I would add that I find Cartman to be an essentially successful character: he’s evil in a consistent, terrible, wonderful way. His tremendous selfishness, his fantastic prowess at manipulation, and his simultaneous childishness are a combination that Parker and Stone clearly understand enough to preserve.

Contrast this to Homer Simpson, who has evolved from a deeply sympathetic everyman who was excessive in every one of his natural inclinations (including good ones) to a vacuous fiction of a character, a foil who does stupid or selfish things to create obstacles and advance plots, rather than one who often reacts in instinctively stupid or selfish ways to things in the world. He has, sadly, followed in the steps of Peter Griffin, a man who is simply and blankly monstrous.

South Park can be really gross, but the preachy episodes make it worth it. There are three elements to every episode: little kids wacky adventure, heavyhanded preachy metaphor, esoteric or closely observed parody, with some episodes more purely one of the three. The first episode about the alien anal probes isn’t about anything, but as time has gone on they’ve started to say more and more interesting things.

A couple episodes have stayed with me as templates for my thinking. Sometimes I just disagree with TP & MS’ politics/beliefs, like with the Al Gore ManBearPig episode. Sometimes their take is so contrarian that it makes you glad contrarians exist (the “Bloody Mary” episode has an interesting take on alcoholism[1]). I used Cartman as an example in a paper on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: (He tells Butters, “Life goes by pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once and a while, and do whatever you want all the time, you could miss it” but he also likes authori-teh).

Mainly what they offer is a genuinely skeptical/cynical perspective on everything, something that’s not at all common in modernity. It’s not even Libertarian, because they believe that most people are idiots. The “Free Willzyx” episode [2] strikes me as a sort of summation of their philosophical position, which is against sentimentalism of any stripe.

I haven’t watched The Simpsons in a long time, but SP and it started out the same, both with bad animation and SP with “kick the baby!” and Simpsons with Homer strangling Bart, and both moved to more complex satire. An episode I saw recently [3] was pretty clever in many ways.

[1] http://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/103803/
[2] http://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/103677/
[3] http://www.hulu.com/watch/7631/the-simpsons-that-90s-show

Mr. Method,

Your description matches my experience of South Park perfectly. Your analysis of episode mechanics, in particular, strikes me as correct. I’m also glad you reminded me of their take on alcoholism: it was unusual and delightful to have someone criticize the idea that alcoholism is a disease. I wasn’t particularly convinced, but it made me immediately grateful for the dialectical space it created.

I don’t think, though, that Homer strangling Bart is the equivalent of “kick the baby”. Homer strangling Bart was (aside from a good sight gag) a demonstration of Homer’s inability to restrain his impulses. Since, at the beginning, he was still something of a father, who might be annoyed by the childishness of his son or even by his son’s failure to behave, it was a good demonstration of how Homer in some ways fit his role of father, but lacked the moderation or maturity to behave as he was supposed to. This is a compelling picture, in my opinion, where many of us feel fundamentally unsuited (or at least occasionally unsuited) to the roles we must play, as much as we frequently are grateful for them, too. That Homer’s inability to parent more effectively is essentially parallel to Bart’s failure to be a good kid is, of course, obvious to us and part of the cleverness of it.

All this is to say that I consider it part of the sophisticated character structures that informed stories and interactions in the early years. I’d take any of those episodes in a second over the satire of episodes like “That ’90s Show”, where the characters are unimportant, and exist merely to serve up a smörgåsbord of (admittedly decent) cultural references and jokes.

Nate,

I think if you go back and watch those episodes from the first season, you’ll see that everything is very crude and direct, like a cartoon version of Married with Children. Homer looks and sounds like a dangerous monster. The lines wobble and the sight gag of Bart’s head ‘squishing’ up when Homer strangles him is common (Homer strangles him whenever he realizes that Bart is making fun of him: “Why you little…”). Then, as Groening et al. figure out the medium, everything slows down, the animation gets cleaner and the focus shifts to the complex three-act stories with all the cultural references. I think this was Groening making the successful show more like his comic books, which are fairly intellectual. A few seasons in there’s an episode making fun of the early “Eat my shorts, man!” phase of the Simpsons, and I recall a scene in a more recent episode where Homer strangles Bart but it’s clearly an ironic reference back to that time. Then, the Simpsons has had to transition from a creative labor of love to a social institution, like Saturday Night Live. An episode like “that 90s show” is extremely self-aware and post-, since of course the 90s was a decade that the Simpsons helped to define, and the writers know that (the episode begins the same way as another popular episode where we see Marge and Homer in the 70s). Look out for “that Oughts Show” in 2010.

The Nirvana and Bush references in that episode are really funny: “Margarine!”

That the creators of Family Guy were born at all represents a staggering failure on the part of Planned Parenthood.