As President Trump will get his long-overdue roasting from Trey Parker and Matt Stone, here is a take a look at extra of the Comedy Central collection’ most outrageous and hilarious celeb moments.
‘South Park’
Comedy Central
For greater than 1 / 4 century, South Park has gleefully skewered sacred cows, puncturing egos with a construction-paper smile. No movie star — regardless of how beloved, feared or seemingly untouchable — has ever been protected from Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s razor-edged parody. Whereas late-night monologues and sketch comedy may poke light enjoyable, South Park thrives on annihilation; lowering pop idols at hand puppets, Oscar winners to screaming buffoons and political titans to fart jokes.
The brilliance of the present’s satire lies in its steadiness of absurdity and reality. Jennifer Lopez reimagined as Cartman’s hand puppet feels ridiculous — till you bear in mind how omnipresent she was in 2003. Kanye West insisting he’s “not a homosexual fish” feels cartoonish — till you concentrate on his legendary refusal to take a joke. Within the universe of South Park, the extra highly effective the movie star, the tougher they fall, and the sharper the cultural aftershock.
From Tom Cruise refusing to depart Stan’s closet to Oprah’s vengeful anatomy, these moments aren’t simply gags — they’re cultural flashpoints that uncovered America’s uneasy relationship with fame. Right here, in no specific order, are 25 of probably the most unforgettable movie star spoofs in South Park historical past: savage, surreal and at all times uncomfortably on the nostril.
-
Donald Trump, “The place My Nation Gone?” (Season 19, Episode 2) and Season 27
Picture Credit score: Comedy Central Earlier than President Trump grew to become a central character within the at the moment airing twenty seventh season, Mr. Garrison grew to become a stand-in for then-just Donald Trump when he launched a xenophobic marketing campaign constructed on vulgarity and absurd guarantees in season 19. The parody of Trump’s meteoric rise to political energy was then prophetic, foreshadowing and correct. That is now being one-up’d within the present season, the place Trump himself has been wooing his boo, Devil, as he annihilates the city of South Park in a authorized showdown.
-
Barbra Streisand, “Mecha-Streisand” (Season 1, Episode 12)
Picture Credit score: Comedy Central On this early-in-the-series movie star satire, Barbra Streisand — one in every of Parker and Stone’s least-favorite celebs — discovers a mystical artifact and transforms right into a towering Godzilla-like cyborg. Solely a crack group of her movie star allies — Leonard Maltin, Sidney Poitier and Robert Smith of The Remedy — can cease her rampage. This premiere episode showcased Parker and Stone’s gleeful movie star savagery, incomes the movie star icon’s disdain and a fan-favorite cult following.
-
Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, “Fats Butt and Pancake Head” (Season 7, Episode 5)
Picture Credit score: Comedy Central/Paramount At a cultural variety occasion, Eric Cartman’s hand turns into possessed by “Jennifer Lopez” — full with an offensive Latin accent. The hand-puppet “Ms. Lopez” then steals her fiancé Ben Affleck’s coronary heart because the doppelganger’s profession usurps the true J-Lo’s, enraging her and driving her to tried homicide of the offensive mitt. Lopez’s early 2000s persona and megastardom will get a strange-even-for-South Park therapy right here. And “Taco-flavored kisses” will stay on as a viral pop-culture relic.
-
Mel Gibson, “The Ardour of the Jew” (Season 8, Episode 3)
Picture Credit score: Comedy Central Kyle wrestles with guilt after watching The Ardour of the Christ, whereas Cartman rallies townsfolk right into a Hitler-esque fan membership for Mel Gibson. Stan and Kenny meet the actor and filmmaker, who descends into slapstick insanity. Gibson’s controversial movie grew to become a comedic punching bag with this episode, with the South Park boys amplifying critiques of its violence and Gibson’s public meltdowns.
-
Michael Jackson, “The Jeffersons” (Season 8, Episode 6)
Picture Credit score: CC/Paramount Michael Jackson, disguised as “Mr. Jefferson,” strikes together with his son to South Park, the place his weird and childlike conduct and persona delights the boys however begins to alarm the city’s adults. Chaos erupts when Kenny, dressed as Jackson’s youngster, Blanket, meets a tragic and slapstick ending. The parody blurred comedy and the rising public unease over Jackson’s eccentricity and scandal-ridden conduct in his grownup life.
