Advertisement
>> VIDEO COUNTDOWN: Check out our picks for the 25 Greatest "South Park" Moments ever. Talk back to us here!
>> This is an excerpt from the new issue of Rolling Stone, on newsstands until March 22nd.
Deep in a maze of adobe-colored huts at the Hyatt Grand Champions Resort conference center in Indian Wells, California, men in polo shirts are striding to 8:30 a.m. meetings. Most are gathering to debate recent advances in re-wetting drops for contact lenses -- "I have superior lens technology to Bob, I know that," one man jabbers, croissant in hand -- but beyond the golf course, in a hut with a majestic plaque reading villa capri, six Viacom employees huddle over coffee on polka-dotted chairs. This is the secret corporate retreat for Comedy Central's most popular, antinomian and flat-out awesomest show: South Park.
For the past decade, Comedy Central has footed the bill for twice-yearly South Park writers' retreats in Tahoe, Hawaii and Vegas, where episode plotting was trumped by strippers and dark nights of twisted fun. Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the show's co-creators, were younger then. With South Park's debut a month away, this is Day Three of their four-day spring retreat, and they have played golf and eaten dinner at festive Mexican restaurants while drinking themselves into a stupor. Not one episode has been written, but brains are being whetted for the onslaught of work to commence a week before the season premiere -- each episode of South Park is created nearly from scratch a week before broadcast, and they wouldn't have it any other way.
For three long hours, Stone, 35, and Parker, 37, ponder future episodes about George Bush as a superhero and one centering on "ghost cats," genetically engineered felines from outer space. The complicated, affable and devilish Parker -- possessed of schlubby sex appeal, like a young Bill Murray -- grabs at a plate of sweet-potato fries, taking notes on his scratched-up laptop. Stone, who resembles the high school science teacher with a cool haircut who is always telling you how the world really works in his parched basso voice, drums on his leg. They wear T-shirts in primary colors and baseball caps. When they're deep in thought, Stone bites his nails and Parker bites his lip. They are damn cute, surrounded by a half-dozen equally adorable producers and writers, all wearing serene smiles and chortling at the silliest jokes.
Stone, it seems, is having some problems with the city of Venice, California, over the height of a fence he wants to build around his house, and has been subject to multiple community-board meetings in elementary-school gymnasiums presided over by gray-ponytailed dudes ("Anytime a guy with a ponytail is telling me what to do, I get bummed out," he says). It's not like Venice is such a perfect place -- there are a zillion homeless people there and in Santa Monica, an observation that quickly turns into an hour-long assembly of an episode in which the South Park foursome -- Kyle, Stan, Cartman and Kenny -- confronts the homeless while their parents argue about the best way to save them. "We should give the homeless designer sleeping bags and really nice clothes so they're pleasant to look at," says writer Kyle McCulloch, in Randy Marsh's voice.
Advertisement
"Let's give them $150 for a spa treatment," says writer Jon Kimmel.
"They'll use it for crack!" scolds Parker. "Let's give them really nice engraved money clips and see if they'll go away."
"OK, that didn't work -- we've got to double the amount of money and crack," quips Stone.
Parker looks in the distance. "Oh, my God: The homeless are crossbreeding!" he declares. "They're starting to get jobs and homes. They're the hybrid homeless!"
"You mean like a Prius?" asks McCulloch.
"They're changing, evolving, buying homes," whispers Parker. "They're adapting!" He takes the voice of a South Park police officer. "We caught one." He lowers his voice. "He was about to buy a home."
Everyone laughs. "At the end of the show, we'll run a placard that says, 'there are thousands of homeless people in america, if you would like to help call this number,'" says Parker. "If you would like to help!" He giggles for a long time. "Oh, I don't care." Then he pretends to fart.
For the past ten years -- the show debuted on August 13th, 1997 -- South Park has satirized America's moral panic over issues big and small, from gay marriage to global warming to Lindsay Lohan's drinking habits. Taking the country to task for hypocrisies like the abandonment of the homeless is South Park's way, even though there's something uncomfortable about watching six adults make jokes about homelessness for a solid hour without ever once talking about solutions to the problem. It's the stupidest smart show on television, consistently pushing the envelope on scabrous humor with the perhaps unintended side effect of paving the way for dumber-than-dumb shows such as Family Guy. The silly parts of the show, say its authors, are the ones they really like. "I spend shockingly little time thinking about real-world stuff," says Parker. "As far as I'm concerned, I've got a computer, the Internet, an Xbox and PlayStation 3, so fuck off."
It's also the most ideologically opaque political show on television, fostering an open-ended dialogue on difficult questions like whether one has a duty to obey unfair laws or if there is a God in an evil world. Unlike The Simpsons, which is intellectual and pleasantly dumb in its portrayal of American life, using both to further a leftist agenda, South Park offers simple parables -- often with an optimistic message -- to take aim at all issues without ever showing its hand. "If Matt and Trey came out and said what they were about, all of a sudden people would watch the show with a map," says Penn Jillette, a close friend. "But you shouldn't have a map to look at during the ride. You must trust the art and not the artist. They'll never say what they're about."
