"Sermon of the 'Mount'" (S27E01), South Park.
Twenty years after its first episode, and barely six months into Trump’s second presidency, the 27th season of South Park (1997–) premiered on Paramount+ on July 23, 2025. It was a period of great mischief. Earlier that month, Paramount had settled with the president for $16 million to end a lawsuit over a pre-election interview with Democratic candidate Kamala Harris he alleged had been falsely edited. That even the company’s own lawyers saw the case as “completely without merit” meant nothing to the company’s top brass. Paramount was readying for an $8.4 billion merger with Skydance Media that required federal approval; three days after Stephen Colbert called the settlement “a big fat bribe” on the Late Show, which runs on the Paramount-owned CBS, came the network’s announcement that the show was cancelled. Coincidentally, Colbert broke the news on the very same day the House approved a $1.1 billion cut that slashed all federal support for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the nonprofit charged by Congress with allocating funds to NPR, PBS, and other US public radio and TV stations. None of this came as a surprise to anyone who’d perused Project 2025, the alt-right playbook for Trump’s second mandate, but the systematic attacks suggested a large-scale attempt to silence all rebellious voices, aided and abetted by media conglomerates more than willing to muzzle their own employees in return for lucrative deals.
Even if you’ve never sat through one of South Park’s 338 episodes, chances are you’re familiar with its MO. Crass, foul-mouthed, and resolutely determined to provoke and offend, the animated sitcom has weathered threats of cancellation ever since its four protagonists—fourth graders and best friends Eric Cartman, Kyle Broflovski, Stan Marsh, and Kenny McCormick—first roamed the titular Colorado town in 1997. In the years thereafter, cocreators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have turned the city into a microcosm of American society and trained their satire on all kinds of targets, from environmentalists to religious fanatics, gun-toting hicks to self-righteous celebrities. Far from “the most hostile [show] to liberalism in television history,” as Brian C. Anderson flamboyantly praised it in his 2005 book South Park Conservatives, the sitcom has always remained proudly unaligned with either side of the political spectrum, fueled by an itch to break taboos and speak the unspeakable, decorum and good taste be damned. Much of its appeal derives from that transgressive power and the hair-rising question that its best lines always trigger: Did they really just say that?
But in this political context, the stakes felt higher than ever—and the season 27 premiere, “Sermon on the ‘Mount,” spoke directly to those anxieties. In the show’s alternate universe, NPR has just been shut down, and Trump—a horny despot seen threatening foes with tariffs and shagging Satan on the sly—is bringing religion back into schools. Furious at the government’s tampering with their children’s education, the townsfolk start protesting, only to be slammed with a $5 billion lawsuit from the commander-in-chief. It’s up to Jesus Christ—a prominent character since the show’s beginning, himself embroiled in a lawsuit with the president—to placate people and remind them of the severity of the situation. “You really wanna end up like Colbert?” the messiah warns. “Shut the fuck up or South Park is over!”
Not unlike the Paramount politburo, the town caves in, settles for an exorbitant sum, and commits to a series of pro-Trump PSAs. But as you might expect from a show that once featured a statue of the Holy Virgin squirting menstrual blood on Pope Benedict’s face (“Bloody Mary”), kowtowing to the powerful has never been Parker and Stone’s forte. Back in 2020, at the tail’s end of the first Trump administration, the duo launched Sassy Justice, a web series that used deepfake technology to satirize the president and a few others. In “Sermon on the ‘Mount” too, synthetic images power the propaganda the city puts out: a computer-generated Trump staggers through the desert; exhausted by the heat, he starts undressing before crumpling to the ground, naked, only to be summoned by his genitalia, a pinky-sized excrescence with googly eyes. “Trump,” Parker’s voice echoes off-screen: “His penis is teeny tiny, but his love for us is large.” Sassy Justice was among the earliest examples of deepfake technology at work, and like its iteration five years later, really the only way it should be used. Punching up at those in power has always been South Park’s guiding principle, but the attempt this time felt equal parts gasp-inducing and rejuvenating—a gag that, in ridiculing the POTUS, had also opened up a space where all our anger and frustrations at these monstrous times could finally burst forth.
