South Park has never been a series noted for its consistency, but boy was tonight’s episode mindlessly scattershot. It was a tad funnier than last week’s middling mid-season premiere “Sarcastaball” (an episode whose big punch line involved people drinking a child’s semen), but this episode was so clearly lacking in smart satire that the occasional laughs failed to compensate. The motif of this episode—that American’s have no ethical standards and that watching fat people do gross things is inherently funny—is both an exceptionally easy target to home in on and one that the show has tackled before, with much more aplomb in previous seasons. To balance out for a glaring lack of edge, series creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone throw in a grab bag of random references, from James Cameron’s deep sea dive this past summer to the ludicrously stupid lyrics of Randy Newman songs, and these jarring non-sequiturs unfortunately end up being the highlights of the night.
We begin in a Wal-Mart, where the boys are going shopping for new mitts for an upcoming baseball game; there’s some of the show’s typical banter, an obvious joke about the fat kid being the catcher. When Cartman freaks out over a sale on Candy Corn Oreos (a real thing, guh), he is chastised by Kyle for being a part of America’s obesity epidemic. Overcome with shame, Cartman chooses not to get in shape, but to fully embrace his sloppiness, picking up a Little Rascal (goddamn annoying name) scooter with “a basket in the front, just for my Candy Cane Oreos”.
There’s a montage of Cartman exploiting the benefits of his “handicap” and facing his critics with an unqualified outrage dangerously reminiscent of his “Ginger Kids” stint; “This is exactly what Adele is talking about!” he cries indignantly and with such conviction that I actually laughed out loud. But after a focused—albeit predictable--set-up, the narrative weirdly jumps between a slew of largely unconnected B-stories, from the afore mentioned Cameron adventures to lambasting the TLC series Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo.
A brief note about Honey Boo-Boo; I have never watched the show before (and don’t intend to, for health reasons), but it seems like something almost too easy to make fun of, and the fact that Parker, Stone and company wring few laughs but an almost excessive amount of cruelty from the premise is testament to how flimsy the writing for this week was.
The scramble of the episode’s three or four plot arcs culminates in an anti-climax that feels wildly rushed and unsatisfactory (what happened to Randy Newman?! I need to know!), though I applaud the show for avoiding its overused “absolutely everyone dies in an absurdly violent manner” trick. In the end, we get an episode typical of the last two or three seasons of SP; a few solid laughs, some nice animation and satire that has become more referential than caustic or clever. There is one great meta-joke at the end as Kyle ponders whether “they” (the creators of South Park) are the ones who’ve lowered the standard bar so low as to justify spawning fodder like Honey Boo-Boo Child. It’s a little bit shoehorned in, but a contemplative moment of serious introspection nonetheless. The South Park boys haven’t entirely lost their talent, just their way.
Some Highlights:
- Both the Randy Newman song and the James Cameron “James Cameron” song are absolutely hysterical. Stone and Parker are nothing if not clever musicians (see; Book of Mormon)
- “I don’t have legs.” “Yeah? Well you’ve got skinny arms.”- Devastating comeback
- “You think he’s dead?” “I hope so.”- the cut away shots to Cameron’s miserably bored crew were fantastic
- I cannot describe how badly I wanted the “lowered bar” to be a DVD copy of Cameron’s Titanic. I fucking hate that movie
Grade: C