The Four Color Media Monitor

Israel National News/JTA reports the animated comedy series South Park has perhaps unsurprisingly taken a view of Israel post-October 7, 2023, where the writers can only seem to think of attacking Benjamin Netanyahu, and not so much the jihadists who murdered and raped over 1,200 people on that repulsive day in recent history:

Television’s most irreverent cartoon has taken aim at the Gaza war, showing one of its Jewish characters flying to Israel to tell Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he is “making life for Jews miserable” by continuing to prosecute the war.

The latest episode of “South Park” depicts FCC Chairman Brendan Carr suffering from a brain-eating parasite that threatens his “freedom of speech” — a potent visual in the week following ABC’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel over misleading comments over the identity of Charlie Kirk's assassin that Carr criticized.

But it also involves Kyle’s mom — the matriarch of the long-running Comedy Central show’s starring Jewish family— flying to Israel after learning that a prediction market app is asking for bets on the question, “Will Kyle Broflovski’s mother bomb Gaza and hit a Palestinian hospital?”

The episode, the first to tackle Gaza on a show that is famous for its rapid responses to current events, leaves no one unscathed — from non-Jews who press their Jewish friends to denounce Israel to Hollywood actors who weigh in on complex geopolitical issues. But it builds toward a denunciation of Netanyahu i[n] particular, who draws the scorn of one of the show’s most strident characters. [...]

The episode ends as Kyle’s mom bursts into Netanyahu’s office and directs her famous ire at him.

“Just who do you think you are, killing thousands and flattening neighborhoods, then wrapping yourself in Judaism like it’s some shield from criticism! You’re making life for Jews miserable and life for American Jews impossible!” she says.

This is so rock bottom, and perhaps we shoudn't be shocked that a TV show whose producers/broadcasters caved on the Danish Muhammed Cartoons episode would resort to cheaper, easier targets. That's got to be the way of people who apparently believe degradation is okay for anybody, but ultimately end up only pursuing those who're easy. Apparently, nobody on the South Park staff is interested in taking issue with Islamic sharia even in Gaza, where in the past decade, women were forced to wear burkas and niqabs. If there was no episode to date where a character of any background yells at the Hamas dictatorship that they're making life miserable for women by denying them an identity and turning them into 2nd class citizens, that says quite a bit about where the South Park producers actually stand too.

The shoddy approach to Israeli politics, as is noted in the above article, isn't the only troubling problem in South Park lately. According to Breitbart, even Donald Trump's been villified in the worst ways possible there, and it proves that, contrary to what was previously reported, they've boomeranged back to their old anti-conservative tricks again:

Comedy Central’s South Park placed a not-so-subtle pro-Jimmy Kimmel message inside the plot of this week’s episode that saw President Donald Trump nearly killing FCC chair Brendan Carr during several failed attempts to actually murder his unborn baby being carried by Satan.

“Hey Satan! You wanna get in the hot tub and smoke some cigarettes?” Trump says to a bedridden crocheting Satan while taking off his pants, exposing his comically small penis.

“Hot tubs and cigarettes are really bad for the baby,” Satan responds.

“Yeah, I know. Let’s do it anyway,” Trump says.

The bit escalates quickly with Trump setting multiple boobytraps for Satan that only Brenden Carr falls for.

This is sick. But then, what else could it be? It's shameful in the extreme how "satire" is used as a shield for such repulsive humor, and considering South Park's been around for nearly 30 years now, it's about time it was cancelled by HBO, just like the Simpsons should be cancelled by Fox. On which note, I'm glad I stopped watching the Simpsons 2 decades ago, as the humor was becoming increasingly forced and crude at the time, and they too have had their share of embarrassingly bad political moments over the years, even at Trump's expense. And the writers/producers of these animated cartoon series never seem to take issue with figures like Trump over valid issues at all. Which only additionally clarifies how pathetic Hollywood's animation industry is, much like the rest of showbiz.

Interestingly enough, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, one of the producers, Matt Selman, claimed they'd rather stay out of these issues South Park deals with, though his response still doesn't provide any alleviation:

In the spirit of staying relevant to the moment that the show is premiering in, how is The Simpsons handling the contemporary political climate with so much scrutiny on comedy? We've seen various controversies and hubbubs surround other satirical shows like South Park and Jimmy Kimmel Live recently.

Well, when you write a show that doesn't come out until 10 months after you write it, it kind of takes the pressure off, because who knows what the f--- we're gonna be looking at in 10 months. So like South Park, they make their show in a week, and even they can't stay up to date on things. More crazy s--- goes down faster than even they can do it. And you know, Jimmy Kimmel's great, and I'm glad he is back on TV. Censorship sucks. What can I say? Censorship sucks.

But it's not our mission statement to respond to the crisis of the moment. It's more about a town of good-natured dum-dums dealing with a changing world, yet our characters never really change. The world changes around them.

That being said, does it feel like there's anything that is off-limits in a way that it wasn't before? Does the team feel any pressure to skew more or less political at this point?

I think it's about the same. We're not gonna do a big show where the president comes to town. We did do that, but he was George Bush and he'd been out of office for quite some time. And, you know, we just don't do big topical things, 'cause the topical is so chaotic and nuts. So we have to look at the bigger trends.

Ideally, I would like to think that people on both sides of our divided nation can watch The Simpsons and feel that, like America, Springfield is a town of people who are good, but easily misled. Whatever your definition of misled is, you can apply that to the show.

Well unfortunately, based on his favoratism towards Kimmel, his offensive jokes notwithstanding, it's clear the staff running the Simpsons remains firmly on the left-wing side, and wants everybody to see the right-wing as misleading, and the sole proponent of censorship. What's more, if you want to parody Bush, that's fine, because he did do things that were wrong in his time, but failure to convincingly take issue with left-wing figures for any reason ruins everything. And the Simpsons did have its political moments in more recent times, so I don't know where Mr. Selman gets off claiming it's not their mission to do political issues. The point is, some of the topics they dealt with more recently have sadly been politicized long ago, and gotten worse and more divisive since, so it's hypocritical to say it's not their "mission" when they clearly have decided otherwise.

That's why Mr. Selman's interview does nothing to convince me they're improving, and if they see fit, they'll go back to more divisive subjects yet again, sooner than we think. At 800 episodes in over 35 years, it's clear the Simpsons has been on the air far too long, and it should be put out to pasture already. Who knows if it was even worth developing as a TV show to start with?

Update: according to the BBC, a South Park episode that mocked Kirk was removed from Comedy Central after the tragedy, but remains on Paramount Plus. Perhaps it's time to stop watching those channels too?

Labels: animation, Europe and Asia, history, islam and jihad, misogyny and racism, moonbat artists, moonbat writers, politics, terrorism, violence