Satiristas Read online

  TREY PARKER AND MATT STONE

  MATT STONE AND Trey Parker like to push limits. From puppet porn in Team America: World Police, cartoon bestiality in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, and just about everything else over South Park’s thirteen-season run on Comedy Central, they’ve redefined limits of what can be said on television and in film. But just below that seemingly sophomoric surface lies keen intelligence and social critique more on par with the writings of Jonathan Swift than those of a potty-mouthed eight-year-old, and a richly textured, through-the-looking-glass view of America’s values. Deftly multilayered, their work often makes our perception of it an integral part of the joke itself, and its actual, bigger point. Many satirists provoke anger and outrage in their time only to be fully appreciated and embraced later on, and, like them, South Park will long be regarded as a masterpiece of modern satire despite any baseness in its approach. In relating their run-ins with America’s appointed and self-appointed thought police, Parker and Stone illustrate the hypocrisy and ultimately ineffectiveness of those who would impose conditions on the First Amendment.

  MATT STONE: It wasn’t intended, but we had kind of a “triple crown” of religious anger all in just one year, from the Catholics, from Scientologists—I don’t know if that really counts as a religion—and from Muslims for a “Mohammed” episode we did.

  We wanted to do a Scientology episode for years, because it’s just so fucking funny. It’s just this big funny thing that we were ignoring, and we were ignoring it just because Isaac Hayes, who played Chef, was a Scientologist. Finally, we just decided—

  TREY PARKER: We decided, fuck him.

  MATT STONE: We went after everyone else; Scientology was all that was left.

  TREY PARKER: So we did the Scientology episode, and Isaac Hayes and Tom Cruise got pissed off. They wanted to pick a fight. Tom Cruise decided he would try to get it pulled off the air.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Did Isaac Hayes get all “Shaft” on you?

  MATT STONE: No, through all of this, Isaac was a really nice guy. I think someone put him up to trying to make us pull it. When he asked us, there was some creepy, cultish stuff going on in the conversation.

  Three months later, when the first rerun of the show was scheduled, we got a call from Comedy Central, saying, “The producers of Mission: Impossible III want the show pulled.”

  We were, like, “Tom Cruise?”

  They said, “THE PRODUCERS of Mission: Impossible III want the show pulled. We’re gonna pull it tonight, and, uh, you guys can’t say anything.”

  We decided, you know what? We don’t have to say anything. The truth will come out. And it did.

  TREY PARKER: In, like, six hours.

  MATT STONE: On the Internet. Everybody was calling us—the New York Times, CNN, The O’Reilly Factor… There was a temptation to really go to war. Unfortunately, we have to get a show on the air, so we just issued this brief statement—

  TREY PARKER: See, the whole Scientology gig is that you have alien souls attached to your body—

  MATT STONE:—And their Satan is named Xenu. We’re not making this shit up.

  TREY PARKER: So we put out a press release that said, “Ha ha, Scientology! Alien souls will be attached to your bodies forever and you cannot save the human race. Hail Xenu!”

  MATT STONE: It turned out to be much more effective than starting a fight, ’cause then you’d get into a pissing war with Tom Cruise.

  TREY PARKER: And you don’t wanna be covered in Tom Cruise piss.

  MATT STONE: Even if you’re right, you’re on that level of bullshit.

  And, really—and I don’t know why this makes us proud, but—that whole show was basically only barely legal. It shouldn’t even be legal, but it just barely is.

  Scientology is known for taking people to court, so we had called Comedy Central’s lawyers, who said, “Well, if you follow these guidelines, you can do it.” And we did, but the way we do South Park is the reason that show got on the air. We do an episode in a week; if that show had sat on a shelf at Comedy Central, it would never have made it to air because they would’ve gotten cold feet.

  TREY PARKER: When we started thinking of that show, I said, “We’ll have Tom Cruise on it, all super-flamboyant.”

  And the lawyers said, “No, you can’t do that.”

  “Well, what if he’s really closeted?”

  “You can’t do that, either.”

  “Well what if he’s literally inside a closet?”

  “You can do that.”

  It’s all nuance. We had Stan saying, “Scientology is just a pyramid scheme.”

