North by Northwestern

Art can come to imitate life by the strangest coincidences sometimes. The running motif of tonight’s episode of South Park was, as the title would imply, insecurity, and one of the reoccurring jokes was the barrage of false alarms, both literal and otherwise, set off by ignorance and reckless action. I live in the Hinman dorm on south campus, a residence hall infamous for its fire hazard track record, and about five minutes into my initial viewing of “Insecurity”, as I was taking notes for this very review, the emergency alarm for my hall sounded and I, along with the rest of Hinman’s unfortunate denizens, were forced out into the cold as the situation was sorted. As it turns out, an emergency door was held open for too long on a lower floor, and the whole mishap could’ve easily been avoided had a little more thought been applied, a lesson that fits nicely into tonight’s episode.  

Despite the real life relevancy (for me) of “Insecurity”, I don’t know how I feel about the somewhat flimsy satire, though the story was certainly more carefully structured and coherent than last week’s installment. The plot opens with Kyle’s parents in bed watching a hilariously accurate riff on the dopey Cialis commercials that run every other minute during football ad breaks. The two adults decry the advert as nonsense; Shelia and Gerald Broflovski don’t need supplements when they’ve got imagination. After their little boy Ike witnesses them engaging in some hardcore delivery boy role play (it’s grotesquely explicit), he mistakenly thinks his mother is having an affair with the UPS man, as he illustrates in a crude Crayola drawing that puts the botched ecce homo to shame. 

Like “Raising the Bar”, the only roll-on-the-floor-laughing bit of “Insecurity” is a gag that has next to nothing to do with the larger narrative. Everybody loves a nice  Bane (The Dark Knight Rises) impression—some stabs at replicating Tom Hardy’s guttural growl have racked up hundreds of thousands of hits on YouTube alone — and watching Randy Marsh and company spew their best insults with the villain’s idiosyncratic inflections is good giddy fun. Parker and Stone take care to not kill the joke either, using it sparingly in the middle and then again later to give the episode some nice closure.

At the looming threat of, not one, but seven Banes terrorizing South Park, the townspeople turn to Wolfhome Security, whose patent “In-Security” system advert wrings some of the most consistent comedy out of the night as stranger-danger types and shoe store clerks are shown threatening to do random, horrible things to children. We also get to hear Cartman’s meticulously caustic security passphrases, all of them along the lines of “Kyle is a no good Jew” and “u love boobs”.

“Insecurity” ties up neatly, and, aside from some stabs at Batman, the humor of the episode coheres in a fashion that the show often struggles to achieve. I didn’t necessarily find “Insecurity” funnier than “Raising the Bar”, but it’s evident that a little more thought went into the writing and ensuring that the plot culminated in a sensible conclusion.

Some Highlights: