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    ‘It’s like they’re trying to get prosecuted’: when cartoons try to take down governments

    It shouldn’t really be a surprise that South Park has become “the most important TV show of the Trump 2.0 era”. Trey Parker and Matt Stone have spent decades taking any potshot they like at whoever they choose, from Saddam Hussein to Guitar Hero to – thanks to their inexplicable 2001 live-action sitcom That’s My Bush! – other sitting presidents.But by using every episode in its latest series to focus their fury solely at the current US administration, hitting Trump with a combination of policy rebuttals and dick jokes (and daring him to sue them in the process), this is the strongest sense yet that Parker and Stone are out for nothing less than full regime change.Let’s not pretend that South Park is the first cartoon to attempt this, though. For almost a century, animation has often proved to be a better satirical weapon than anything made with flesh-and-blood actors. There is a sense that, to some, George HW Bush will be remembered by the mauling he received at the hands of The Simpsons, which depicted him as a gullible, uptight neighbour after he dared to criticise the show during a speech on family values. You could argue that the show pulled its punches a little – his episode, Two Bad Neighbors, didn’t air until he had been out of office for three years – but the anger is still palpable.View image in fullscreenSimilarly, even though Seth MacFarlane’s American Dad has been going for so long (388 episodes and counting) and its satire has long since softened into screwball sitcommery, it’s important to remember that his series came to fruition as a response to the George W Bush administration in the wake of 9/11. The protagonist is a patriotic Republican CIA agent hellbent on enforcing homeland security no matter what. In season three, he performed a Schoolhouse Rock-style song about the Iran-Contra scandal that may well qualify as the best entry-level explainer of the subject ever made.The fact that these worked where That’s My Bush! failed might be down to the fact that they are animated. “I think there’s a spectrum,” says Dr Adam Smith of York University’s Research Unit for the Study of Satire. “On one end, you’ve got film, where you’re seeing an actual representation of the thing you’re satirising. And on the other end of the spectrum, there are things like abstract poetry, where the viewer has to work harder to figure out what the thing means. Visual comedy, like cartoons and caricatures, is on the direct end of the spectrum, so you get the message in a split second.”View image in fullscreenThis is partly why South Park is succeeding in tackling Trump; while drama and journalism might grapple with the totality of Trump’s instincts and temperament, South Park can depict him as a horny psychopath with a tiny penis, and it lands all the harder.The approach is in huge contrast to their depiction of Trump during his last term. Back then, the show largely avoided him, instead drawing in the elementary school character Mr Garrison as a Trump character. As Dr Smith explains, that was a far more traditional way of tackling a government.“A lot of satire as we understand it today relies on allegory or double entendre,” says Smith. “This evolved in the 18th century in response to libel laws. It’s a way to critique the thing without being prosecuted for the thing.”But this time around, South Park is going in two-footed. This season’s Trump is Donald Trump, animated with a photo of his face. This doesn’t leave much room for allegory.“What they’re doing now is the opposite of how satire normally works,” Smith continues. “It’s almost like they’re trying to get prosecuted, isn’t it? The satirical act of this new series is the baiting of Donald Trump. If they can get the president of the free world to try to sue them, it reveals that he’s not got a good sense of humour. It reveals he’s petty. It reveals that he’s ridiculous. So the critique will actually be in the way he responds.”View image in fullscreenOf course, these are very American examples of satire, bright and funny and direct. It’s telling that British efforts to mimic this approach tend to be rooted less in longform series and more in sketch. Spitting Image is the prime example here, which was able to crystallise the perception of several leading politicians for 12 years in the 80s and 90s. But even this has cooled of late. BritBox’s Spitting Image revival died on impact in 2020, and other attempts at animated sketch satire (like 2DTV and Headcases) similarly failed.The comedian and philosopher Imran Yusuf attempted a version of this with his 2014 animation Union Jack, about a British man who – proving some subjects never fully go away – is aggressively suspicious of his non-white neighbours. “We wrote a couple of scripts and tried to pitch it, but everyone turned it away. When it went out on BBC Three, the commissioner hated it,” says Yusuf. “Britain is terrified of doing what the Americans do in regards to political satire and animation. Why don’t we have The Simpsons and Family Guy and American Dad and South Park? Part of the problem is, and this is where it gets really hairy, if a black or a brown writer writes political satire that satirises white politics and white culture, there’s going to be less commissioning will to make it happen.”View image in fullscreenStill, it could be worse. Elsewhere in the world, where authoritarian regimes tend not to enjoy direct insults, animators have long since used other methods to get their point across. For example, Marjane Satrapi’s film Persepolis, about a young girl struggling to come of age against the backdrop of the Iranian Revolution – which it depicts unflatteringly – could only have been made outside Iran. Indeed, upon release it faced bans in Iran and Lebanon, and in recent years schools in some American states have attempted to ban Satrapi’s original graphic novel from schools.Elsewhere, artists have had to use metaphor and symbolism to slip the net. During its time spent under military dictatorship from the 60s to the 80s, Brazil’s government suppressed political art, so artists were forced to obfuscate their point. This resulted in work like Vendo Ouvindo by Lula Gonzaga. On the surface, the film is simply a rudimentary cutout of a face. However, as soon as you key into the context in which it was made, you realise that the face can see and hear but not speak. In other words, it’s a reflection of life under authoritarian censorship.But sometimes even this doesn’t work. Dimensions of Dialogue, a short film by the Czech film-maker Jan Švankmajer, was an abstract depiction of, among other things, one clay head sharpening its tongue on another clay head. Despite containing no specific message, it was made in explicit defiance of the Czechoslovak Communist party’s preference for social realism in animation. And it worked; the party not only banned it, but used it as an example of the sort of thing it wouldn’t stand for.View image in fullscreenTellingly, the White House reaction to South Park has been the exact opposite: JD Vance and the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement chose to tweet about their depiction rather than try to erase it from existence.But, as Dr Smith says, the fact that the administration is attempting to laugh along with it doesn’t mean that the satire has failed. “I suppose it depends on what the point of satire is,” he says. “You always get these questions like, does it change anything? I think it’s too soon to say. My preferred explanation when people ask about the value of satire is that, if you engage in enough satire, it makes you incredulous. Perhaps the ultimate goal of South Park is not how JD Vance or Ice reacts, but the people who have watched it and thought about it. Are they going to be more critical in their day-to-day lives as a result?”With this in mind, something like South Park, which has the ability to go after Donald Trump so aggressively that nobody can misunderstand its point of view, is something of an outlier. But if America does slip into full-blown dictatorship, as with Brazil and the Eastern Bloc before it, this might all change. In other words, if you like your animation satirical, now might be the time to get into abstract clay heads. More

