The Ultimate South Park and Philosophy (28 page)

The corporations, as Mr. Tweek likes to say, have his balls in a vice grip, a salad shooter, and a juice maker. He’s offered to manage the very Harbucks that would have driven his family business to ruin. Although he jokes that he won’t need the money after he sells his son into slavery, he leaves it open whether he’ll work for the giant coffee chain before whose superiority he prostrates himself in good-­humored capitulation.

It is nonsense,
South Park
says, to blame corporations for the wrongdoing of individuals. Corporations are good in and of themselves. Individual persons who use corporate tools to do bad things need to be held responsible as individuals, regardless of whether legal and economic penalties apply to a business as corporate entity. Corporations, as Mr. Tweek observes, have seized upon some favorite parts of our anatomies in the grip of hazardous kitchen appliances, where we can expect they won’t be treated very gently or respectfully. Nor is this any less true for the fact that we don’t have much choice, just as long as we continue to want and are willing to work all our lives in exchange for the kinds of things that only corporations can provide.

1
. Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
The Social Contract
, trans. Maurice Cranston (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 96.

2
. Ibid., 71.

Paul A. Cantor

Tho’ ye subject bee but a fart, yet will this tedious sink of learning ­ponderously philosophize.

— Mark Twain, 1601

Critics of
South Park
—and they are legion—bitterly complain about its relentless obscenity and potty humor. And they have a legitimate point. But if one wanted to mount a high-minded defense of the show’s low-minded jokes, one might go all the way back to Plato (427–347
BCE
) to find a link between philosophy and vulgarity. Toward the end of his dialogue the
Symposium
, a young Athenian nobleman named Alcibiades offers a striking image of the power of Socrates. He compares the philosopher’s speeches to a statue of the satyr Silenus, which is ugly on the outside, but which, when opened up, reveals a beautiful interior: “if you choose to listen to Socrates’ discourses you would feel them at first to be quite ridiculous; on the outside they are clothed with such absurd words and phrases … His talk is of pack-asses, smiths, cobblers, and tanners … so that anyone inexpert and thoughtless might laugh his speeches to scorn. But when these are opened … you will discover that they are the only speeches which have any sense in them.”
¹

These words characterize equally well the contrast between the ­vulgar surface and the philosophical depth of the dialogue in which they are spoken. The
Symposium
contains some of the most soaring and profound philosophical speculations ever written. And yet in the middle of the dialogue the comic poet Aristophanes comes down with a bad case of hiccups that prevents him from speaking in turn. By the end of the dialogue, all the characters except Socrates have consumed so much wine that they pass out in a collective drunken stupor. In a dialogue about the spiritual and physical dimensions of love, Plato thus suggests that, however philosophical we may wax in our speeches, we remain creatures of the body and can never entirely escape its crude bodily functions. In the way that the
Symposium
moves back and forth between the ridiculous and the sublime, Plato seems to be making a statement about philosophy—that it has something in common with low comedy. Both philosophy and vulgar humor fly in the face of conventional opinion.

I’m not sure what Plato would have made of
South Park
, but his Silenus image fits the show quite well.
South Park
is one the most vulgar shows ever to appear on television, and yet it can at the same time be one of the most thought-provoking. Its vulgarity is of course the first thing we notice about it, given its obsession with farting, pissing, shitting, vomiting, and every other excretory possibility. As Plato’s dialogue suggests, it’s all too easy to become fixated on the vulgar and obscene surface of
South Park
, rejecting out of hand a show that chose to make a Christmas icon out of a talking turd named Mr. Hankey. But if you’re patient with
South Park
, and give the show the benefit of the doubt, you’ll find that it takes up one serious issue after another, from environmentalism to animal rights, from assisted suicide to sexual harassment, from presidential elections to US foreign policy. And the show approaches all these issues from a distinct philosophical position, known as libertarianism, the philosophy of freedom. If anything, the show can become too didactic, with episodes often culminating in a character delivering a speech that offers a surprisingly balanced and nuanced account of the issue at hand.

In thinking about
South Park
, we should recall that some of the greatest comic writers—Aristophanes, Chaucer, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Jonson, Swift—plumbed the depths of obscenity even as they rose to the heights of philosophical thought. The same intellectual courage that emboldened them to defy conventional proprieties empowered them to reject conventional ideas and break through the intellectual frontiers of their day. Without claiming that
South Park
deserves to rank with such distinguished predecessors, I will say that the show descends from a long tradition of comedy that ever since ancient Athens has combined obscenity with philosophy. There are almost as many fart jokes in Aristophanes’ play
The Clouds
as there are in a typical episode of
The Terrance and Phillip Show
. In fact, in the ­earliest dramatic representation of Socrates that has come down to us, he’s making fart jokes as he tries to explain to a dumb Athenian named Strepsiades that thunder is a purely natural phenomenon, not the work of the great god Zeus:

First think of the tiny fart that your intestines make.
Then consider the heavens: their infinite farting is thunder.
For thunder and farting are, in principle, one and the same.
²

The people who condemn
South Park
for being offensive need to be reminded that comedy is by its very nature offensive. It derives its energy from its transgressive power—its ability to break taboos, to speak the unspeakable. Comedians are always pushing the envelop, probing to see how much they can get away with in violating the speech codes of their day. Comedy is a social safety valve. We laugh precisely because comedians momentarily liberate us from the restrictions that conventional society imposes on us. We applaud comedians because they say right out in front of an audience what, supposedly, nobody is allowed to say in public.

Paradoxically, then, the more permissive American society has become, the harder it has become to write comedy. As censorship laws have been relaxed, and people have been allowed to say and show almost anything in movies and television—above all to deal with ­formerly taboo sexual material—comedy writers like the creators of
South Park
, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, must have begun to wonder if there is any way left to offend an audience.

