Comedy Series Review: South Park

Eric Cartman, Stan Marsh, Kenny McCormick, Kyle Broflovski

South Park is Comedy Central's flagship show. Always rude, often gross, sometimes shocking and eternally on a quest to stretch the boundaries to the max, this show has attracted a huge fanbase over its  17 season lifespan (so far).

Matt Stone and Trey Parker are the masterminds behind this stop-motion animated comedy show. They first created an animated short entitled The Spirit of Christmas in 1992. This showed the four boys, largely as they would be depicted in the later series, although Kenny didn't have a name yet, and who is now Eric Cartman was called Kenny. A mutual friend and FOX producer then asked them to create a second animation for a Christmas card. This was created 1995 and already looked like the later series. The FOX producer sent the card to some of it's friends who uploaded it to the Internet, where it became one of the first viral videos ever.

After FOX refused to pick up the series the second short was shown to Doug Herzhog, executive with Comedy Central and he commissioned a series to be made. The first episode started the gross and shocking tradition straight away, entitled Cartman gets an anal probe and featuring Cartman getting

Muhammad, Prophet of Muslims and Lord of Fire

abducted by Aliens who install a giant satellite dish in his rectum. This episode later got a sequel with Cancelled, which has the exact same opening, after which the kids realize they've had that scene before.

Part of South Park's signature style is its animation. Although only the pilot episode was complete cut-out stop-motion, the rest of the series is animated by computer, keeping close to the stop-motion style of the pilot. This creates a unique and instantly recognizable style, which is now found on countless t-shirts, sweaters, bags, lunch boxes etcetera.

Due to it's kind of humour and complete disregard of conservative values and liberal causes and its portrayal of religion for comic effect, South Park has generated plenty of controversy and criticism from parent- and teacher-associations. The depiction of religious characters such as Muhammad has resulted in death threats and even the creator's home addresses were shared via the Internet. The depiction of Buddha snorting cocaine led Sri Lanka to completely ban the series.

Snookie from Jersey Shore makes an appearance on the show

The series follows a group of 4 primary school boys: Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny who go through all sorts unlikely and absurd adventures. These include trips to outer space, trips to Imagination-land, a battle against Wal-Mart, a bunch of Mongolians invading the Chinese restaurant City Wok and a war raging over 2 Canadian comedians which involves Satan and Saddam Hussein.

The absurd, gross, disgusting humour and sharp criticism of politics, religion and society as a whole, with a complete disregard for people's feelings and with no limits as to who gets insulted makes this series an absolute gem of contemporary American comedy. It has aired over 200 episodes and it's nowhere near over.