On Saturday, South Park turns 25. It is a tremendous achievement for a show that, when it debuted, looked as if it would probably amount to nothing more than a short-lived slice of nihilistic juvenilia. But, as the show has aged, it has managed to grow wildly in ambition. South Park is now a fully fledged topical satire, picking off targets both big (all of religion) and small (Game of Thrones) as creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone see fit.
The anniversary is not the end of South Park by any stretch – Parker and Stone have signed a $900m deal to keep producing the series (plus 14 hour-long specials) for another five years. But this is still a time for reflection, so let’s look back at South Park’s greatest episodes so far.
25. Good Times With Weapons
A skittish form-breaking episode from 2004, Good Times With Weapons stands out for the handful of sequences presented in anime form. It’s a lot of fun, but the episode’s moral (it’s weird that humans are more offended by sex than violence) feels a little tacked on.
24. Guitar Queer-o
Lots of South Park is (to put it gently) of its time, with no episode more so than 2007’s Guitar Queer-o. Not only is it a satire of the long-forgotten Guitar Hero video game, but it also has a truly regrettable title. Still, overlook both those things and the episode is a lot of scattershot fun.
23. Mr Hankey, The Christmas Poo
For a time, the early buzz around South Park was so strong that you could walk into a high street greetings card shop and buy a replica faeces just because it had featured on the show. And yet, for all its marketing gimmickry, this was South Park’s first stab at attempting to navigate the black hole of religious discourse. Parker and Stone would hone it in later years, and it would make them millionaires several times over.
22. The Return of the Fellowship of the Ring to the Two Towers
An amazing sleight of hand, this episode manages to simultaneously be a loving (and surprisingly faithful) parody of the Lord of the Rings movies and a meditation on the effects of hardcore pornography on children.
21. Butters’ Very Own Episode
Butters is a peripheral character on South Park, but an important one whose sincerity has a habit of cutting through the show’s general cynicism. When he was finally given his own episode in 2001, Parker and Stone tested that sincerity to the limit. This is possibly the bleakest South Park episode ever made, to the point that even describing it would bum me out for the rest of the week.
20. Cartman Gets An Anal Probe
South Park’s first ever episode was a much cruder affair than we are used to, but it still set out the stall of what the show wanted to be. Kenny dies, Cartman is obnoxious, there is an overwhelming fascination with human body parts. Maybe not the best episode, but an important one.
19. Grounded Vindaloop
After realising that virtual reality had got too easy a ride, South Park made this episode, where Butters is tricked into thinking he’s living inside a VR simulation, before quickly getting stabbed by a sex worker.
18. Major Boobage
A step back from the hot-topic ambulance-chasing the show often indulges in, Major Boobage is relatively timeless. A fantasy about the kids getting high on cat urine, this episode is largely set in a city called Nippopolis, where everything is shaped like a breast.
17. You Have 0 Friends
This episode and The Social Network came out in the same year, and both take potshots at Facebook. However, South Park’s approach is a little more elaborate. Here, the kids literally enter Facebook, and Cartman finds himself fending off a pack of compulsive masturbators.
16. AWESOM-O
A classic episode of escalating stakes, in which Cartman dresses as a robot to trick Butters, only to find himself kidnapped (and sexually assaulted) by the film industry and the military.
15. Kenny Dies
After 78 episodes of killing off Kenny in increasingly elaborate ways, Trey Parker and Matt Stone made the momentous decision to kill him off properly (and sadly) from terminal muscular dystrophy. But what could have been a truly mournful episode is enlivened by a subplot about a scheme to steal aborted foetuses in bulk for profit. Which, now I’ve looked at it, is a hell of a sentence.
14. The Jeffersons
Five years before he died, Michael Jackson became the subject of a full-frontal South Park attack. Here, he moves to the town under an assumed identity, and the kids try to figure out whether he really does molest children, or if he’s just the victim of society’s prejudice against rich Black men. Also, his face pretty much entirely falls off at one point.
13. Medicinal Fried Chicken
Over the years, South Park has become more confident about doling out hot takes about whatever happened to be in the news at any given point. Here, the targets are the (then) newly legal marijuana dispensaries and plans to restrict fast food restaurants. The show makes a lot of good points about how state-sanctioned lifestyle mandates often result in a thriving black market, but it also has a bunch of scenes where Randy rides around on his testicles like a space hopper, so there’s something for everyone.
12. Make Love, Not Warcraft
This Emmy-winning episode is notable for its presentation, with much of the action showing the characters as World of Warcraft characters on a quest to kill a persistent online “griefer”. It’s always exciting when a show like this breaks form, and to do so with so many well-aimed jabs at the online gaming community makes it doubly sweet.
