The Season 27 premiere of South Park—the animated Comedy Central show famous for skewering public figures with crude and topical humor—trained its sights on President Donald Trump with the message that the would-be emperor has no clothes. Literally.
The episode depicts an out-of-control president who threatens everyone in sight with frivolous lawsuits, including the residents of South Park, merely for questioning him. Trump’s cartoon doppelgӓnger cows the news program 60 Minutes into craven servility, whose reporters tremble when covering the fictitious case against South Park and take care to assure viewers what a “great guy” the president is.
And that about does it for the tasteful part.
The show’s creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, portray a naked Trump with a tiny penis in bed with Satan, who asks about Trump’s place in the Epstein files before rebuffing the president’s sexual advances. The episode concludes with what appears to be an AI-generated public service video—inspired by Tweed tried to bribe Nast, offering what would be millions of dollars today for the cartoonist to study art in Europe. Nast turned him down flat, so Tweed and his cronies tried to strong-arm Harper’s Weekly, threatening to have the city’s Board of Elections boycott Harper’s textbooks. Unlike Paramount today, Harper’s ignored the threat and stood behind Nast.
The political potency of cartooning persuaded the Supreme Court to unanimously affirm First Amendment protections for Hustler Magazine in 1988 after Rev. Jerry Falwell sued it for causing “emotional distress” after the magazine published a savage and salacious parody of Falwell committing incest with his mother in an outhouse. The Court was untroubled by the “caustic nature” of the graphic attack, observing that “from the early cartoon portraying George Washington as an ass down to the present day, graphic depictions and satirical cartoons have played a prominent role in public and political debate.” It noted that political cartoons have “an effect that could not have been obtained by the photographer or the portrait artist,” and accordingly, “our political discourse would have been considerably poorer without them.”
South Park‘s gleeful takedown of Trump falls squarely within this tradition. And, perhaps for that reason, the White House and its political minions apparently have declared war on comedy.
Of Paramount Global’s decision to terminate The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the president posted, “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings.” The company has maintained that the termination was purely for economic reasons, but the timing is suspicious to say the least, coming just days before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) finally approved the long-delayed Paramount-Skydance merger. Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez denounced the merger approval and said it resulted from backroom dealing that led to a “payout and other troubling concessions Paramount made to settle a baseless lawsuit.”
Trump’s post about Colbert, and his follow-up musing that Jimmy Kimmel could be next, was mirrored shortly thereafter by an FCC submission from the Center for American Rights. This political group that litigates on Trump’s behalf is calling for the commission to investigate late-night talk shows to determine whether the shows and their comedian hosts are too left-wing. To this, Trump’s hand-picked FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, suggested that maybe it is time for what he called a “course correction” for late-night television. Carr did not elaborate on what he meant by that—a fairness doctrine for comedy, perhaps?
It appears that Trump and his followers want to accomplish what Boss Tweed could not—to find a way to stop “them damn pictures” and jokes. But that’s not going to happen so long as our leaders continue to beclown themselves, and our constitutional history teaches that it is the comedians like Colbert and the creators of South Park who will have the last laugh.
