South Park Season 15, Episode 1: feh
Last night I watched Season 15, Episode 1, "Humancentipad," of South Park. Normally I love South Park, but this was the first episode I have ever watched that I take issue with. In this episode, Kyle gets kidnapped by Apple Corporation because he signed one of their iPad agreements without reading it, and it permitted Apple to kidnap him, throw him in a cage with two other hapless people in the same boat (both adults), and make a HumancentiPad" out of them, with Kyle in the middle, connecting Kyle's mouth to the leading person's anus, and Kyle's anus to the following person's mouth, so that # 2 and # 3 have to eat the feces of # 1 and -- after processing through # 2's GI tract -- # 2. In the end, because of a few of Eric Cartman's tantrums over lack of an iPad, leading Cartman to win the new HumancentIpad, Kyle and the other two who had been dragooned into becoming parts for the HumancentIpad are freed and allowed to go home.
Two types of problems bothered me enormously about this. One, it was gross. Gross beyond gross beyond gross. As it is, I can just barely the obscene outbursts of the exuberant Canadian comedians, Terence and Phillip, but as their verbal shenanigans are always just that -- verbal -- I can tune it out and thoroughly enjoy the rest of the show. But the mindless, heartless, appalling cruelty of what was done to Kyle and his two companions-in-horror by Apple Corporation was both horrific and utterly nauseating, and by the time the episode ended I was more than a little green because of it.
The second problem was the stupidity of the situation Kyle found himself in, nothing that any huge, wealthy corporation with everything to lose and nothing to gain by it would ever do to its customers and its customers' children for fear of Godzilla-league legal consequences for it if it did. The following crimes against three Apple customers, one of them a child, in this episode included kidnapping, a deadly federal crime; torture of American citizens, a crime on the books both federally and locally; egregious child abuse of a sort that must constitute something like 15 nested felonies in its own right; violation of public health and safety laws, ditto; outright enslavement and human trafficking of American citizens, ditto; and, on top of everything else, forcing US citizens to give up their rights under the law, which is illegal everywhere in this country. All that Kyle's family needed to do to get their child back was call the FBI and the local cops, who would have sailed in, liberated the three who had been made into the HumancentIpad, and busted every last official and employee of Apple Corporation up to and including Steve Jobs. Jobs and his henchmen would have gone to prison for life, thanks to the sheer number and nature of the crime they had committed against Kyle and his fellow sufferers, the American public would have been so revolted by the news when it came out that they would never have had anything to do with Apple again, and Apple Corporation would have become instant history without the slightest hope of recovering from such lethal body-blows.
But there was no mention of the fact that Apple's treatment of Kyle and the other two victims was so highly illegal that new laws would have had to have been passed just to cover it all, or that it was ridiculous to suppose that nobody at all in that episode, whether central characters or part of the cattle call, seemed to realize just how illegal Kyle's time in durance vile was. Nor did anyone who saw the new HumancentIpad seem to be nauseated and appalled by it. Put both together and you have, rather than an episode so ridiculous that people couldn't help but laugh at it, a totally unfunny one. "Ridiculous," handled correctly, can be comedy gold. But "utterly, completely, literally impossible" is a horse of a very different color, one not lending itself to humor. It's the emotional analog of the difference between a child's lopsided drawing of a square or circle, on the one hand, which is evident in the painfully hand-colored drawings pinned onto the front of the refrigerator of every household including children anywhere in the world, and squaring the circle, which is literally impossible in Euclidean geometry using only an idealized drawing compass and straight-edge -- you can't empathize with anything that can't exist, and that you know cannot exist, and if you can't empathize with a situation, you can't find it funny. Something that is virtually or almost impossible can be worked into a great comedy routine, which will do its job well as long as the apparent impossibility is shown to be actually possible or there is a resolution of some other kind by the end of the routine. But a truly impossible situation simply falls flat on its face -- as did this episode of South Park.
"Gross upon gross upon gross," of course, went most of the way to my being thoroughly turned off by this episode. But "truly impossible" had its own, not insigifcant part to play in it, as well. Thumbs down, South Park -- this one bombed, the only South Park episode or spinoff I've ever known to do so. Shame on you.
Two types of problems bothered me enormously about this. One, it was gross. Gross beyond gross beyond gross. As it is, I can just barely the obscene outbursts of the exuberant Canadian comedians, Terence and Phillip, but as their verbal shenanigans are always just that -- verbal -- I can tune it out and thoroughly enjoy the rest of the show. But the mindless, heartless, appalling cruelty of what was done to Kyle and his two companions-in-horror by Apple Corporation was both horrific and utterly nauseating, and by the time the episode ended I was more than a little green because of it.
The second problem was the stupidity of the situation Kyle found himself in, nothing that any huge, wealthy corporation with everything to lose and nothing to gain by it would ever do to its customers and its customers' children for fear of Godzilla-league legal consequences for it if it did. The following crimes against three Apple customers, one of them a child, in this episode included kidnapping, a deadly federal crime; torture of American citizens, a crime on the books both federally and locally; egregious child abuse of a sort that must constitute something like 15 nested felonies in its own right; violation of public health and safety laws, ditto; outright enslavement and human trafficking of American citizens, ditto; and, on top of everything else, forcing US citizens to give up their rights under the law, which is illegal everywhere in this country. All that Kyle's family needed to do to get their child back was call the FBI and the local cops, who would have sailed in, liberated the three who had been made into the HumancentIpad, and busted every last official and employee of Apple Corporation up to and including Steve Jobs. Jobs and his henchmen would have gone to prison for life, thanks to the sheer number and nature of the crime they had committed against Kyle and his fellow sufferers, the American public would have been so revolted by the news when it came out that they would never have had anything to do with Apple again, and Apple Corporation would have become instant history without the slightest hope of recovering from such lethal body-blows.
But there was no mention of the fact that Apple's treatment of Kyle and the other two victims was so highly illegal that new laws would have had to have been passed just to cover it all, or that it was ridiculous to suppose that nobody at all in that episode, whether central characters or part of the cattle call, seemed to realize just how illegal Kyle's time in durance vile was. Nor did anyone who saw the new HumancentIpad seem to be nauseated and appalled by it. Put both together and you have, rather than an episode so ridiculous that people couldn't help but laugh at it, a totally unfunny one. "Ridiculous," handled correctly, can be comedy gold. But "utterly, completely, literally impossible" is a horse of a very different color, one not lending itself to humor. It's the emotional analog of the difference between a child's lopsided drawing of a square or circle, on the one hand, which is evident in the painfully hand-colored drawings pinned onto the front of the refrigerator of every household including children anywhere in the world, and squaring the circle, which is literally impossible in Euclidean geometry using only an idealized drawing compass and straight-edge -- you can't empathize with anything that can't exist, and that you know cannot exist, and if you can't empathize with a situation, you can't find it funny. Something that is virtually or almost impossible can be worked into a great comedy routine, which will do its job well as long as the apparent impossibility is shown to be actually possible or there is a resolution of some other kind by the end of the routine. But a truly impossible situation simply falls flat on its face -- as did this episode of South Park.
"Gross upon gross upon gross," of course, went most of the way to my being thoroughly turned off by this episode. But "truly impossible" had its own, not insigifcant part to play in it, as well. Thumbs down, South Park -- this one bombed, the only South Park episode or spinoff I've ever known to do so. Shame on you.