Offence has often been taken at the extraordinary conflations concocted by the writing team the Japanese as sociopathic murderers of dolphins and whales, God as a small rodent, Buddha as a cocaine addict and the Queen of England committing suicide. Such vociferous criticisms stem from a hallmark of the South Park style: tackling contemporary issues through lewd toilet humour that targets a plethora of different individuals, social groups and events. Diverse audiences comprised of concerned parents from Action for Children’s Television, the Parents Television Council, the government of Sri Lanka and members of the Russian Pentecostal Church have all engaged in efforts to proscribe the viewing of South Park.
Despite nearly every episode being rated TV-MA, the most restrictive rating possible in America (designed for mature audiences only), South Park has a Wikipedia page dedicated solely to the controversies in which it has been embroiled.
The show has generated enormous controversy throughout its history, with a battery of criticisms and a dedicated following of protest groups. In what ways might fart jokes be geopolitical? This questions animates this study of the hugely popular cartoon South Park, a satirical show that has enjoyed consistently high ratings since its inception in 1997. This is defined in a Bakhtinian sense of the body grotesque, a social inversion through reference to the common bodily functions of all human beings. I examine the show South Park and argue its satire combines bodily and scatological humour with more traditional satirical techniques to produce a comedy that ridicules contemporary issues by reducing complex politics to the most basic and crass condition possible. I argue that this should not involve a wholesale rejection of satirical shows, as humour that uses irony, subversion, and other discursive techniques is just one way satirical media becomes an effective commentator on political issues. Studies of satire have suggested that rather than contesting entrenched geopolitical beliefs, satirical shows can serve to further divide audiences both amenable and antagonistic to the satire in question. Humour that is vulgar and politically ambiguous is yet to be explored as a potent geopolitical avenue of enquiry. Scholars have explored the affirmative and liberatory possibilities of humour, and the affective bodily dimensions of laughter as tools for transformative action in critical geopolitics. Humour and laughter have become the subject of recent geopolitical scrutiny.