"Sermon of the Mount" (S27E01), South Park.
South Park wasn’t canceled. In fact, “Sermon on the ‘Mount” aired just hours after Parker and Stone signed a $1.5 billion, five-year deal with Paramount for 50 new episodes, and earned Paramount+ 5.9 million viewers over the first three days of availability alone—it was the biggest linear-television premiere for the show since 1999, and the top cable telecast the day it debuted. Slandering Trump and their own bosses for genuflecting to the administration while getting obscenely richer in the process is arguably one of the showrunners’ greatest jokes to date, but the minuscule penis and satanic sex didn’t fly well with the White House. “Just like the creators of South Park, the Left has no authentic or original content, which is why their popularity continues to hit record lows,” spokesperson Taylor Rogers brayed to Variety. “This show hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention.”
I remember a time when outing myself as a South Park fan used to raise eyebrows and the same baffled question: you mean the show is still on? Well, yes. For us reckless devotees who still tune in, the last ten years have spawned some of the sitcom’s most inspired material, thanks in no small part to its breakneck turnaround pace. South Parkepisodes are written and produced within a week of airing, an astonishingly ambitious schedule that allows writers freedom to riff off the most disparate topics in the zeitgeist and respond to them in real time. Which is why the show has remained so scorchingly timely, addressing in the last few years alone hot-button issues like Ozempic and the Byzantine US healthcare system (“The End of Obesity”), the cancerous effects of monoculture (“The Streaming Wars”), and the rise of A.I. (“Deep Learning”). That episode sees the kids wake up to the powers of ChatGPT, but their discovery is in many ways the show’s. As Stan risks losing face and girlfriend, he asks the chatbot to write him a way out, and the happy ending is hilarious precisely because it feels like it was penned by a robot (Parker really did rely on ChatGPT for the closing scene, and credited it as his co-writer). “Deep Learning” isn’t just a critique of AI, but as with so many other episodes, also an earnest attempt to question our ever-changing culture and the sitcom’s own place inside it.
So yes, the show is still on, and if it has managed to remain so fresh it is precisely because of its willingness to interrogate its own meaning and worth. Like it or not, the relentlessly scatological humor has always belied larger anxieties over the series’s significance. You can sense that everywhere in “Post COVID” (2021), a two-part special that imagined Cartman, Kyle, and co. returning to South Park as middle-aged drifters in a future littered with pop up Pho restaurants, Teslas, NFTs, passive-aggressive Alexas, and very tame, very PC standup. A deep-seated hopelessness permeates the reunion: the kids, now in their embittered adult form, have parted ways, and the town looks like a vision out of Blade Runner (1982). But what makes this diptych so striking is Parker and Stone’s refusal to succumb to despair and commitment to turning their satire against that new, depressingly lame world. The special’s leitmotif—“the future fucking sucks!”—never registers as two Gen Xers bitching about the changing of the guard so much as two creatives grappling with these “unprecedented times” and trying to make some art out of them. I’m not using the word “art” lightly. Vilified as it’s been since its inception, South Park hasn’t just kept an unparalleled pulse on our society, but combined high- and lowbrow comedy to interrogate our dreams and paranoias, stress-testing the limits of what can and cannot be said. But what, if anything, could a sitcom that kicked off in 1997 as a crudely animated Christmas video card from two disgruntled University of Colorado Boulder graduates—now in their mid-fifties—have to say about today?
"The Crap Out" (S28E05), South Park.
