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Unspeakably vile and well worth watching
South Park is a protest against political correctness. It is a liberation from dishonest, manipulative niceyniceness, which it lampoons.
It is a fair bet that if grown-ups start saying that a television programme is undermining civilisation as we know it, the programme is worth watching. I remember standing years ago in a supermarket in New England with a born-again Christian mother, who was pointing at a poster of some yellow-headed television cartoon characters and saying, sadly, that the series was undermining family values.
Somehow, though I don't watch much television and I don't often like cartoons, I knew I would love it. Sure enough, it was The Simpsons and it was wonderful. Soon afterwards The Simpsons arrived in Britain and millions of people - at least five million, according to the latest viewing figures - love them. They now appear on pyjamas at Marks & Spencer - there is no more significant cultural apotheosis.
I haven't the slightest idea what is shocking about them. It's true that Homer and his son Bart are far from admirable, that Marge the mother is deeply stupid, that Lisa the saxophone-playing daughter is a terrible prig and that most of the other characters are dubious in one hopeless way or another. But the family sticks together. The parents are married. They love each other. The dad sticks to his dead-end job at the nuclear power plant. The family eats together. One of the children actually does her homework willingly. And, of course, they're funny. If the Simpsons are a dysfunctional family, Western civilisation needs more of them.
The same rule applies to the American cartoon series South Park, which appeared in Britain last year. At first, it wasn't much noticed; it was just another cult cartoon. But recently the respectable have started to sit up and object. It is beginning to be denounced as unspeakably vile and depraved. Indeed, just after Christmas, the King's School at Ely warned parents to stop letting their children watch South Park. According to a school letter, it contains "obscenities, swearing, lavatorial actions, and filth of a most unsavoury nature". That is all entirely true. The series is absolutely vile. The characters are deeply unpleasant or silly. They say and do unspeakable things all the time; moments of tender feeling are ruthlessly ridiculed. All the same, it is one of the funniest, most intelligent things I have ever seen on television, and well worth watching. I let my children watch it, even my 11-year-old son.
There must be a great many people who would consider this irresponsible. I had a slight jolt myself at the New Year, when staying with friends and playing the dictionary game in which everyone has to write a preposterous definition of a strange word. One I remember, which seemed very funny at the time, was "disease likely to be caused by anal probe". This came from the very young South Park fan in our party and, I later realised, had been plagiarised from an episode I had not seen, about aliens who make contact with humans by means of anal probes.
That is the general tone of South Park and, however funny it is when you actually see it, it is not easy to defend. All the same, it should be defended. I think South Park is the best of satire, not so much subversive and scatological as liberating and civilised. It is not, as Americans have claimed, "a giant step in the coarsening of American culture", but a valiant stand against it.
South Park is a benighted hick town in Colorado. The main characters are four unappealing schoolboys, one of whom is relentlessly persecuted, just because his parents are poor. He meets a different violent death in every episode. There are regular appearances from a sex-obsessed chef, almost the only black person in town, a mad Vietnam veteran, a gay schoolmaster, a nasty lady mayor, a wimp of an English boy, a cross-dressing policeman, a daft genetic scientist and assorted gun-crazy dads and permissive moms, including little Eric Cartman's mother, who appears on the cover of a porn magazine and is described by Cartman's putative father, a Native American who is anxious to disclaim paternity, as a "bear with a wide canyon".
Jesus occasionally appears, in a white nightie, as some sort of marginal religious nut, and once there was Mr Hankey the Christmas Poo, a do-gooding piece of animated excrement. Then there was the starving African toddler that the boys call Starvin Marvin, who was delivered by mistake instead of the aid donor's watch they had ordered.
Chef has excited public attention here recently with his lewd Christmas hit, containing such lines as "suck my salty chocolate balls", but he is really the most respectable character and, in what is perhaps almost the only lapse of courage in the series, never says anything really unforgivable. The same can't be said of the rest, such as the two men watching a school baseball game. A little boy who has a Jewish name is running very fast. "God," says one, in the white trashy South Park drawl, "I haven't seen a Jew run that fast since 1939." Or the newscaster announcing an epidemic, who says: "Here with a live news report is a midget wearing a bikini."
The defence of South Park is that it has to be truly outrageous to shock us into recognition. The entire series is a long-drawn-out protest against - for lack of a better shorthand - political correctness. It is a liberation from dishonest, manipulative niceyniceness, which it lampoons.
It is a protest that has the straightforward, lewd innocence of childishness, which is why it seems childish in parts and appeals so much to children. In making the South Park people say and do all the awful things they really do mean and want, it is a protest against the way most adults say things they don't mean, and pretend things are different from the way they really are. It is a protest against insincerity and pretending, against adult hypocrisy.
Adults tell terrible patronising lies, and contradict themselves all the time about the poor and the starving and the gay and ethnic minorities; they go in for extraordinary pretences about excretion and reproduction and competition and, of course, about the nature of children. They're always - and I think now, with political correctness, more than ever - trying to manipulate people's responses and thoughts into what they think they ought to be.
South Park is very funny and very unusual because it exposes all these things without the slightest embarrassment. And it's safe, too, because it's a small, contained, unreal world; the characters are not us. It is a great relief for once - and a great comic relief - to be given this freedom. This is indignation which is not only savage, but also very, very funny. For grown-ups, even more than for children.
The Daily Telegraph | Thursday, January 28, 1999