  And they were, like, “You can’t say that.”

  MATT STONE: See, Trey just said that, and now he’s gonna get sued.

  TREY PARKER: No! I said, “Stan said it.” I didn’t say I said it! There’s actual, legal reasons why that’s different.

  So we said, “What if Stan says, ‘It’s a global scam.’”

  They went, “Okay, that’s good.”

  As long as something’s worded just the exact right way, it’s okay.

  MATT STONE: To give Comedy Central credit, they were really cool about it.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Aren’t you a little upset that nobody burnt shit down over your Mohammed cartoon?

  TREY PARKER: Funny thing is…We had this episode called “The Super Best Friends” with Mohammed on it as a superhero who turns himself into a beaver for some reason. It first aired about seven years ago, but I turned on the TV and saw Muslims rioting, and, “Muslims upset over Mohammed cartoon.”

  I went, “Oh fuck! They just saw it!” Honest to God, I thought, “Oh man, it took this long!”

  I called Matt, “This is great! We have our next episode for sure! We’ve already shown Mohammed, so let’s do a show about what qualifies as showing Mohammed.” Like if I draw a little stick figure with a Chinese hat and say, “This is Mohammed,” is that showing Mohammed?

  We eventually decided to do the South Park boys watching Family Guy, and Mohammed’s on that and it causes all this uproar. Of course, the real joke was that we put Mohammed on Family Guy so if any stills of it came out, Family Guy would get blown up, not us.

  MATT STONE: We weren’t being brave at all, really.

  TREY PARKER: We showed Comedy Central a little clip of Mohammed just standing at the door—no bombs in the turban, nothing offensive at all—and they were, “No! No Mohammed! NO! You can’t do this.”

  We said, “You do realize an episode from seven years ago with Mohammed on it is rerunning on your network right now, don’t you?”

  They went, “WHAT?!”

  MATT STONE: They didn’t want us to do a show about showing him, much less show him. But to be fair, no one in America would’ve done that, and still no one has. No one’s had the guts to do the simplest thing.

  PAUL PROVENZA: What was the Catholic controversy?

  TREY PARKER: That was our first episode to ever get pulled: “Bloody Mary.” Stan’s father thinks he’s an alcoholic, and he turns to God since that’s what AA tells you—even though they’re not supposed to tell you that, that’s basically what AA tells you. There’s a Virgin Mary statue that’s crying blood, and Stan’s father thinks it’s a miracle and maybe the statue can help him. But it turns out the Virgin Mary is actually crying blood out her ass.

  The pope comes to determine if this really is a miracle, and the Virgin shits blood all over his face, and the pope says, “This isn’t a miracle, because she’s not bleeding out her ass; she’s bleeding out of her vagina, and chicks bleed out their vaginas all the time.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: I just love that the pope calls them “chicks.”

  TREY PARKER: Some Catholics were upset about it, and for the first time ever we got THE phone call: “We’re pulling the episode.” In ten years, we’d never had an episode pulled. We told Comedy Central, “You’re setting a scary precedent here, because if you pull this for the Catholics, then you’d better pull that for the Jews, this for t
he Muslims, that for the homosexuals…” Where does it end, you know?

  MATT STONE: We wouldn’t have any shows left!

  TREY PARKER: So they said, “We’ll just pull the repeat scheduled for Christmas Eve.”

  And we said, “Well, okay…that’s probably cool.”

  But for about two days we were thinking, “Here it is; we’re being censored! Things are changing; they won’t let us do what we wanna do anymore!” But then we thought, “Well, really…It is Christmas Eve, and to be fair, the Virgin Mary does shit blood on the pope…”

  PAUL PROVENZA: People not all that well-versed in your work tend to assume you’re Left-leaning liberals, but then you do Team America, blowing the brains out of Michael Moore and Janeane Garofalo, and it fucks with everybody’s head. No pun intended.

  MATT STONE: We’ve purposely stayed apolitical, because there’s funny shit on every side. We’ve never had any group we’ve ever made fun of get more mad at us than liberals got over Team America. They were humorless about it, like, “Whoa! The joke is never on us!” It was a learning experience. We’ve done plenty of shows totally ripping on Right-wing stuff, and then we’ll do a show that rips on Left-wing stuff and people go, “Which side are you on? What’s wrong with you?”