Never has that question felt as urgent as it does in the two most recent seasons, in which the times are a-changin’, and tragically so. South Park Elementary headmaster “PC Principal,” once a self-righteous progressive, has become Bible-toting Power Christian Principal; Jesus Christ himself has abjured his faith to embrace Christian Nationalism, and Eric Cartman is no longer the school’s preeminent reactionary, replaced by fellow fourth-grader Clyde Donovan as a Charlie Kirk–styled Master Debater in an episode that aired just a month before the real Charlie Kirk died doing what he loved best on the lawn of Utah Valley University. For what it’s worth, Kirk found it “hilarious” that he appeared on the show—which didn’t stop Paramount’s Comedy Central from removing it once he passed, the same fate that befell an installment of Nathan Fielder’s Nathan For You (2013–2017) series, taken off Paramount+ in April last year over “sensitivities” around antisemitism. Evidently not all speech is free: you can send the president naked into the desert, but god forbid you touch on the Holocaust or lampoon a man with a proven track record of antisemitic comments.
“Woke is dead,” Cartman sighs at the start of “Sermon on the ‘Mount,” “and it’s terrible, cuz I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” Boy and show alike must confront a world in which our definitions of taste and decorum grow more vaporous every day, in which, by PC Principal’s own admission, “not much is illegal,” much less shameful. Over the time I worked on this piece, I saw the man presiding over the world’s most consequential office post a video that depicted his predecessor and his wife as dancing apes; I heard him promise to “wipe out a whole civilization”; I watched his minions clad in shades, balaclavas, and Gestapo-looking coats murder civilians in broad daylight; and I heard press secretary Karoline Leavitt accuse a reporter of being a “leftwing activist” for pressing her on those atrocities. Now that the obscene language that made South Park anathema to so many in its early years has become the establishment’s lingua franca—now that Trump 2.0 has effectively out-South Parked South Park in vulgarity and depravity—what’s left to be said?
"Sermon of the 'Mount" (S27E01), South Park.
This is the storm seasons 27 and 28 had to brave. It is also what makes them so extraordinary. Because instead of forsaking their punk mandate and bowing to the powers that be, Parker and Stone made that existential impasse an opportunity to reclaim their disruptive voice, turn it against the administration, and fire back on all cylinders. “Sermon on the ‘Mount” was just an amuse-bouche: in the following episodes, Trump—whose face isn’t drawn like other characters’ but appears photorealistic, a privilege hitherto granted to such fixtures as Saddam Hussein and Mel Gibson, among a very few others—is mocked as a micropenised tyrant fucking Satan and/or JD Vance all while being lavished with gifts and reassurances over the size of his presidential member. He’s not the only one pilloried. Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem shows up as a trigger-happy puppy-killer whose heavily made-up mug requires constant lifting lest it should collapse and crawl away like a facehugger. Trump lackey and Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr loses his “freedom of speech” after a terrible accident leaves him staggering around the White House as a crippled mummy, right arm raised in a stiff fascist salute. When Trump gets Satan pregnant, Antichrist-connoisseur Peter Thiel is summoned by Vance as exorcist, while then-Attorney General Pam Bondi struts about the Oval Office with her nose chronically smeared in Trump’s shit, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth mistakes South Park’s Thanksgiving run—an annual tradition this time sponsored by the Saudi royal family—for a mass insurrection.
Strange as this may sound, the last two seasons were not intended to cover politics at all. “I don’t know what more we could possibly say about Trump,” Parker admitted to Vanity Fair in September 2024 after it was revealed that the show would avoid the looming election cycle. Asked about the U-turn barely a year later, he toldThe New York Times that it wasn’t South Park that got all political; “it’s that politics became pop culture.” Which is why the last ten episodes often doubled as real-time commentary on the country’s inexorable collapse. More attention to the White House meant a lot less given to the kids; as Trump became a black hole at the center of the narrative, other prominent characters saw their arcs tangled up with and made subservient to the administration’s antics. South Park Elementary counselor Mackie loses his job and joins ICE; once Noem and her posse arrest “his” Mexican employees, Stan’s father Randy is forced to sell his Tegridy Weed farm; as for how exactly Trump and JD Vance wind up using Towelie—a talking and chronically stoned towel that served as Randy’s sidekick since the late 2010s—the least is said about that the better.