11. Trapped in the Closet
Perhaps the most notorious South Park episode of all time, this was a furious takedown of the Church of Scientology, packaged within R Kelly’s bizarrely popular Trapped in the Closet series. Not only did it include a stingingly thorough description of what Scientologists actually believe, but it ends with the characters daring the religion to sue them. Unsurprisingly, this is where the show’s relationship with (practising Scientologist) Isaac Hayes AKA Chef started to sour.
10. Cartoon Wars: Part II
South Park’s greatest stand against religious censorship came in 2006 with a satire based on a Danish newspaper that angered Muslims by printing a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad. Parker and Stone also intended to depict Muhammad during the episode, but Comedy Central replaced it with a black card. However, the episode is best remembered for being the one in which it is revealed that Family Guy is written by a pack of manatees picking balls at random from a tank.
9. The Death of Eric Cartman
The closest that South Park has ever come to It’s a Wonderful Life, this episode revolves around Cartman’s mistaken belief that he is dead, and his subsequent attempts to right all his mortal wrongs. It shouldn’t be a spoiler to reveal that the plan doesn’t work and Cartman ends up being anally probed in an asylum for 14 hours.
8. All About Mormons
Parker and Stone’s The Book of Mormon musical has now made more than half a billion dollars in ticket sales. However, we can trace its conception back to this 2003 (musical!) episode that – for once – manages to both condemn and approve of the religion in the same breath. For a sledgehammer like South Park, it’s an unusually nuanced episode.
7. Casa Bonita
Named after a Mexican-themed restaurant in Colorado beloved by South Park’s creators, this episode is another example of Cartman’s elaborate vengeance. Shut out of a birthday party at Casa Bonita, Cartman wheedles himself on to the guest list by convincing Butters that civilisation was destroyed by a meteor strike, and that the world is now plagued by packs of radioactive zombies. As an epilogue, Parker and Stone bought the real-life Casa Bonita last year, in a move that Parker last week described by saying, “Have you ever seen Kitchen Nightmares? It’s the very, very worst one of those you could possibly ever imagine.”
6. The Biggest Douche in the Universe
Included solely for the white-hot anger the episode directs towards the laziness of Rob Schneider’s early 2000s film output. The episode includes trailers for fake Schneider films such as The Stapler (where Rob Schneider turns into a stapler), A Carrot (where Rob Schneider turns into a carrot) and Da Derp Dee Derp Da Teetley Derpee Derpee Dumb (where Rob Schneider derp de derp, derp de derpity derpy derp, derpa derpa derpaderp).
5. Simpsons Already Did It
A paean to the difficulty of writing an original episode of animated comedy when every conceivable storyline has already been covered by The Simpsons. The episode makes peace with this by its conclusion, but what is hilarious is that Parker and Stone were complaining about this problem after just 86 episodes. They have subsequently made another 231, so God knows how both shows are doing it now.
4. The Return of Chef
The fallout from Trapped in the Closet meant that Isaac Hayes eventually resigned from the show. Parker and Stone responded with The Return of Chef, where Hayes (his voice edited together from clips of previous episodes) sexually propositions some children, gets struck by lightning, falls down a ravine, becomes impaled on a tree, gets accidentally shot, is eaten alive by a bear and a mountain lion then soils himself. There have, it must be said, been more elegant breakups.
3. You’re Getting Old
A small confession. I have gone with the crowd on the last two, but You’re Getting Old may actually be my personal favourite South Park episode. Stan turns 10 and falls into a deep pit of ennui. The episode’s muted finale, an entirely jokeless montage in which Stan’s parents separate to the sound of Fleetwood Mac’s Landslide, hit so hard that (at the time) many thought it was Parker and Stone’s resignation from the show. As it happened, it was followed by an episode called Ass Burgers.
2. Fishsticks
This is the Kanye West episode, in which the singer misunderstands a joke and attempts to front it out before – in a note-perfect parody – singing a song about his new life as a gay fish. Not only is this episode painfully funny, but it riled West enough to make references to South Park more than once on record.
1. Scott Tenorman Must Die
At the core of South Park, there lies a theme of disproportionate retribution. The best example of this – and the best example of South Park, and one of the best examples of television comedy – comes in the form of this fifth-season episode. Cartman is humiliated by a peer, then seeks vengeance in the most extreme form. By the time guest star Thom Yorke has sneered, “Everyone has problems, it doesn’t mean you have to be a little cry baby about it” to a child who has just unwittingly eaten his murdered parents, we’re in all-star territory.
