@SeventhSense – we’ll just have to agree to disagree here. Besides my original point, you agree with, that the show is created by intelligent people. Never thought Nobel prizes were in their future, I feel like you’re taking my thoughts on this show too far. I certainly wouldn’t equate this show with the extremes you mentioned of world peace, end of starvation and equal rights. I kind of think you’re putting words in my mouth and going a bit off the rails about it.
All I’m saying is I find the show to be intelligently written. Yes, there is a lot of dumb, crass, blunt humor, but I see more than just the kid in the cap at the end summing it all up, I see the whole show leading up to the point that kid eventually makes. I think there is social value, certainly not to the level of the civil rights movement or health care reform, but some social value nonetheless to pointing out the obviously ludicrous in our society as bluntly as they do. What I think the show does well is to point out the cognitive disconnect between what people are prone to believe, particularly within the members of our society who do not possess the intellectual capacity to laugh at anything that is now low brow, and what is really going on. I believe they employ irony, sarcasm and satire to make points that the masses simply aren’t going to grasp without some assistance. If anything, I’d suggest I’m far from idealistic on this, but highly cynical in what I believe this says about the “unwashed masses”.
To put it in plain English, I think there are a lot of stupid, ignorant fuckers out there who don’t grasp the obvious. Perhaps they don’t posses the ability of critical thinking, but more likely than not our dumbed-down culture has beaten it out of them, and if not the culture, then the fear tactics employed within our political system. When I see an episode of South Park, I get what their point is almost instantly, and say to myself, well, I already knew that. For me it’s not an education. I see the social value in what it represents to the people who essentially ARE the stereotypical easily led buffoons that populate the town. By using a truly one dimensional town populated with people who will fall for anything, they are able to exaggerate to great extremes what happens in our popular culture, while exaggerating to great extremes how people miss the point and react in counter-productive ways.
And I fully admit I laugh at the twisted humor. I’m a huge Family Guy fan as well, and that show’s as crass and disgusting and low brow as it gets, that show’s sole purpose is to entertain and shock, which have their own values to society. It’s a more non-sequeter from of humor, whereas I see South Park as a more ironic form of humor. But the thing is, if you’re not very bright, and you take things too literally, you are apt to be offended by this type of crassness…as I see it those of even average or above intelligence can usually see that these are jokes and are to be taken as such.
If you wonder why I spend time defending the show, really, I’m simply defending myself, it’s what I think about the show, it’s why I appreciate it, it’s the level on which it works. I think it does serve a purpose, some times that purpose is to mock the ridiculous, at other times its to push the envelope. Consider a much earlier predecessor to Eric Cartman, a character on which Cartman was admittedly somewhat based….Archie Bunker. All in the Family was a brilliant social satire, starring a bigoted old man in the lead role. But by making this bigoted old man likable and entertaining, and allowing the viewers to see that much of his distaste for others came not from a place of hatred, but of lack of understanding, this show helped tear down a lot of walls in our society. It pointed out the fundamental problems with Archie’s way of thinking, but by portraying it realistically as simply outdated, and not extremist (which was the stereotype), people got it. And I say the same holds for someone like Cartman.
Now, we live in a different time, and Archie Bunker is been there/done that…the positive social value of a show which soft pedals its message in a our 24 hour screamathon television world is completely nullified….if one wants to be heard, one needs to grab attention. And as such where a soft, realistic approach in terms of the characters, confronting extreme situations made a lot of sense at the time…now the formula is turned on it’s head. We need extreme characters imparting a realistic message about what is really going on. And I believe that pushing the envelope of free speech only allows us to be more frank in dealing with each other.
I’ll give one example from the show. Take the show where they said shit I forget how many times, while keeping a counter. By just continually forcing the word out in every possible place where it could fit, they were blunting the shock value of the word and showing that it was indeed just a word, not something to which we should have dedicated as much censorship over the years. And to really hammer home the point of how silly it really is to get up in arms about a combination of 4 letters that everyone uses, but somehow we can’t say on TV, or weren’t able to until now (what changed, it begs the question), they awakened the Knights in charge of Standards and Practices. They treated it as if it had existential consequences. I use this example, because I don’t even remember what Kyle said at the end to wrap it all up, I just remember seeing the point driven home so that no one could ignore it. And of course they went even more granular, pointing out how you could be censored for saying fag, but not if you actually were gay, which of course led Mr. Garrison to sing his “shitty, shitty fag fag” song. It was gratuitous, but that was the point…it’s just as arbitrary to overuse something as it is to underuse it.
Point is, I too could write the jokes all day if they were stand alone jokes, but to tie everything into this one point until you are beating a dead horse, to use every gag to advance the cognitive disconnect between reality and how people perceive, and to do so often in the form of a musical is in my opinion something which takes talent and intelligence, and is something that an intelligent person should be able to enjoy on a level beyond just the fart joke laden surface. That’s all I’m saying.
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