The Trailer for 'South Park: Joining the Panderverse' is Here, and it Would Appear Parker and Stone Have Lost Nothing Off Their Fastball

Tibrina Hobson. Getty Images.

Comedy, in case you're not aware, is hard. Doing comedy for a long time is damned near impossible. Tastes change. Jokes you used to appreciate don't seem as funny as you get older. Premises get worn out. Everything comes with an expiration date. It's the nature of the art form. 

The Ancient Greeks talked about the nine Muses, goddesses of the arts and sciences who would visit an artist for a while, help inspire their best work, and then leave. And none of them waited around less than Thalia, the Muse of Comedy. Which, while a myth, would be as good an explanation as any as to why we'll be seeing NCIS and Law & Order spinoffs until the sun goes nova, but only got seven good years of The Office and four (out of six) of Community.

Then there's South Park, which is such an outlier to this rule that it defies all logic. If anything, Trey Parker and Matt Stone are producing their best content ever. Despite being 30 seasons and 330 episodes into this run, making three movies, and my all time favorite stage musical as they went along. I mean, it's hard to imagine a show that began with the joke that four little kids swore and got visited by a talking Christmas poop in 1997 is now churning out spot on satire like the "You're Getting Old":

… and the one that so perfectly reduced Harry and Meghan to the clout-seeking attention whores that they are, they considered suing:

And now we've been gifted the teaser trailer for their next episode. Which appears to sum up pretty much  all of entertainment over the last few years in the span of 30 seconds:

Gender and race-swapping the South Park kids at this particular moment in our pop culture is chef's kiss. 

At a time where Disney Studio's only reason to exist seems to be to take their classics and do live action remakes to promote representation. Even if that means the dwarfs aren't dwarfs and the titular character hates the original. Or to take the LucasFilms IP they paid billions for and make the hero and old, crabby hermit who gets saved by a girl boss in order to fight the Patriarchy or something. 

We live in an entertainment landscape where Bryan Cranston gets ripped for playing a quadriplegic, since that supposed took work away from one of Hollywood's many famous quadriplegic actors. Where Gal Gadot is asked to apologize for playing Cleopatra, instead of the role going to an Egyptian, despite the fact Cleopatra was Macedonian. Where Helen Mirren and Bradley Cooper are put in heavy make up to make themselves look just like the famous people they're playing (Golda Meir and Leonard Bernstein), and get accused of "Jewface." Even though the Meir and Bernstein families each approved their respective casting. Where Jennifer Lawrence claims Hunger Games had a hurdle to jump over because no female character had ever been the hero of an action movie. Where the Oscars have made it clear that unless you check the right number of social boxes with your cast and crew, you can't get nominated for awards. (Sorry, Godfather I & II. Tough luck, Lord of the Rings. Shit out of luck, Gladiator. And forget you, Oppenheimer.)

To be perfectly clear, making movies with diverse casts is a great goal. So make them. Write orginal characters and cast them however you wish. Like Parasite, which everybody liked. Everything, Everywhere All at Once, which was complex and layered and a little hard to follow, but an objectively good movie deserving of all the awards. All the Jordan Peele films, that are elevating the horror genre. No one's stopping anyone (except during the writer's strike, I suppose). But requiring that every cast of every movie represent everyone of every backround just for the sake of doing it is anti-creativity.

So the timing couldn't be more perfect for Parker and Stone to wade into this nonsense. First and foremost, because you know it'll be hilarious. They've simply delivered with way too high a batting average for it not to be. But also, it'll make the people who hate this kind of dead-balls, spot-on satire because it makes them look ridiculous:

AV Club - [T]he long-running series can kind of sneak up on you sometimes, meaning that something like the new trailer for South Park: Joining The Panderverse, released earlier today, can hit you with no time for preparation and, woof, yeah, this one is a lot. 

The basic gimmick, at least from the teaser, is that the South Park boys have been replaced with adult women of color, in what may, or may not, be some kind of nightmare that Cartman is having. (That’s according to the official plot synopsis, which reveals that the episode will also be tackling AI, which the show’s recent 26th season also tackled with an episode whose script was partially credited to ChatGPT.) The Spider-Man-referencing title suggests that the show will be offering its take on increasing calls for diversity in mainstream media (or at least allegations that said calls are cynically exploited by studios to make money), and, hey, do you get these pounding headaches in the front of your skull while watching this stuff? We get these pounding headaches, in the front of our skull.

I already have this set to record. But knowing that it will make the right heads explode? Now I can't wait. Parker and Stone are national treasures, and the best we can hope for is that they have another 30 years in them.