The genius of Parker and Stone has been to see that in our day a new frontier of comic transgression has opened up because of the phenomenon known as
political correctness
. Our age may have tried to dispense with the conventional pieties of earlier generations, but it has developed new pieties of its own. They may not look like the traditional pieties, but they’re enforced in the same old way, with social pressures and sometimes even legal sanctions punishing people who dare to violate the new taboos. Many of our colleges and universities today have speech codes, which seek to define what can and can’t be said on campus, and in particular to prohibit anything that might be interpreted as demeaning someone because of his or her race, religion, gender, handicap, and a whole series of other protected categories. Sex may no longer be taboo in our society, but sexism now is.
Seinfeld
was probably the first television comedy that systematically violated the new taboos of political correctness. The show repeatedly made fun of contemporary sensitivities about such issues as sexual orientation, ethnic identity, feminism, and handicapped people.
Seinfeld
proved that being politically incorrect can be hilariously funny in today’s moral and intellectual climate, and
South Park
was quick to follow its lead.

The show has mercilessly satirized all forms of political correctness—anti-hate crime legislation, tolerance indoctrination in the schools, Hollywood do-gooding of all kinds, environmentalism and anti-smoking campaigns, the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Special Olympics—the list goes on and on. It’s hard to single out the most politically incorrect moment in the history of
South Park
, but I’ll nominate the spectacular “cripple fight” in the fifth season episode of that name, and indeed just look at the politically incorrect name to describe what happens when two “differently abled,” or rather “handi-capable,” boys named Timmy and Jimmy square off for a violent—and interminable—battle in the streets of South Park. The show obviously relishes the sheer shock value of moments such as this. But more is going on here than transgressing the boundaries of good taste just for transgression’s sake.

This is where the philosophy of libertarianism enters the picture in
South Park
. The show criticizes political correctness in the name of freedom. That’s why Parker and Stone can proclaim themselves equal opportunity satirists; they make fun of the old pieties as well as the new, savaging both the right and the left insofar as both seek to restrict freedom. “Cripple Fight” is an excellent example of the balance and even-handedness of
South Park
, and the way it can offend both ends of the political spectrum. The episode deals in typical
South Park
fashion with a contemporary controversy, one that has even made it into the courts: whether homosexuals should be allowed to lead Boy Scout troops. The episode makes fun of the old-fashioned types in the town who insist on denying a troop leadership to Big Gay Al (a recurrent character whose name says it all). It turns out that the ostensibly straight man the Boy Scouts choose to replace Big Gay Al is a pedophile who starts abusing the boys immediately by photographing them naked. As it frequently does with the groups it satirizes,
South Park
, even as it stereotypes homosexuals, displays sympathy for them and their right to live their lives as they see fit.

But just as the episode seems to be simply taking the side of those who condemn the Boy Scouts for homophobia, it swerves in an unexpected direction. Big Gay Al himself defends the right of the Boy Scouts to exclude homosexuals on the principle of freedom of association. An organization should be able to set up its own rules and the law should not impose society’s notions of political correctness on a private group. This episode represents
South Park
at its best—looking at a complicated issue from both sides and coming up with a judicious resolution of the issue. And the principle on which the issue is resolved is
freedom
. As the episode shows, Big Gay Al should be free to be homosexual, but the Boy Scouts should also be free as an organization to make their own rules and exclude him from a leadership post if they so desire.

This libertarianism makes
South Park
offensive to the politically correct, for, if applied consistently, it would dismantle the whole apparatus of speech control and thought manipulation that do-gooders have tried to construct to protect their favored minorities. Libertarianism is a philosophy of radical freedom, and particularly celebrates the free market as a form of social organization. As a ­philosophy, it descends from, among other sources, the thinking of the Scottish Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Moral philosophers from that period such as Adam Smith (1723–1790) argued for free trade and the reduction of government intervention in the economy. Libertarianism is especially grounded in the work of the Austrian School of economics, above all the writings of Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) and Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992), who offer the most cogent defense of unfettered economic activity as the key to ­prosperity and progress.
³
The term
libertarianism
was popularized by Murray Rothbard (1926–1995), a student of Mises, who developed the most radical critique of state interference in economic and social life, a ­philosophy of freedom that borders on anarchism.
⁴

With its support for unconditional freedom in all areas of life, ­libertarianism defies categorization in terms of the standard one-dimensional political spectrum of right and left. In opposition to the collectivist and anti-capitalist vision of the left, libertarians reject central planning and want people to be left alone to pursue their self-interest as they see fit. But in contrast to conservatives, libertarians also oppose social legislation; they generally favor the legalization of drugs and the abolition of all censorship and anti-pornography laws. Parker and Stone publicly identify themselves as libertarians—which explains why their show ends up offending both liberals and conservatives. Parker has said: “We avoid extremes but we hate liberals more than conservatives, and we hate them.”
⁵
This does seem to be an accurate assessment of the leanings of the show—even though it is no friend of the right,
South Park
is more likely to go after left-wing causes. In an interview in
Reason
, Matt Stone explained that he and Parker were on the left of the political spectrum when they were in high school in the 1980s, but in order to maintain their stance as rebels, they found that, when they went to the University of Colorado, Boulder, and even more so when they arrived in Hollywood, they had to change their positions and attack the prevailing left-wing orthodoxy. As Stone says: “I had Birkenstocks in high school. I was that guy. And I was sure that those people on the other side of the political spectrum [the right] were trying to control my life. And then I went to Boulder and got rid of my Birkenstocks immediately, because everyone else had them and I realized that those people over here [on the left] want to control my life too. I guess that defines my political philosophy. If anybody’s telling me what I should do, then you’ve got to really convince me that it’s worth doing.”
⁶