Last
night’s South Park was one of those moments where the program’s
brilliance really shines. The episode had everything that’s great about the show:
surreal humor, gleefully offensive potshots at sacred cows, and biting satire
that puts things in perspective.
It starts
with all the characters lining up to get their yellow bracelets removed after
the person behind them is revealed as a fraud. Think it’s because of a certain cyclist in the news lately? WRONG! I won’t say who and ruin the surprise, but
it’s someone who’s even more deified than any athlete. Lead character Stan also becomes the
face of his own cause, complete with its own wristband, before falling from grace and
turning into an arrogant pariah himself.
Amazingly,
the episode managed to hit all the points of the controversy surrounding Lance Armstrong
without even mentioning him, and skewered the very idea of cause wristbands
(parts of it would have been relevant years ago). It depicts the makers of these
bracelets as hucksters only out to make a buck off public sympathy, and the
celebrities who endorse them as empty egotists who care more about promoting
themselves than any issues. But there are also jabs at us, the public, for just
buying these wristbands for the fad without actually doing (or even knowing)
anything about the causes they seemingly represent (one telling scene shows Cartman
wearing so many bracelets that he forgets what he supposedly supports).
The
episode kept things quirky and funny by implementing references to Dr. Seuss. But the biggest laughs came from the sheer blasphemous shock value in seeing a
certain religious figure sink lower and lower. A sobering (and hilarious)
reminder, perhaps, that even those we most revere can be full of it.
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