us to rip on liberals only because nobody else does it, and not because we think liberals are worse than Republicans.”
They enjoy mocking celebrities most of all, which has the show in sharp focus all over again as the latest episode absolutely skewered Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
“There’s something uniquely aggravating about the smugness of liberal Hollywood,” Stone said in 2010. “You have to laugh at Alec Baldwin when he gets political. You have to. He is an amazing actor, he may even be a great guy, but that s*** is funny. Sean Penn getting on TV on CNN and talking about politics … that’s f***ing funny. And we’re going to make fun of you, Sean Penn.”
One of the latest “South Park” episodes features “the Prince of Canada and his wife,” who are meant to represent Harry and Meghan.
During the episode “The Worldwide Privacy Tour,” the Canadian prince and his wife — who look similar to Harry and Markle — go on a worldwide “we want our privacy” tour following a book tour for his tell-all memoir “Waaaagh.” Meanwhile, the Princess of Canada is described as a “sorority girl, actress, influencer, victim.”
Rumors were floating around that the real Harry and Meghan might sue the show for hurting their feelings. However, a spokesperson for the Sussexes said those reports were “all frankly nonsense,” as well as “totally baseless” and “boring.”