-
Kanye West, “Fishsticks” (Season 13, Episode 5)
Picture Credit score: Paramount/Comedy Central Fan-favorite classmate Jimmy invents a joke about “fish sticks” that the whole world finds hilarious — besides rapper-producer Kanye West, who can’t grasp the wordplay. His ego spirals till he embraces life as a literal “homosexual fish.” The gag went viral past the confines of the present, embedding “homosexual fish” into meme tradition and lampooning West’s thin-skinned popularity.
-
Oprah Winfrey, “A Million Little Fibers” (Season 10, Episode 5)
Daytime TV icon Oprah Winfrey’s uncared for physique elements, Minge and Gary, plot revenge whereas she interviews South Park’s resident anthropomorphized towel, Towelie, and shortly sufficient, their rebellion devolves right into a weird hostage disaster. Although divisive amongst followers, it grew to become notorious for its grotesque audacity — proof that no cultural determine, not even the queen of daytime TV, was off limits.
-
Paris Hilton, “Silly Spoiled Whore Video Playset” (Season 8, Episode 12)
Well-known-for-nothing heiress Paris Hilton opens a retailer in South Park, glamorizing her particular model of vapid, hypersexualized fame for younger ladies. Wendy fights again, whereas Mr. Slave defeats Hilton in an unforgettably grotesque endurance contest. The takedown aired on the peak of America’s fascination with Hilton, sparking debate about movie star position fashions and the surplus of reality-TV fame.
-
Al Gore, “ManBearPig” (Season 10, Episode 6)
Picture Credit score: Comedy Central
Al Gore was parodied as a local weather alarmist on this episode as he warns the boys concerning the fictional monster ManBearPig, then-climate skeptics Parker and Stone’s stand-in for environmentalism hysteria. Gore’s warning was initially dismissed as a joke, however ManBearPig returned in two season 22 episodes, “Time to Get Cereal” and “No one Obtained Cereal?,” the place the boys now understand years later that ManBearPig exists and Gore receives an apology. Launched across the time of his hit documentary, An Inconvenient Fact, the parody of Gore’s local weather change politics has aged right into a sobering reminder of warnings that go ignored.
-
Russell Crowe, “Fightin’ Across the World” (Season 6, Episode 5)
Picture Credit score: Comedy Central Actor Russell Crowe hosts a youngsters’s TV present the place he travels the globe selecting fights with strangers, all accompanied by his tugboat “Tugger.” The episode is cruel because it exaggerates Crowe’s much-publicized real-life mood, making “fightin’ world wide” a shorthand for unwarranted movie star rage.
-
Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson and Barbra Streisand, “200” & “201” (Season 14, Episodes 5–6)
Practically each movie star parodied by South Park returns to sue the city, with Tom Cruise main the cost and Mel Gibson and Barbra Streisand resurfacing outrageously and offensively. These closely censored episodes grew to become legendary flashpoints — fusing satire with free-speech battles that got here after real-world loss of life threats.
-
Britney Spears, “Britney’s New Look” (Season 12, Episode 2)
Picture Credit score: Comedy Central After a failed suicide try leaves the pop star disfigured, Britney Spears is paraded by the media and townsfolk as a sideshow act. The boys witness her exploitation with rising horror. That is one in every of South Park’s extra bleak parodies; it indicts America’s urge for food for movie star self-destruction whereas mirroring the mid-2000s tabloid frenzy that ended with Spears being positioned underneath a conservatorship.
-
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, “The Worldwide Privateness Tour” (Season 26, Episode 2)
Picture Credit score: Comedy Central A thinly veiled Prince Harry and Meghan Markle tour the globe, demanding privateness whereas selling a tell-all memoir. Their hypocrisy turns into a neighborhood nightmare. This parody of the contentious couple lit up headlines and mirrored the fatigue over the couple’s media ubiquity and reignited debates about monarchy and fame.
-
Dan Snyder, “Go Fund Your self” (Season 18, Episode 1)
Picture Credit score: Comedy Central Actual-life group proprietor Dan Snyder is portrayed as determined and livid when the boys launch a startup named The Washington Redskins after the NFL loses the trademark. The episode amplified criticism of Snyder and the NFL’s hypocrisy, injecting South Park into ongoing debates over sports activities branding.
-
Hillary Clinton, “The Snuke” (Season 11, Episode 4)
Picture Credit score: Comedy Central This episode impressed by the format of the thriller collection 24, has terrorists planting a bomb inside Hillary Clinton. Jack Bauer–model antics collide with South Park absurdity. With this one, Parker and Stone satirized post-9/11 paranoia and lampooned Clinton as each oblivious and oddly sympathetic.
