Comedy Central’s ‘South Park’ enjoys a silver anniversary of satire

NEW YORK — Reaching the age of 25 is usually a sign of hitting adulthood, a signal to put away all childish things. Not for South Park and stars Stan, Kyle, Kenny and Cartman.

The Comedy Central staple about four bratty, perpetually bundled-up youngsters in an unhinged Colorado cartoon town celebrated its silver anniversary by trundling along, fueled by poo jokes and razor-sharp social satire.

Just some of its targets over the years include religions like Christianity, Islam and Scientology as well as climate change deniers, cryptocurrencies, Phil Collins, Tiger Woods, smoking bans,

Game of Thrones and pedophiles. One of its child stars used to die in every episode, violently.

“Some people are like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe they made fun of that because that’s such an important thing.’ And that’s exactly why we made fun of it,” says Trey Parker, who created the show with Matt Stone.

To celebrate the series’ 25th birthday, Parker and Stone have returned to Colorado with a concert filmed at Red Rocks Park and Amphitheatre near Denver, headlined by Primus and alternative rockers Ween. Rush members Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson also stopped by to play.

The concert, which will debut Saturday on Comedy Central and hit Paramount+ on Sunday, will feature songs from the series’ history. Stone calls it “a celebration, a party and a retrospective.” It airs at the same hour and same day 25 years ago that South Park debuted.

Since the Peabody Award-winning show’s first episode in 1997, Parker and Stone have blurred the boundary between good taste and bad, even more so than that other, long-living adult cartoon The Simpsons. South Park had a cartoon Jesse Jackson insist on having his rear end kissed by Kyle’s dad to apologize for his use of a racial slur and depicted Jesus Christ defecating on former President George W. Bush and the American flag.

“As much as I love The Simpsons and I think The Simpsons is really important, I think South Park has definitely done things that The Simpsons haven’t,” says Dr. Jonathan Gray, a media and cultural studies professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison, whose books include

Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality.

One highlight was the three-episode 2007 arc that told the story of Imaginationland, a place where Gandalf, Charlie Brown, Count Chocula and all the inventions of human imagination live. When terrorists attacked Imaginationland, our pint-sized heroes had to set things right before the U.S. military nuked the place.

Gray says Parker and Stone fit poorly in either the Democratic or Republican camps and places the pair on the political spectrum as “left-skewing libertarians.”

One common target is pontificating celebrities, like when Bono of U2 was revealed to be the world’s largest turd. But Parker and Stone only like to skewer powerful celebs, showing a surprisingly tender side to Brittney Spears.

“They hate celebrities when celebrities try to tell us how to run our lives,” Gray says. “Some of their criticisms are ones that unite the left and the right. Like we all find celebrity culture vacuous.”