Oops, I did it again

I've watched South Park off and on since the beginning of the show, and while it still makes me laugh out loud, I find it to be hit-or-miss in the larger scope.  Episodes like "Cow Days" and "Critter Christmas" still top the list for me as being enormously funny, but lately it seems that the guys who write this show can't quite figure out if the show is ultimately extreme biting satire or shocking for the sake of shock value.  Perhaps they mean to do both, but again, sometimes this works for me and sometimes it just doesn't.  Often I find myself scratching my head and wondering why I'm still watching it fifteen minutes in.

However, two episodes I've watched recently stand out to me as being distinctly different from the often self-indulgent gross jokes and over-the-top lampooning of popular culture.  "Scott Tenorman Must Die" is one such episode that the average viewer might disregard as simply disturbing and not terribly funny but simply terrible.  Even I didn't realize it at the moment I watched it, but it is clearly a modern interpretation of Titus Andronicus.  This is no revelation, of course, and lots of people are aware of this, but I have to wonder what in the world Trey Parker and Matt Stone are doing invoking Shakespeare on a show whose primary demographic - if the commercial spots sold during the prime time premieres of new episodes suggest this - is a bunch of 18-22 year-old guys who drink too much cheap beer, watch ultimate fighting championships, and think the Blue Collar Comedy Tour is the greatest achievement in a good laugh they've ever seen and have "Git 'R Dun" on bumper stickers plastered on their lifted Ford trucks.  The simple response to this is the fact that Parker and Stone, despite their penchant for toilet humor and a preoccupation with anal cavities, appear by all accounts to be quite bright and certainly capable of such literary allusion.  I have, in fact, incorporated this episode into my regular classes when I teach Titus, to the delight of most students, and - I'm certain - the horror of the English department powers that be.

In any case, whilst watching the show two nights ago, I saw an episode about the great Ms. Britney Spears, in which she appears in South Park under "Britney Watch" a la TMZ and the boys try to get her photo by telling the security officers that they were her kids.  Britney is dazed, vapid, confused, and her performance on MTV in which she was criticized for "phoning it in" and being "fat," appear in the episode after the cartoon Britney blows her head off and becomes a wandering, babbling, headless Britney incapable of speech.  Of course it was South Park-style, completely overblown and taken to the extreme, as if the Britney debacle/spectacle could be taken any further.  Not only is the episode a stinging social commentary, but by the end, it also accomplishes something entirely more literary.  Here, at the locus of shocking television and even more shocking reality of a fallen pop star, the final part of the show reveals its brilliance.  

Rene Girard wrote in Violence and the Sacred that in sacrificial cultures (which can be applied subsequently to acts of this in literature), that a "purifying violence" (51) is necessary "to protect the entire community from its own violence" (8).  Thus, by choosing a pure, beautiful specimen to sacrifice, it vicariously purifies the desire for violence in the larger community - a kind of losing one to save the many kind of idea.  At the end of the Britney episode of South Park, it is discovered that everyone involved with her - agents, promoters, the public, and even the citizens of South Park itself - have "chosen" Britney for a sacrifice for the harvest time.  Since it's "uncivilized" to continue the public spectacle of the murder, they have decided that the sacrificial person should kill herself and this is accomplished by driving her to madness.  While this is clearly hilarious and socially relevant, it's also critical on a much higher order than one might expect from the likes of South Park.  It's downright impressive.

And who says I'm no fun to watch television and films with?  

Pretty much everyone...