Co-created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, South Park debuted in the late 1990s in the shadow of The Simpsons, but about five or six years into its run on Comedy Central the series lapped its groundbreaking predecessor as the funniest and most consistently shrewd animated peddler of sociopolitical commentary on television. The release of its 11th season on DVD only confirms its ongoing genius, featuring a number of new classic episodes.
Coming off a year in which Parker and Stone memorably assayed the hybrid car craze (“Smug Alert!”), the James Frey memoir debacle (“A Million Little Fibers”), the debate over evolution being taught in school (the two-part “Go God Go”) and the online gaming craze (the groundbreaking “Make Love, Not Warcraft,” portions of which featured the show’s kids doing battle as their animated avatars), the creative bar was set awfully high. Right from the start, though, the 11th season of South Park delivers.
Season opener “With Apologies to Jesse Jackson” finds Randy Marsh, little Stan’s father, appearing on Wheel of Fortune and making a rather unfortunate guess during the game, choosing the word “niggers” instead of “naggers” as the correct answer to the clue “People Who Annoy You.” While Stan tries to understand Token’s feelings on the matter, Randy embarks on a self-centered campaign to ban the word, burdened as he is by the discrimination he feels from being known as “That Nigger Guy.” An amazing, razor-sharp send-up of the Michael Richards/Laugh Factory debacle, the episode is side-splittingly funny (without even getting into Cartman’s battles with a dwarf who comes to speak at the kids’ school), and it makes a powerful social point to boot — African-Americans don’t need whites trying to convince them that they “feel their pain” with respect to racial slurs, they only need them to acknowledge that they’re probably not in a position to truly understand the deep-seated hurtfulness of a word with that much of a nasty, oppressive history.
The next episode, “Cartman Sucks,” finds Cartman pranking an asleep Butters by taking a series of photos of him in sexually compromising positions… including one with his penis in Cartman’s mouth (?!). Naturally, Butters, unaware of any of this, misunderstands the definition of the word “bi-curious,” which prompts his parents to send him to a right-wing de-homosexualization camp. (Paging Ted Haggard!) Another instant classic, this episode attacks religious intolerance and hypocrisy, all while letting Stan and Kyle blister a panicked Cartman — who works to cover up the existence of the photos before they get out — as gay, something he hadn’t considered when mock-fellating Butters.
Other episodes include “Le Petite Tourette,” which finds Cartman learning about Tourette’s Syndrome, and feigning his affliction with it so that he might go around cursing people out (it’s hard to believe it took 11 seasons for Parker and Stone to work this idea in); and “The Snuke,” a faux-political thriller, presented in the style of 24, in which a nuclear weapon is hidden in Hillary Clinton’s… well, I don’t want to spoil it. Bono gets rapped in “More Crap,” wherein Randy battles the U2 frontman for the record of the world’s largest “number two.” (There’s a twist ending here that helps save this otherwise bizarrely personal salvo against Bono, along with the fact that crap sizes are measured in “Courics,” as in Katie.)
Tackling, in (relatively) epic visual scope, the spectre of terrorism as applied to a literal war on the mind, the three-episode “Imaginationland” arc is the 11th season’s putative sociopolitical highwater mark, but in fact the aforementioned “With Apologies to Jesse Jackson” is probably the most focused, eviscerating political statement on this set. Running a close second is the equally hilarious “Night of the Living Homeless” (above), a zombie movie send-up in which shuffling, change-needing homeless folk overrun South Park, scaring the bejesus out of the locals and forcing the kids to again save the day.
Spread out over three discs, and housed, like previous seasonal releases, in expansive gatefold packaging in a nice (and this time light purple) cardboard slipcase, the DVD extras here consist only of episodic mini-commentaries by Stone and Parker. Running several minutes apiece, these introductions contain a few bon mots here and there, like the fact that “Imaginationland” was originally thought of as potentially another long-form movie idea. The series itself is of course the main thing, with enough legitimate laughs to sincerely earn repeat-viewing enjoyment. That said, a bit more behind-the-scenes material on these sets would really send the collectible factor through the roof. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. A+ (Show) C+ (Discs)