I began watching South Park a few years after its 1997 premier; primarily due to my parent’s refusal to provide our household with even the most basic cable. I was a senior in high school by the time I had started to pick up on the increasingly popular phenomenon. I was immediately drawn to the satiric portrayal of third graders as foul mouthed, violent, instigators commenting on the ridiculousness of social norms.
It wasn’t until I was writing my Master’s thesis, which included a section on the history of satire across European and American cultures, that I realized that this type of exaggerated, seemingly sophomoric humor, which focused mainly on vulgarity and bodily humor to shock its audience is directly reminiscent of famous satirists like Jonathan Swift or Alexander Pope. In both poetry and prose, these authors provided detailed descriptions of bathroom habits and human excrement to draw attention to the animal nature within human beings while disavowing the claim that human beings are somehow separated from the animal kingdom due to our capacity to “reason”.
I am drawn to this type of satirical commentary. It is often hyperbolic, vulgar, and intentionally shocking but still remains close enough to reality to wake us up from aspects of life that have become normalized. The shock felt is analogous to the feeling of waking up from a dream; a change in perception or insight provides an awareness of our veiled knowledge, allowing us to, at least temporarily, lift the veil.
Watching “Franchise Prequel”, South Park’s 281st episode from their 21st season, in all of its typically exaggerated and vulgar glory specifically provided insight into Facebook and its complicity in the dissemination of lies during the 2016 presidential campaign. The episode reunites the superhero team of Coon and Friends, which is part of what provides the spine of the episode. The power of this episode lies in its portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg, originally brought to the town by parents flustered by how their children have begun to confuse fact from fiction via Facebook: following the logic of… If it’s on Facebook, it must be true. However, Zuckerberg has been taking money from Professor Chaos (ie. Butters), making it impossible to remove the fake news stories from Facebook.
However, South Park makes it clear that Zuckerberg is not the only complicit party in the Facebook community; the parents (erroneously considered “responsible adults”) were the first ones to invite Zuckerberg to their town.
A few takeaways….
1) Human beings do not instinctively understand how to decipher truth from reality…
2) If children are not taught critical thinking at some point in their life, they will not develop this skill…
3) Children grow up and become “adults”…
….who are unable to use critical thinking skills to tell the difference between opinion, perspective, and fact…
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All South Park episodes are available for free to stream through allsp.com. You can view this particular episode here: http://allsp.ch/?v
Creating A Nation United 