Kim Jong Il was one of the most chilling figures of the modern era, with a harrowing human rights record. But of the tyrannical madmen who have died this year, he was also the one who made the oddest pop culture splash. Moammar Gadhafi’s ability to rock a golden muumuu will never be paralleled. But from “30 Rock” to “The Daily Show,” the departed North Korean leader will be missed. Was it those rock star shades? His fondness for olive green? The way he really knew how to throw a tank-rolling, goose-stepping military parade? In a word, yes.
Sure, Saddam Hussein got to play a role in Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s 1999 opus “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut.” But it was Mr. Jong Il who really stole the show in Parker and Stone’s subsequent puppet masterpiece “Team America: World Police.” Kim’s not just a homicidal maniac in a big house — he’s a guy who really, really loves to put on a big show. He’s also a man who can’t quite pronounce “inevitable,” who struggles with the isolation of success, and who, it turns out, is actually a bug from outer space. Now that’s a villain!
What makes the puppet Kim Jong Il such a classic comedic character is that he’s not all that far from the Western perception of the real guy. This, after all, was a man who loved the movies so much he wrote a book on “The Art of Cinema.” He loved them so much he owned thousands of DVDs – “Rambo” and Elizabeth Taylor were allegedly among his faves. He loved them so much that early in his career, he had South Korean filmmaker Shin Sang-ok and his South Korean film director Shin Sang-ok and his actress ex-wife Choi Eun-hee kidnapped to forge the North Korean film industry. The results included the somewhat less subtle than “Triumph of the Will”-rampaging monster masterpiece “Pulgasari.”
Jong Il not only forcibly created entertainment, he inspired it. He became part of a pivotal plotline on “30 Rock” last season, when Jack Donaghy’s wife, Avery Jessup (Elizabeth Banks), wound up abducted by the internationally fearsome “convenience store owner.” It was a crazy sitcom twist – based on the very real imprisonment (and subsequent release) of Current TV’s Euna Lee and Laura Ling in 2009.
Even as he retreated from the spotlight throughout his later years, Kim Jong Il became all the more dominant a force on the Internet. Is there a more elegantly straightforward, satisfyingly amusing Tumblr than Kim Jong-il Looking at Things? There is not. Have you ever seen photos of Stalin smiling merrily at great wheels of cheese? I rest my case.
He was a complicated man. A man who apparently had a penchant for water slides and could golf a 38-under-par round. Would you tell him he couldn’t take that mulligan? What can you say of a person who has been played by both Margaret Cho and Gilbert Gottfried? A man who’s provided more material for “The Daily Show” than anyone not named Jim Cramer? A guy like that doesn’t come along in too many lifetimes. Now that the leader is dead, his legacy on the evening news will no doubt be harrowing. But as Elizabeth Banks tweeted Monday, we are indeed at a pivotal moment in history” — one that leaves joke writers and Tumblr bloggers just a little “sad and ronery.”
Uh, you guyyyyyssss....It's Cartman, Trey Parker and Matt Stone of "South Park."
As I watched Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of Comedy Central’s “South Park,” collect armloads of Tony awards for their satirical musical “The Book of Mormon” Sunday night, a disquieting and thrilling realization popped into my head: These potty-mouthed clowns might very well be America’s greatest and most consistently inventive humorists.
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.
Another of Parker and Stone’s admirable qualities is their resistance to political pigeonholing. At some point, representatives of every American party or movement have tried to claim them as standard-bearers, only to get a thumb in the eye soon after. Are the “South Park” guys liberal? Conservative? Republican? Democrat? Libertarian? Pro-choice? Pro-life? Pro-capitalism? Pro-socialism? I suspect they’re mainly anti-complacency, and anti-bullshit.
I’ll never forget watching their 2004 political satire/puppet epic “Team America: World Police” with two different theatrical audiences — one in lower Manhattan, the other in suburban Dallas — and hearing both crowds chortle as Parker and Stone beat up on people or ideals they thought worthless, then squirm when the humorists started butchering their sacred cows.
Parker and Stone fire on targets and settle scores. But their work almost always has a structural integrity that makes it feel more substantial than a rant-of-the-week. For instance, the epic, three-part, 2007 “South Park” episode “Imaginationland” is one of the definitive statements on American pop culture in the age of terrorism and endless foreign war. But it’s not just a finger-wagging editorial about how to behave or not behave, or how to think about the relationship between the American imagination and the media that feeds it. It’s self-contained and self-supporting, a stand-alone piece that has internal logic as rigorous as that of any big budget fantasy film that takes itself seriously.
