Almost everybody would agree that the first South Park episode of the current season slammed President Donald Trump. However, that was not enough for Vanity Fair's Hollywood Correspondent, David Canfield. Displaying steroid levels of insecurity, he just has to know if the creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, are really really anti-Trump.
You can see Canfield's desperate insecurity in his story on Wednesday, "South Park Has Been Pissing Viewers Off for Decades. Then It Came for Trump," which led off with this subtitle: "The show has a history of controversy and provocation—but it’s still virtually impossible to know where Trey Parker and Matt Stone really stand."
That was the first clue that Canfield just had to find out for sure if Parker and Stone were as satisfyingly anti-Trump as himself. Therefore he leaps into a highly neurotic microanalysis of just what are the politics of the show's creators.
...At the same time, it’s never been an easy series to pin down. South Park initially made a name for itself with contrarian, pessimistic satire, arguably characterized by Stone saying, back in 2001, “I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals.” The Trump phenomenon challenged Parker and Stone to stake out a more evolved point of view—and a decade in, it seems as though they’re still trying to figure it out.
It also seems as though David Canfield is still trying to find out if Parker and Stone are still anti-Trump enough to smugly satisfy himself and the Vanity Fair crew.
Speaking with Vanity Fair two months before the 2016 election, Parker said he and Stone still weren’t sure how they felt about PC culture: “I don’t think that we came to any real answers.” And even back then, they sounded exhausted by the prospect of Trump as a subject. “We already did this Donald Trump episode,” Stone told VF. “And real life is outrunning satire this year.”
Uh-oh. Such vague answers only adds to poor Canfield's neurosis on just where Parker and Stone really stand politically.
During Trump’s first term, South Park still appeared uncertain about how to handle him. The show called out the new president as a xenophobe and an authoritarian, jabbed at his wild behavior on Twitter (now X), and reminded viewers of the allegations of sexual assault that continued to trail him (and which Trump has denied). Yet perhaps because South Park filtered its Trump critique through the character of Mr. Garrison—he’s been the show’s stand-in for the president until this season—Trump ignored it. At the same time, Trump opponents criticized those same episodes, claiming they echoed alt-right sentiments—particularly when South Park tackled workplace harassment and trans athletes.
GASP! So South Park does NOT consistently follow the standard liberal narrative? Such heresy is what causes Canfield to grow even more neurotic in his desperate search to pin down South Park politically.
South Park didn’t even try to tackle the 2024 election. Last September, Parker and Stone told me that they had intentionally decided to skip it. “I don’t know what more we could possibly say about Trump,” Parker said.
How many hours of sleep did Canfield lose over that?
South Park still mostly plays as an equal-opportunity offender; it’s the rare comedy to generate genuine, consistently strong reactions on both sides of the aisle.
Perhaps you should just relax and live with that idea rather than performing a microanalysis of just where Parker and Stone are coming from on the political scale.