-
George Clooney, South Park: Greater, Longer & Uncut
Picture Credit score: Paramount Footage/Warner Okay, so technically this one’s a caveat — it’s from South Park: Greater, Longer & Uncut (1999) and never the collection correct. However when George Clooney lends his A-list voice to play the smugly severe Dr. Gouache, the U.S. Military surgeon treating Kenny’s flaming intestines, it completely counts. Clooney had already been a fan — he famously voiced Stan’s canine Sparky in an earlier episode — so his cameo as a stern, hyper-professional physician is a sly little bit of stunt casting. It really works as a result of Clooney is the epitome of gravitas, and dropping that gravitas into the center of a foul-mouthed cartoon musical makes the joke land even tougher. His look proved that even Hollywood’s main males weren’t above hopping aboard the South Park prepare.
-
Steven Seagal, “Protected Area” (Season 19, Episode 5)
Picture Credit score: Comedy Central Cartman outsources the filtering of his on-line insults, sparking a charity drive run by Steven Seagal and different beleaguered celebs determined for constructive PR. The episode lampooned safe-space tradition and uncovered celebrities’ fragile egos underneath the guise of philanthropy.
-
Saddam Hussein, A number of Episodes (Seasons 2–7)
Picture Credit score: Comedy Central Voiced in Parker’s goofy falsetto, the Iraqi dictator seems as Devil’s abusive, manipulative lover throughout a bit of the sooner seasons of the collection, and brilliantly in South Park: Greater, Longer and Uncut. By emasculating a dictator right into a needy boyfriend, South Park turned geopolitical terror into an absurdist farce.
-
Tiger Woods, “Sexual Therapeutic” (Season 14, Episode 1)
Picture Credit score: Comedy Central Following his much-publicized dishonest scandal, golf sensation Tiger Woods seems right here in a online game the place his spouse assaults him with golf golf equipment. The episode parodies public obsession with movie star intercourse lives, and the gag nails media and our personal fixation on scandal, particularly on this planet of sports activities.
-
George R.R. Martin, “Black Friday” Trilogy (Season 17, Episodes 7–9)
Picture Credit score: Comedy Central
The Recreation of Thrones creator and prolific writer seems as a perverse eccentric obsessive about “wieners,” stalling the boys’ fantasy saga whereas the epic HBO collection drags on with out decision. This episode skewered Martin on the peak of his energy over fanboys and mirrored their rising frustration together with his countless delays in finishing his landmark collection.
-
Steve Jobs, “HumancentiPad” (Season 15, Episode 1)
Picture Credit score: Comedy Central “You didn’t learn the phrases and situations?” Kyle indicators Apple’s person settlement with out studying it and results in a grotesque “HumancentiPad” experiment overseen by the late Apple CEO. The gag heightened paranoia over tech giants and person exploitation.
-
Jeff Bezos, “Unfulfilled” & “Bike Parade” (Season 22, Episodes 9–10)
Picture Credit score: Comedy Central
Amazon overlord Bezos is portrayed right here as an alien overlord who’s telepathically controlling the web retailer whereas exploiting its staff. This lampoon crystallized fears of company monopoly and created Bezos as an eerie and unforgettable villain.
-
Bono, “Extra Crap” (Season 11, Episode 9)
Picture Credit score: Comedy Central Go away it to South Park to cut back one of many world’s most self-serious rock stars to literal excrement. Within the season 11 episode “Extra Crap,” Parker and Stone take purpose at U2 frontman Bono, portraying him as a person whose obsession with being “primary” is so pathological that it seems he’s not even human — he’s only a large piece of crap. The twist performs in opposition to Bono’s public persona as a do-gooder with an ego drawback, skewering the strain between his simple affect and his relentless want for recognition. By the point Randy Marsh challenges him in an epic bowel-movement showdown, South Park has made its level: Bon is stuffed with himself.
-
Caitlyn Jenner, “Gorgeous and Courageous” (Season 19, Episode 1)
Picture Credit score: Comedy Central Caitlyn Jenner is launched as a brand new political operating mate for Kyle’s dad; she’s portrayed as reckless behind the wheel, continuously inflicting accidents (Jenner was concerned in a four-car pile-up in 2015). Whereas the present acknowledged Jenner’s bravery in residing an genuine life as a transgender lady, it additionally refused to deal with her with child gloves, making use of the identical savagery it doles out to everybody else. The gag stirred controversy but additionally mirrored the present’s insistence on treating all celebrities equally.