Parker and Stone have done some of their sharpest and craziest work in the last couple of seasons — for the record, that’s seasons 14 and 15, at which point most TV series are either long-canceled or coasting on the memory of past triumphs. This season’s send-up of the royal wedding — a 12-tiered wedding cake of riffing — was one of the single greatest episodes the show has produced. The goof on the ceremony itself (substituting the “Canadian royal family” for the Brits, with Parker-as-cable-newscaster ending every other observation with a variation of the phrase, “as is tradition”) belongs on a short list of great self-contained surreal set pieces, alongside the “Hail, Freedonia” number from the Marx Brothers’ “Duck Soup” and the duel with the Black Knight in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” (You can watch it below at the 1:30 mark.) “People in attendance now gently tossing Captain Crunch as the prince passes by, as is tradition … [The] Canadian prince now dipping his arms into the pudding, as is tradition … The princess will, of course, scrape the pudding off the prince’s arms, symbolizing their union … This is a glorious day for our country, and indeed the world.”
Last week’s half-season finale, “You’re Getting Old” — in which Stan’s 10th birthday afflicts him with cynicism, and prompts arguments between his parents about how one’s taste in pop culture almost inevitably hardens over time — might have made a great series closer if Parker and Stone had decided to hang it up now. But why would they when they’re producing work like this, which makes an unpretentious but true statement on generational tension, aging and nostalgia without turning self-important?
Parker and Stone have managed to seem as though they’re still a couple of wiseacres sitting in the back row of the classroom, goofing off and making trouble, when in fact they’ve spent the past decade-and-a-half winning Tonys and Emmy and Oscar nominations, and diligently assembling a body of work that should be the envy of any animator, stand-up comic or editorial cartoonist. It’s been a remarkable run. And as long as the show stays interesting — and it has; much more so than any of its long-running animated competitors — there’s no reason it shouldn’t continue.
Since I’ve managed to go a whole column without running a clip from “Bigger, Longer and Uncut,” let’s close with one, shall we? All hail Satan. He can dream, too.
Tyler Perry is something of a divisive figure. We’ve already seen Spike Lee decimate Perry in the pair’s ongoing feud, and it’s a well-documented fact that audiences of Tyler’s extremely popular Madea series don’t give a crap what Spike Lee thinks of the “coonery buffoonery.”
Last night, “South Park” gave Perry a long-awaited noogie when he showed up to accept at the school’s comedy awards show. (Called “The Kathy Griffin Awards” – how I wish those really existed.)
Perry continues to pop up throughout the episode, and Token Black (the only African-American “South Park” kid) continues to laugh before stopping himself in self-loathing. Even Obama isn’t exempt from the “South Park” stereotype of every black person loving Perry. “I know it’s embarrassing, but I simply can’t help myself,” says the president.
In this theater publicity image released by Boneau/Bryan-Brown, Andrew Rannells, center, performs with an ensemble cast in "The Book of Mormon" at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre in New York. (AP Photo/Boneau/Bryan-Brown, Joan Marcus)(Credit: AP)
When the Broadway season began last year, a big brash musical about Spider-Man was supposed to muscle its way to multiple Tony Award nominations. Instead, a pair of goofy Mormons may be the ones to beat.
“The Book of Mormon” nabbed a leading 14 Tony Award nominations Tuesday morning, earning the profane musical nods for best musical, best book of a musical, best original score, two leading actor spots and two featured actor nominations.
The musical, about two Mormon missionaries who find more than they bargained for in Africa, was written by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of “South Park,” and Robert Lopez, co-creator of the Tony Award-winning musical “Avenue Q.” The trio teamed up with Casey Nicholaw, who co-directed with Parker and choreographed.
It has received 12 Drama Desk Award nominations, six Outer Critics Circle Award nominations and a Fred & Adele Astaire Award nomination, which recognizes excellence in dance. The musical is also grossing more than $1 million a week and is selling out — the place “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” was supposed to be before its implosion.
“The Scottsboro Boys,” a searing tale of 1930s injustice framed as a minstrel show, received 12 nominations, including best musical, best book of a musical, best original score as well as a leading actor and two featured actor nods.
Among others who earned nominations were Al Pacino, who played Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice,” Vanessa Redgrave in “Driving Miss Daisy” and Sutton Foster for “Anything Goes.”
“There’s absolutely nothing cookie-cutter about this season,” said Charlotte St. Martin, executive director of the Broadway League, which jointly produces the Tony awards with the American Theatre Wing. “The theme is that there is no theme.”
Of the 42 new productions this season, there were 14 musicals — 12 new ones and two revivals — and 25 plays, a whopping 16 of them brand new. The last time there were 16 new plays produced in a single season was 1986-87.
It is also shaping up to be a lucrative time for Broadway, with total box-office grosses already at more than $987,057,484, or 3.6 percent more than the same time last year. Attendance this season is at over 11.4 million, up 3 percent from this time last year.
The awards will be handed out June 12 at a new location: the Beacon Theatre on the Upper West Side of Manhattan after producers lost their long-term space at Radio City Music Hall. It will be broadcast live by CBS.
In the past decade, Osama bin Laden invaded our sense of safety, but also our pop culture. Here’s a look at the top five most memorable appearances by the slain al-Qaeda terrorist in TV and film, from the irreverent to the bizarre.