  PAUL PROVENZA: I believe, and this is an illustration of it, that most censorship in America now actually comes from the Left.

  TREY PARKER: Absolutely! We’ve seen that personally. Everyone always says, “Wow, you guys really fight the religious Right,” but the truth is, we’ve never heard from them.

  MATT STONE: The Catholics were the first time in ten seasons at that point.

  TREY PARKER: But when we ripped on liberals in Team America, Sean Penn wrote to us, “Fuck you guys!”

  Matt called and said, “Dude, we got an open letter from Sean Penn!”

  I was, like, “What??”

  And he starts reading it: “‘I’ve been to Iraq, and let me tell you something…’”

  I said, “You’re making this up!” ’Cause it sounded exactly like he did in Team America: “I’ve been to Iraq! Fuck you! You don’t know anything…”

  MATT STONE: It was such a trip.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Blowing up Michael Moore in Team America has a bit of a back story to it, doesn’t it?

  TREY PARKER: He asked us to do an animated piece for Bowling for Columbine, but we said we didn’t have enough time to do it or whatever.

  MATT STONE: Then he asked me to be in it, because I grew up in Littleton, and I agreed to talk a little about growing up there. He didn’t misrepresent me in the interview, but about five or ten minutes after me, he put in this South Park–looking animation someone else had done. It looks just like South Park, and most people who saw it thought we did it.

  That’s what Michael Moore does: the way he cuts things together, he creates meaning where there isn’t any—and now we were personal victims of that. He pulled South Park into it, which pulled Trey into a movie he didn’t want any part of—

  TREY PARKER: So I made him into a puppet, filled him full of ham, and blew him up.

  PAUL PROVENZA: What were some particular issues the MPAA had with Team America?

  TREY PARKER: The biggest problem submitting Team America to the MPAA was the names Matt Stone and Trey Parker on it. They smelled blood; they were just, “Fuck those guys, we’re not even gonna watch it.”

  For the first cut, they said we could only have three positions for the sex scene, for, like, three seconds each. Matt didn’t think they were gonna cut out much, but I was, “Dude, they are so gonna fuck us on the sex scene, I guarantee it.”

  We learned from the South Park movie that you gotta give them shit to cut out, so I was, like, “Let’s have him piss on her face, and have her shit in his mouth, and they’ll cut that out and everything’ll be fine.”

  The MPAA got it and said, “You can have them do it missionary, that’s it.”

  There’s no genitalia. There’s no pubic hair. There’s two pieces of plastic rubbing against each other, that’s all there is!

  MATT STONE: Truth is we never wanted any piss or shit in the movie. We really didn’t think that was Gary and Lisa’s relationship; we had long arguments about it.

  PAUL PROVENZA: They’re just not those kinds of puppets?

  MATT STONE: It breaks the reality, believe it or not. But when we released it on DVD, we could release an unrated version, and of course the unrated version sold about 90 percent of the DVDs sold and the R-rated sold 10, so most people in America have now seen shit-and-piss puppets solely because of the MPAA.

  TREY PARKER: If it wasn’t for them, we would never have shot it.

  MATT STONE: The MPAA made the South Park movie more anti-American, and dirtier, too. They did it. We didn’t want to, they just kind of forced it on us.

  TREY PARKER: They make no sense, either. In the South Park movie we had a scene where the boys find Cartman’s mom blowing a horse on the Internet. The scene is just Kyle going, “Dude, is that a horse?” You didn’t see what he was looking at; you didn’t see anything. Well, the MPAA came back and said, “No bestiality. You can’t do that.”

  They don’t realize that with South Park we can animate something overnight, so we were, like, “Let’s fuck with them. Let’s have it be a German shit video with people shitting on her and stuff and send them that.”

  They watched that and said, “Okay, that’s better.”

  MATT STONE: The original title was South Park: All Hell Breaks Loose. The MPAA said it couldn’t have the word “hell” in the title. We said, “What about Hellraiser and Hell’s Angels and all these other movies?”

  They said, “This is animated, so you’re under different guidelines.”

