The hypocrites of South Park
Matt Stone and Trey Parker are notorious for bringing in tropes and stereotypes in a fun laughable manner in their show depicting life in a small town in Colorado, South Park. To bring some laughs into the uncertain times the world is facing right now, they unveiled their vaccination special for streaming online at Comedy Central’s website where they portray all sorts of groups in different ways, but the most significant group that was displayed is hypocrites.
The Kommunity Kids
The story of the episode begins as they decide to hang out for the first time in a while to help their friend Kenny get over his depression about how little the boys have been hanging out with each other during the pandemic. The kids are tasked with a mission from their guidance counselor Mr. Macky, who like all of the other faculty members of South Park Elementary are frustrated with not being considered “essential” enough to receive their Coronavirus vaccinations. The mission was a simple mission, to steal enough vaccines for the teachers of the school. In this part, the show writers use this as an excuse to make jabs at another demographic — child advocacy groups, but that’s not the focus of this writing. The boys pull off their heist and are celebrated by the news as “robinhoods”, stealing the vaccine from the essentials, to give to the non-essentials. This is where we first begin to see the relationship between the field reporter and the news anchor, with the field reporter getting emotional about the boys stealing the vaccines, saying “Kommunity Kids are just what this town, and this world needed…” cussing out the news anchor as he tries to cut away from the scene.
Lil’ Q-ties
While shopping at the grocery store, conspiracy theorist and leader of QAnon Mr. White runs into the former President of the United States, Mr. Garrison. Mr. Garrison, clearly annoyed by Mr. White trying to idolize him cussed him out, leading to Mr. White being confused thinking that the former president’s insult was a coded message, comparing the insult with many unrelated things, ultimately landing on they all need to become teachers to stop the indoctrination of the town’s children by the Hollywood Elites, ultimately causing them to indoctrinate the kids they’re teaching, telling them about how the Elites are are pedophiles and cannibals.
The storming of the school
The creators of the shoe wanted to model a scene based on the attack on the United States Capitol earlier this year, in this scene the Kommunity Kids are delivering vaccines to their teachers but are met with resistance from the Lil’ Q-ties, a group of kids from the QAnon tutoring service. One says “I refuse to let you hurt my teachers”, referring to what they have been told by their tutors about the dangers of the vaccines, leading into a brawl between the two sides. During this we see the reporter and anchor again. The anchor reporting about the clash, saying “at the center of it all, a group of kids taking time to do what they believe is right, I’m talking about of course, the Lil’ Q-ties,” further saying “If the kids really believe the horrible things they believe they’d be bad people not to do it”, with the reporter responding “If they were corrupt d***heads”. Here the show brings up to light the hypocrisy that we see in the media a lot today with the political divide getting further and further apart. It’s quite often that we will criticize the other side of the political spectrum while our side is doing the exact same thing.
Evaluation
South Park always will be one of those shows that can come in unfiltered with little to no backlash, which is beneficial to us as media consumers as it is able to touch on to more sensitive subjects that other forms of media cannot. The show constantly shows different tropes while making fun of those tropes and giving viewers a way to reflect on ourselves and society as a whole while still entertaining us, such as fir this specific episode pointing out that many of the times we criticize somebody we’re really being hypocritical.