And yet, overwhelming as all of this was, the more I watched, the more South Park began to feel strangely cathartic. At a time when the proverbial bottom has fallen out and the administration’s deeds routinely lap Parker and Stone’s most obscene ideas, isn’t there something at once so sacrosanct and electrifying about a show that can rub these psychopaths in shit, expose and ridicule their monstrosity, and have a disgruntled Trump voter call the president a “retarded faggot” on mainstream TV? No doubt the bashing cost Parker and Stone a sizable chunk of their audience—hyperbolic as Anderson’s claims about South Park’s supposed “anti-liberalism” sound, there’s no denying the show’s historic appeal among conservatives who relished all the anti-PC tirades. But for the rest of us watching, these episodes offered an increasingly rare experience: a satire that was equal parts galvanizing and therapeutic. It’s not just that the government “is in your face everywhere you look,” as Parker told the Times. It’s that with its fascistic commitment to obliterating dissenting voices—whether through lawsuits or bullets—the administration has also effectively sabotaged our own imagination. When the screens you stare at every day are littered with images of unnamable atrocities perpetrated by egomaniacs who will never live with the consequences of their actions, it can be difficult to dream up alternative narratives, to imagine a world existing beyond the putrid status quo.
By reclaiming vulgarity for the people—and reappropriating it from the racists and bigots infesting the White House—the show turned its relentlessly crude jokes into something seditious. This is what South Park skeptics gloss over when they dismiss the sitcom’s humor as pointless trash. If the show can so often feel invigorating, that’s not in spite of its profanities, but because of them. All those crass, vile jibes ignite something that we seldom surrender to in everyday life: a deeply human, carnivalesque desire to scourge the powerful and revel in filth, mess, and untidiness. That irreverent blend of comedy aligns Parker and Stone to a tradition that harks back to satirists like Aristophanes, Rabelais, and Swift, and has recently found a cinematic equivalent in Radu Jude. More than once as I watched these last ten episodes, I thought of the director’s masterpiece, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023), or Dracula (2025), his latest take on Romania’s most famous export. Like South Park, Jude treats vulgarity as something emancipating, and if his films can make you feel uncomfortable, that’s less a function of their obscenities than what those obscenities might reveal about you. Watching Ilinca Manolache’s foul-mouthed character curse her way through Bucharest in Do Not Expect or listening to the deluge of dick jokes in Dracula, I remember wondering if I was wincing because of the material or because I somehow recognized myself in it—because all those grotesque images were opening up a space where I could see myself and others in a different way, one that spat in the face of the cleanliness of the social order I belong to. As with Jude’s most impudent films, to laugh at South Park’s Trump and his posse was—I do not mean this in any abstract sense—to feel seen.
This is what makes South Park so essential: however naive and ridiculous the show’s jabs at Trump and his minions might look, they still amount to a powerful antidote to the kind of paralysis that befell the country since he was sworn in for a second time. As mayor Jacob Frey told ICE to “get the fuck out of Minneapolis” just hours after an officer murdered Renée Good in cold blood on January 7, my mind traveled back to the moment South Park Police chief Harris told Pete Hegseth to “get [his] little bitch-ass out of town” before booting the Secretary of War and his selfie stick out of the station and onto the street. That was early into season 28, a couple of months before Good’s extrajudicial killing; as my newsfeed flooded with videos of her death and others of Kristi Noem praising ICE and calling Good a “domestic terrorist,” I found myself not so much rewatching but clinging to those episodes. No, Hegseth will likely never meet a local police force so heroic, and Noem’s face hasn’t beetled around the White House lawn on its own (yet). But there was an astonishing force to those images. They weren’t comforting. They weren’t silly. They were subversive in a way few other things last year ever looked—fantasies that existed in acrid conversation with the barbaric present that spawned them, and refused to submit to it.
