South Park

Of course they have competition. There’s “The Daily Show,” for sure, though I’d argue that Jon Stewart’s version is as much a news program as a comedy series. But for audacity, visual flair, musical chops, verbal invention and gut-busting silliness, not to mention consistency of vision over time, I think the “South Park” boys trump all comers — including the creators of “The Simpsons,” a landmark show that started to flag halfway into its endless run, and Seth MacFarlane of “Family Guy,” whose show has its moments but has never quite risen to the heights of conceptually driven insanity that Parker and Stone reach so often.  At their best, I’d put Parker and Stone up there with “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” “SCTV,” Ernie Kovacs, the Marx Brothers, George Carlin and W.C. Fields, all of whom skated along the edge of the surreal and willfully outrageous, doing pirouettes and blowing raspberries at anyone who tried, like yours truly, to call them great and significant.

Their success is all the more remarkable when you consider what true outsiders they were, and to some extent still are. Back in 1992 they were just a couple of students at the University of Colorado who’d produced a goofy little short film titled “The Spirit of Christmas.” Within five years — thanks to help from Fox executive Brian Graden, who gave them $2,000 to turn the short into a “video Christmas card” that he could send to friends and birthed the very first viral video sensation — they’d landed a Comedy Central show, “South Park.”

Their rise was so sudden that there was no reason to think they’d last. Most overnight successes freeze up in the spotlight or reveal themselves as one-trick wonders. Not Parker and Stone. They’re safely ensconced in mainstream culture — almost everything they do is connected to Viacom, the gigantic parent company of “South Park” network Comedy Central — yet they still seem mysteriously and delightfully outside of it. What other American humorists have been so successful within the mainstream over such a long period while routinely landing on news pages (most recently for Comedy Central’s censoring of their jokes about Mohammed) and maintaining an almost punk rock edge?

Sure, some episodes have been sharper and more coherent than others; like a lot of the aforementioned iconic clowns, Parker and Stone practice a type of humor that is by nature hit-and-miss. But over the past few days, I’ve rummaged through prior seasons of “South Park” looking for duds and have found surprisingly few. The stuff that seemed astonishingly vital at the time still does, and the stuff that felt subpar — such as the Season 1 episode with the Ethiopian –  has proved better than I remembered, sometimes much better.  Even a weak episode is likely to contain a scene or subplot so terrifically unhinged that it makes you dizzy. A “C” effort from these guys is better than a latter-day “A+” effort from “Family Guy” or “The Simpsons.” 

And an A+ — such as Season 10′s “Hell on Earth 2006,” wherein Satan decides to rent out the W Hotel in downtown South Park and throw himself a Sweet 16 party — is one for the ages. The Satan stuff (a continuation of the great hell sequences in their 1999 animated feature “Bigger, Longer and Uncut”) is a barbed skewering of skeezy reality show participants’ narcissism, and the audience’s rubbernecking smugness; that by itself might have been enough to sustain a half-hour episode. But Parker and Stone aren’t content to do just enough. They always want to give us more than we expected, to go further, to overwhelm with sheer imaginative excess. So they add a subplot with the boys summoning the spirit of murdered rapper Biggie Smalls by repeating his name into a mirror à la “Candyman,” and yet another subplot that finds mass murderers Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy being dispatched from the underworld to pick up a giant cake shaped like a Ferrari and deliver it to Satan’s bash. The “Three Murderers” become the supernatural version of the Three Stooges, squabbling among themselves, getting into wacky high jinks, and beating, stabbing and disemboweling themselves and various innocent bystanders. These bits are breathtaking for all sorts of reasons, one of which is that they explore the connection between comedy and cruelty incisively, but without becoming dry or self-regarding.