1. “Family Guy”: While American audiences found dread in bin Laden’s cryptic video messages, Seth MacFarlane found gag reel opportunity. The show’s famous FCC-baiting episode “PTV” depicted the terrorist in Afghanistan cracking up during a taping of his own terrifying video message. Botching the pronunciation of “Ramadan,” the cartoon bin Laden breaks character to say, “Did I just say Radaman? What is that? Yeah, maybe Dennis Radaman is going to punish you with his crazy hair.” Bin Laden made several appearances on “Family Guy” throughout the years, though many never made it to the screen.
2. “South Park”: The first post-9/11 episode from the Comedy Central show was titled “Osama Bin Laden has Farty Pants” and showed the four boys meeting their Afghani counterparts and getting captured by the head terrorist. In a typical “South Park-ian” twist, the episode was surprisingly pro-America, with Stan saying, “America may have some problems, but it’s our home, our team. If you don’t want to root for your team, then you should get the hell out of the stadium.”
3. “Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?”: Morgan Spurlock’s satiric Middle East travel documentary didn’t quite capture the zeitgeist like “Super Size Me.” The 2008 film found Spurlock hunting down the terrorist while his wife was pregnant with their child — a reflection of just how futile the search for bin Laden seemed by then. But the film did poorly with critics, earning only a 38 percent approval rating over at Rotten Tomatoes.
4. “Tere Bin Laden”: Better known in the states as “that Bollywood comedy about Bin Laden,” the 2010 satire featured a reporter who lies about having an interview with Bin Laden, shades of Jack Kelley at USA Today.
5. “Postal”: This videogame-to-film adaptation was never going to be known as the best of its kind, and that’s a low bar to jump. However, the 2007 film based on a first-person-shooter game hit new lows when it depicted an Americanized Osama Bin Laden holding hands and skipping around with George W. Bush.
Say what you will about Trey Parker and Matt Stone, but those guys have had our number for a long time. Way before they were doing feel-good musicals on Broadway about Mormons in AIDS-stricken Uganda, when “South Park” was still mostly known for its Mr. Hanky scatological humor, the satiric duo had taken on a project for Comedy Central that would be unthinkable today: a half-hour sitcom about the president, whose famous catchphrase was “One of these days, Laura, I’m going to punch you in the face!”
Oh yes, welcome to the month that was “That’s My Bush.”
Now, when Matt and Trey were pitching the concept of this show, they had no political agenda in mind. In fact, they had said during the 2000 election that they planned on making a sitcom about the president regardless of who won. (So we could have had a show called “Everybody Loves Al!” which is somehow equally funny when you think about it.) Despite episodes revolving around major issues like the death penalty, the war on drugs, and gun control, “Bush!” was more enamored with itself as a meta-sitcom than it was as any social commentary. For the month that it ran (April-May, 2001), “Bush” let us into the home of George and Laura (played by Timothy Bottoms and Carrie Quinn Dolin), who lived with their “Brady Brunch”-era maid Maggie (Marcia Wallace of “The Simpsons”), a secretary named Princess (Kristen Miller), and Carl Rove (Kurt Fuller, from everything ever). They also had a friendly next door neighbor Larry, who resembled no one as much as Ted McGinley from “Married With Children.”
And in tone, “That’s My Bush” was as subversive about the modern sitcom as its predecessor “Children.” Except with Trey and Matt, it wasn’t enough to have an Al Bundy-like figure lording over the household with his hand down his pants: They were tackling the head of the United States. Every joke revolved around George’s stupidity, Laura’s frigidness, and Rove … well, being Rove. I distinctly remember the episode where Bush accidentally takes Ecstasy and looking at my parents, who wore identical “What the hell?” faces. (In 2001, I thought Ecstasy was something only myself and a very specific group of ravers in Baltimore knew anything about.) Satirizing a sitting president was nothing new, of course. “Saturday Night Live” had been doing it for decades. And in early 2001, “The Daily Show” was hitting its stride with biting political commentary. But “That’s My Bush” took it to an entirely new level.
It’s hard to imagine anyone today green-lighting a show like this about Obama. But hell: It’s hard to imagine “That’s My Bush” existing six months after it launched. Though it was canceled for financial reasons after only a month, even Trey and Matt doubted their sitcom could have survived past Sept. 11, as they mention in the director’s commentary for the series.
As a pop culture artifact, “That’s My Bush” is a quaint relic of a time when an entire show based on the pratfalls of our president could exist. Like one of those mosquitoes encased in amber from “Jurassic Park,” Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s comedy about the hilarious antics of our dumb prez (who, once again, told his wife consistently that he was going to punch her in the face) remains unmarred by history: something we can only now pick up and examine without associating it with the horrific events it directly preceded.
Kim Jong Il in "Team America" 
Uh, you guyyyyyssss....It's Cartman, Trey Parker and Matt Stone of "South Park." 