  So we made it Bigger, Longer and Uncut, and they went, “Okay.”

  They had no idea. Three weeks later, they called, “We just got it. You can’t do that.”

  We said, “We’ve already printed a hundred thousand posters, we can’t change it.”

  So that’s the title.

  VERNON CHATMAN AND JOHN LEE

  VERNON CHATMAN WAS a consultant on South Park (and gave voice to the lovable Towelie), won an Emmy for The Chris Rock Show, and wrote for Late Night with Conan O’Brien before joining creative forces with John Lee to cocreate, write, and produce the now-defunct MTV series Wonder Showzen, the brilliantly twisted anti–Sesame Street for the nihilist child and bipolar Muppet in all of us. They are the team behind the ethereally funny Xavier: Renegade Angel, and the deadpan un-reality show Delocated, both for Adult Swim. Along with their partners in PFFR, their production company/band/art collective kinda sorta, they just may be the darkest, most inventive, imaginatively subversive minds working in television comedy today.

  VERNON CHATMAN: On Wonder Showzen, we put all our darkness and cynicism through the vessel of a child. That’s it. That was the entire premise of that show.

  JOHN LEE: Because if we do it, we’re assholes, but if a little kid does it, it’s cute and funny.

  VERNON CHATMAN: Ironic and deep.

  JOHN LEE: It says something.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Well, you know…It does, actually.

  VERNON CHATMAN: But we weren’t, like, “This is an important thing.” Mostly, it was, “These are scrappy little shitty, cynical things we want to say and if we get a kid to say it, it’s funny.”

  I don’t think we ever think much about a point. We’re not that smart. The degree to which we put any statement in is “just enough to keep things interesting.”

  PAUL PROVENZA: That show grabbed me right away, because I despise prepackaged, one-size-fits-all sentimentality. To be cynical about it in the context of a kid’s show I think is substantive.

  VERNON CHATMAN: We want to smash those smiles off people’s faces.

  PAUL PROVENZA: On Sesame Street, my favorite things were the fact that one puppet is homeless and lives in a garbage can, and somehow, one puppet contracted AIDS. That fucks with your head; whatever you feel has to be o
riginal and surprising.

  JOHN LEE: Early Sesame Street was really somber and strange. A lot different than it is now, which is a formula. Early Sesame Street was kind of a downer—but in a good way. We just think about the puppets now, but it used to have a really weird, political slant to it.

  VERNON CHATMAN: They would go to a prison and just talk to inmates.

  JOHN LEE: Like a Fred Wiseman documentary.

  VERNON CHATMAN: I think Oscar got raped.

  PAUL PROVENZA: We’re always surrounded by so much artificial sentimentality, which I find vulgar. Whenever I see those sweatshirts with cute little kittens and puppies on them, I always think of the factories where five-year-olds make them for 2 cents a month.

  JOHN LEE: This book should come with a sweatshirt with puppies and kittens on it made in a sweatshop. That feels right.

  VERNON CHATMAN: All the emotions that go into all that are fuel, sure, but it’s also a dark black hole to go down; it’s not that creative. It wasn’t just cynicism with Wonder Showzen. A lot of it was that kids are just funny and fun. They’re anarchic and goofy. Their personality and energy bring out the kid in us.

  PAUL PROVENZA: Was your voice as a stand-up similar to your voice on TV?

  VERNON CHATMAN: I definitely indulged in rape and abortion jokes and the darkest, bleakest shit. But there are limits when you have a live audience. When you’re on TV, you’re not in the room, so they can’t punch you.

  JOHN LEE: Were you punched onstage?

  VERNON CHATMAN: I’ve been punched as a result of Wonder Showzen. Doing the Clarence puppet with strangers in Central Park, we got knives pulled on us; I got punched in the head in a restaurant—

  PAUL PROVENZA: It seems endemic for many of us in comedy that, for some twisted reason, it’s more compelling when someone gets upset about something we think funny than just to see them enjoying themselves.

  JOHN LEE: Somehow what you’re talking about is kind of sad. Being cruel and pushing somebody is much more somber than someone going, “Hey! Here’s ten jokes about rednecks.”