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    South Park has become the most important TV show of the Trump 2.0 era | Jesse Hassenger

    I’ll admit it: I’m more of a Simpsons guy than a South Park guy. Nothing really against those South Park guys – I’ve caught plenty of episodes over its astonishing near-30-year run, and loved the 1999 big-screen movie. But while I haven’t always maintained clockwork viewership of The Simpsons, either, those characters have proved durable enough to revive my interest in episodes old and new. South Park has a thinner bench by comparison, and as the show itself astutely pointed out years ago, it’s difficult for a satirically minded animated sitcom to explore ground that The Simpsons hasn’t covered already. South Park’s political bent, too, has often seemed less varied than the warmer (but still sometimes cutting) social ribbing of Matt Groening’s signature show. It’s a fine line between omnidirectional satire and libertarian crankiness.And yet the 27th season of South Park has accomplished something vanishingly few of its peers, whether in animation or topical comedy, have been able to do: getting laughs taking shots at the second Trump administration. It’s not that the White House is beyond reproach. Quite the opposite problem, much-documented: the Donald Trump cabal is so outsized in its stupidity and cruelty that it’s hard to distend it into a “funny” caricature, even a bleak one. In Trump’s second term, it has only gotten bleaker; jokes that were worn out by the end of 2020 are getting retold with a nasty vengeance, and the bar for cathartic laughter has been raised considerably.For a comedy fan, this winds up translating to an aversion. The occasional shots taken by The Simpsons somehow don’t land as squarely as they did when aimed at presidents I liked much, much more. I watch Saturday Night Live every week, and mostly dread James Austin Johnson’s accurate but ultimately defanged impression. (Some weeks, Johnson himself seems bummed out to be doing it.) I respect the hell out of Stephen Colbert, but I have never sought out his Trump commentary; I don’t need any more clapter – the reaction encouraged by comedy that wants your approval more than your laughter – in my life. South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone seemed to agree; Parker’s 2017 announcement that they’d grown bored of taking shots at Trump – then barely into his first presidential term – was one of the show’s many controversies over the years.So how is it that South Park’s revived anti-Trump blows this season have managed to land? A big part of it is precisely Stone and Parker’s allergy to clapter and the grandstanding that inspires it. They obviously resent anything they read as putting on airs and sometimes in the past, this came across as its own form of preachiness, with “everybody chill”-style speeches at an episode’s end that would secretly sound just as prescriptive as the self-righteousness they wanted to send up. With their most recent Trump parody, though, there isn’t much moralizing – just gratifyingly mean caricatures of deserving figures such as Trump, JD Vance and homeland security secretary Kristi Noem. Some (not all) of their past roastings have verged on point-and-laugh bullying; here are targets worthy of that derision.Some of this derision speaks through the language of South Park itself. Trump isn’t vocally or visually imitated; he’s depicted in a series of repurposed photos, with the same voice and animation technique that Parker and Stone used to bring Saddam Hussein to life in the South Park movie. He’s also given the same sexual partner: a muscled-up and put-upon version of Satan, who has found himself in another toxic relationship. Calling Trump a wannabe dictator doesn’t break new ground, but there’s something satisfying in Stone and Parker using their personal toolkit to draw a line between Trump and Hussein; if they thought it was a histrionic comparison, they’d be making fun of it instead of making it. Similarly, there’s real spite animating the depiction of Noem as a dog-murdering zealot whose glamorous face needs to be repeatedly lacquered and reaffixed to her head as she commands an army of Immigration and Customs Enforcement thugs.Not all of the season’s satire has involved making real-life figures regulars on the show. Because South Park’s ensemble has rarely felt as vast or believably developed as Springfield of The Simpsons (or even Arlen on King of the Hill), it’s also flexible enough to turn Randy, Stan’s desperately trend-following dad, into a ketamine-microdosing, tech-bro moron addicted to the soothing, empty reassurances of ChatGPT – the focus of the most recent episode, to the point where most of the core child cast doesn’t appear. Surprisingly, this season has deployed forever favorite Cartman more sparingly so far, again getting self-referential in the season’s second episode, where the id-driven and arguably evil little kid is incensed to find out that podcasters have stolen his “shtick” – his pervasive hatefulness, repackaged as a challenge to debate where the aggressor is always the self-appointed winner. Ascribing this “master debater” title to Cartman (alongside a fellow kid serving as an obvious Charlie Kirk/Ben Shapiro stand-in) somehow manages to make this ridiculous behavior funny in its petty smallness without glorifying it.A South Park diehard would probably describe this praise as a fair-weather fan only enjoying the show when it goes after the “right” targets. Maybe that’s true, but it’s also a lot easier to take some joy in savaging Vance as a meme-faced version of a Fantasy Island sidekick than, say, accusing George Lucas and Steven Spielberg of cultural rape. It’s probably wishful thinking to wonder if Parker and Stone might actually move the needle of the perception on tech bros, debate-me podcasters and Trump-world ghouls, especially among the dude demo. But it’s also just a blessed change of pace to see say-anything, first-amendment types finding a fresher target than the wokeness bogeyman. While countless standups continue to whine about being silenced, Parker and Stone seem highly aware of their rarified position (and, as Paramount contractors, also aware of what actual political-corporate interference looks like). In a world where Trump’s actual political opponents seem terrified to actually fight him, some well-deserved, point-and-laugh meanness has become a surprising novelty. More