"The Woman in the Hat" (S28E02), South Park.
“What’s going [on] now is like the ’60s in America in a sense,” Michael Mann said of the dire state of affairs in the States at Lyon’s Lumière Festival last October, “except that the vanguard and the resistance today is in South Park.” Political agnostics as they are, Park and Stone would likely cringe at the idea of being hailed as the opposition. But Mann’s point still holds, all the more so at a time when other artists of the cocreators’ stature seem to have relinquished their prerogatives. For evidence, look no further than last year’s first ever Riyadh Comedy Festival. A few weeks after several among the most prominent US comedians flocked to Saudi Arabia to perform before the country’s bluebloods, South Park centered its Thanksgiving episode around a turkey trot sponsored by King Mohammed Bin Salman—where the winner gets $5000 and “disparaging remarks on the Saudi royal family are strictly forbidding.” As YouTube adjusted its algorithm to my research, I kept being fed excerpts of festival guest Dave Chappelle’s latest Netflix special, including one about Kirk’s death and political violence in the US that ends with the line “I’m telling you: it’s easier to talk in Saudi Arabia!”
That might be so, especially if you’re willing to turn a blind eye on the kingdom’s abysmal human rights record and genuflect to its royals in exchange for fat paychecks. Still, Chappelle’s remarks made me pause. Does a comedian have a “duty” to speak up against injustices at home and abroad? That seems to be a new element of stand-up, especially now that the genre has increasingly embraced more confessional-style approaches. But to expect comedians to take a stance or uphold this or that ideology is to misunderstand their role. What’s most striking about South Park’s last two seasons, in retrospect, is that they bashed the administration without coming across as if they were enacting some self-righteous politics. Pitted next to impersonations of the president that are either hopelessly defanged (SNL’s James Austin Johnson’s) or suspiciously boisterous (Shane Gillis’s), Parker and Stone’s Trump is a wildly different beast—not a human, exactly, but a manipulative, id-propelled and pathetic monster leaving semen and lawsuits in his wake. Which is exactly as it should be.
But even at its fiercest, South Park never felt like it was simplistically “siding” with or speaking on behalf of the Democratic establishment, and to think of it that way is to embrace the same Neanderthalian us-versus-them logic that led the White House to slam the cartoon as leftist drivel in the wake of “Sermon on the ‘Mount.” Perhaps the real target in the end wasn’t Trump but politics itself, a corrosive and soul-crushing malaise that’s tampering with our ability to imagine a way out of this hell. “People are just afraid to admit that South Park sucks now,” Stan moans towards the end of season 28. “It’s because of all this political shit, we’re totally bogged down in it.” He’s speaking about his hometown; he means the show—the line reads like one of its frequent attempts at preventative self-defense. But if after ten episodes of never-ending Trump jokes you started to nurse a certain fatigue, it was only because the cartoon had managed to capture what it feels like to live in this pestilential climate, where the border between reality and the showrunners’ most deranged ideas grows blurrier with each day.
“Everything keeps on changing,” Stan tells Jesus in the final episode, “and I don’t know how to cope with it.” Easy to relate. But season 28 finds a happy ending nonetheless, a miracle that Christ couches as a kind of reminder to never betray your principles. For the sitcom’s characters, that’s a plea to stay human before the never-ending horrors plaguing town and country. Yet I can’t help but also read it as a statement from Parker and Stone around the series itself. Things may be falling hopelessly apart, but South Park will never forsake its mission to send up the powerful, no matter their political affiliations. In a world no longer beholden to facts and reason, speaking truth to power has become increasingly hard to define, much less to practice. Yet here’s a show that spoke to these dark times with a clarity you’d be hard-pressed to find in mainstream TV—a sitcom that, in fighting the way it has since the start, beat the administration at its own game, one dick joke at a time. At 29, South Park’s never seemed younger. It’s also never felt more liberating.