After spending most of South Park's run also at work on movies -- BASEketball, Orgazmo, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut and Team America, a $35 million marionette sendup of Jerry Bruckheimer and America's derring-do -- Stone and Parker have been almost exclusively focused on South Park in the past couple of years, with good results. Their tight production schedule allows them to respond to news quickly, churning out shows on topics such as the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case, Hurricane Katrina and a particularly scathing episode characterizing Scientology as a moneymaking scheme and portraying sect members Tom Cruise and John Travolta hiding in a closet. In March 2006, Comedy Central parent Viacom, which had pulled reruns of an episode featuring the Virgin Mary hemorrhaging blood, canceled the Scientology rerun allegedly as a favor to producers of Cruise vehicle Mission: Impossible III, also owned by Viacom. This infuriated Stone and Parker -- eventually, Viacom capitulated -- but they really lost it when Isaac Hayes, voice of the ribald school chef and a Scientologist, quit and issued a public statement calling them bigots. "There are reports that Isaac had a stroke and Scientology quit the show for him, and I believe it," says Stone. "It was a brutal, up-close, personal thing with Isaac. If you look at the timeline, something doesn't add up."
Stone is the guy who always argues with the network while Parker snickers on the sidelines -- he doesn't like confrontation. They don't argue much with Comedy Central, but the knives came out in April 2006 over a planned episode in the face of worldwide riots sparked by the depiction of the Islamic prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper cartoon, which is considered sacrilegious by Islamic law. Stone and Parker wanted to show the image anyway. "I really felt we had to do this," says Stone. "I know I'm a total pussy living a privileged life on the west side of Los Angeles while soldiers and policemen protect me so I can say things like 'fudge-packing faggot' on my television show, but this was our duty. Comedy Central wussed out because they thought their offices on 57th Street in Manhattan were going to get bombed." Says Comedy Central president Doug Herzog, "The guys were coming at us all week with questions like, 'Can we show some of Mohammed? Can his turban be showing? Can part of his turban be showing?' It was, quite frankly, retarded. But did we overreact by not showing the picture? Absolutely. At the time, nobody was ready to take the chance."
Advertisement
Stone and Parker met at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where Stone was a math geek and Parker a film nerd cutting class to make hand-held videos such as The Giant Beaver of Southern Sri Lanka, a movie about Godzilla-like beavers ravaging a town, and later Cannibal: The Musical, for which they raised $125,000 from friends' parents. Both grew up solidly middle-class in the Colorado suburbs, playing video games, practicing tae kwon do and working in the pizza industry (Parker at Pizza Hut, Stone at Little Caesar's). They come from close-knit, happy families and say that they have few significant childhood demons. Stone's dad is an economics professor; Parker's father is a government geologist and his mother is an insurance rep. Stone played sports at least a little bit, whereas Parker was a pussy hailing from the nerve center of Pussyland: musical theater, the leading man of many high school musicals. And he sang in the choir. Friends say he didn't know how to throw a Frisbee.
To not be a pussy, then, is of foremost importance. Most of South Park's humor either advocates radical individualism (everyone is stupid, so don't listen to anyone but yourself) and/or a conservative agenda (this is a great country, and you're a pussy if you're down in the mouth about President Bush). Neither Stone nor Parker will delineate his political views, and both contend that the libertarian label, which has been applied to them in recent years, is not entirely appropriate. (As far as the "South Park Republicans" tag that was affixed to their fans a few years ago to define the "cool" part of the conservative movement, they say it's a dumb notion.) They won't talk about the war, even to voice an opinion on President Bush's new troop-deployment plan. "I wouldn't even begin to say I know enough to say if it's right or wrong, because whomever is telling you it's wrong is full of shit too," says Parker. Neither votes -- "like, ever," says Stone. Parker waves a hand in the air. "Each election is a choice with a douche or a turd, so who cares," he says. "If Gore had beaten Bush, things wouldn't be much different."
While Stone is in fact deeply immersed in politics and a serious reader of nonfiction books about the Middle East, I practically have to wrestle him to hear a smidge of his politics: He's against the War on Drugs, pro-gay marriage, against socialized medicine and basically in favor of free markets, except in cases like dropping public funding for roads or education. As for Parker, who owns a couple of guns, the closest I can come is his paraphrase of Team America's climactic monologue: "There's a difference between dicks and assholes. Because there are terrorists -- assholes -- you've got to have dicks, people who hunt down terrorists. Dicks are bad, and it sucks to be a dick, but it's way worse to be an asshole, and because there are assholes, we need dicks. So shut the fuck up, all you pussies!"
Try to argue back to this kind of logic, and the joke's on you, much to the glee of Stone and Parker. "We went to a party in Malibu on the beach recently," says Stone, "and this woman came up to us, like, 'Oh, my son is at the University of Colorado, and I can't get him to go to class, because he snowboards all the time.' I'm immediately thinking, 'Fuck you and your kid,' because I couldn't afford to snowboard in college. Then I say, 'Yeah, I still go to Colorado to visit my family.' She's like, 'So they really are just a bunch of gun-toting hicks out there, aren't they?' I'm like, 'I just told you my mom and dad and sister live there.' Then Trey walks up to her and says, 'George Bush is a great man.' She looked like we'd poured acid in her ear. We were laughing our asses off."
"That's the most punk-rock thing you can do in L.A.: say 'George Bush is fucking awesome' instead of talking about how lame it is that he's fighting for oil," says Parker. "The only way to be more hardcore than everyone else is to tell the people who think they're the most hardcore that they're pussies, to go up to a tattooed, pierced vegan and say, 'Whatever, you tattooed faggot, you're a pierced faggot and whatever.' '' He looks very pleased with himself. "That's hardcore."
>> This is an excerpt from the new issue of Rolling Stone, on newsstands until March 22nd.
>> VIDEO COUNTDOWN: Check out our picks for the 25 Greatest "South Park" Moments ever. Talk back to us here!