Copyright huffpost
Politics wasn’t meant to be the focus of the latest seasons of “South Park” but President Donald Trump’s seemingly boundless influence on America made it impossible to avoid. “It’s pop culture. It’s not that we got all political. It’s that politics became pop culture,” creator Trey Parker told The New York Times in an interview with co-creator Matt Stone published on Saturday. Though Stone and Parker deliberately delayed the show’s 27th season to avoid the mess that was the 2024 election, “South Park” couldn’t resist riffing on the MAGA macrocosm when it returned this summer after a two-year hiatus. For one, the chronically subversive creators said “new taboos” around bad-mouthing Trump had them “attracted to that like flies to honey.” But behind the scenes, the president’s influence also loomed as Parker and Stone were locked in negotiations with Paramount at the same time the entertainment giant’s proposed merger with Skydance made it essential for them to stay in the White House’s good graces. It was at that point they decided centering their first episode on Trump would be a way to “show our independence somehow,” according to Stone. Mere hours after Stone and Parker signed a five-year, $1.25 billion contract with Paramount, “South Park” returned with an episode that mocked the swing from the identity-forward politics of President Joe Biden’s era to life in Trump’s America. “We’re just very down-the-middle guys,” Parker said of their political perspective. “Any extremists of any kind we make fun of. We did it for years with the woke thing. That was hilarious to us. And this is hilarious to us.” As the first months of Trump 2.0 offered no shortage of horrors and absurdities, “South Park” had plenty of material, anchoring the plot of seasons 27 and 28 in the president’s relationship with a brawny but sensitive Satan, who is pregnant with his child. Tackling all things Trump has been a boon for “South Park” ratings, with viewership doubling from its 2023 numbers, according to Nielsen. Though White House representatives called the show’s Trump pivot a “desperate attempt for attention,” the creators said “South Park” doesn’t need chaos in the capital to keep itself relevant. Telling the Times they’ll move on from the MAGA-verse once they’re “sick of it,” Parker said, “If there’s one thing we know, it is that our show will be a lot longer than theirs. So, we just got to do this for now.” The duo previous acknowledged the creative pitfalls of tackling politics while talking about why they moved away from Trump plotlines in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. “Dude, we’re just becoming CNN now. We’re becoming: ‘Tune in to see what we’re going to say about Trump,’” Stone said he remembered thinking. “Matt and I hated it but we got stuck in it somehow.” By the 2024 election, Parker told Vanity Fair he thought they’d squeezed all the comedic material they could from then-candidate Trump. “I don’t know what more we could possibly say about Trump,” he explained.