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    Bob’s Burgers bans actor over alleged involvement in Capitol attack – report

    Bob’s Burgers bans actor over alleged involvement in Capitol attack – reportJay Johnston ‘blacklisted’ by Fox and no longer allowed to voice character Jimmy Pesto Sr, the Daily Beast reports While conservative Fox News hosts continue to downplay the extent of the deadly attack on the US Capitol on 6 January – and their links to the president who incited it – another part of the Fox media empire appears to have cracked down on a personality alleged to have taken part: the actor and comedian Jay Johnston.Mark Meadows was at the center of the storm on 6 January. But only Trump could call it offRead moreAccording to a report by the Daily Beast, the Bob’s Burgers cast member has been “blacklisted” by Fox over his reported presence among supporters of Donald Trump who sought to violently overturn the presidential election.Johnston, 53, has not been charged or convicted of a crime, or even admitted he was at the Capitol on 6 January.Nonetheless, the Beast cited anonymous sources close to the makers of Bob’s Burgers as saying Johnston was no longer allowed to voice the character Jimmy Pesto Sr on the long-running cartoon sitcom.Johnston has appeared in 43 episodes of Bob Burger’s since 2011 but has been missing from the 12th season that began in September, the Beast said, adding that his final appearance to date was in a season 11 episode that last aired in May.Johnston was unavailable for comment, the Beast said, while Fox and Disney, which includes the show on its Disney+ streaming service, declined the chance to do so.Internet sleuths have identified Johnston as a man seen wearing a camouflage face mask at the Capitol and wanted by the FBI for questioning.The Beast quoted a tweet identifying Johnston by Cassandra Church, an actor who worked with him on the comedy podcast Harmontown.“I’m no detective, but I do know Jay,” Church tweeted in March. “He said he was there. And that’s him in the picture. So…”From Peril to Betrayal: the year in books about Trump and other political animalsRead moreIn a tweet subsequently deleted, Spencer Crittenden, who also featured in Harmontown, wrote that Johnston was “a craven Trump supporter and was there at the time”.Tim Heidecker, a comedy writer, claimed to have “fully confirmed through reliable sources” that “it’s Jay”, although he too later deleted his messages.Johnston’s reported treatment by his employer sits in stark contrast to that of Fox News personalities including Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham who continue to push the false narrative that outside actors were involved in the insurrection.Both Hannity and Ingraham this week became entangled in the House investigation of the violence on 6 January, when it was revealed that they were among authors of text messages sent to the then White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, urging him to persuade Trump to call off the mob.TopicsAnimation on TVUS Capitol attackFoxTelevisionnewsReuse this content More