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South Park: Major Boobage

By fred | March 27, 2008

(S12E03) Before talking about this week’s episode, let’s mention the place to go online for everything South Path, and, as said MTV networks’ entertainment group president Doug Herzog, “Southparkstudios.com is a true representation of Matt and Trey’s vision and is the ultimate online destination for South Park fans allowing them full access to every South Park episode ever created“.

Fair to say that when those guys work on something, they do it well. There are plenty of great things over there, including every episodes of every seasons (although to see episodes from the current season you need to wait for sometime in April), in some pretty good quality. Sure, it comes with ads before and within the episodes, but it’s all free, and best of all it’s available from everywhere in the world. I’m not in the US, and usually sites like that only give me a “not available for you, sucker” message. Not this time!

On to this week installment of the show, and I have to say that this was the first episode this season that I didn’t love. Don’t get me wrong, it was a good episode, and it had its moments that were really funny and made me laugh out loud, but overall I didn’t love it, because I didn’t feel it was really funny.

Sure, it had references to the movie Heavy Metal of course, a funny take on drugs that, being South Park, of course had to come from cute little things like cats, there was a reference to The Diary Of Anna Frank and it sure was ironic to have Cartman, of all people, to be the one saving Jews, or cats here, and the final reference to the recent Eliot Spitzer scandal was a pretty good and quick reaction to the news like this show can do.

And I thought it was all nicely integrated into one single story, but the problem is that it really felt to me that this was a good example of an episode where they put their message before the comedy. The message about drugs and how people react to it was there, the parodies and takes of recent events were there, and guess what ? Turns out Kenny isn’t dead and gone after all, he was there, and he was the center of attention of this episode – so much that at some point no other than Cartman was involved in a quest to save his soul – and I feel we were able to understand what Kenny was saying a lot more than we used to.

Still, many many times the episode was not that funny. It had a message, it had parodic elements, but it just wasn’t always funny. It felt somewhat like the end of last week’s episode, when everyone gathered together to finally kill Britney Spears. Sure, it was part of the whole message of the episode and it was great to see everyone going after her and not be satisfied until she was dead, but let’s be real : that entire scene simply wasn’t funny.

It didn’t bother me that much because everything before that in the episode was indeed hilarious, and the last scene was pretty funny as well. This time, though, it wasn’t the case. There were funny bits, but overall and while I find myself liking this episode throughout, I just wasn’t laughing.

One last note about the Holocaust analogy : having Kyle to ask Cartman if he didn’t see any analogy with a past event was really not needed, was it ? We all saw it and got the irony of having Cartman acting like that, but to rub it like that in our face without – of course – Cartman realizing it, really went nowhere and was useless, felt like (a brief) filler actually.

I still thought this was a fun episode and it had its moments, but this time they didn’t put the comedy first and that’s a shame. They have reacted to recent events before, they have made parodies of movies in the past, but they had always put comedy first, they always made sure that the episode would make us laughs first, and that’s why we love this show. Sadly, this time they forgot about that and put comedy second, and it showed.

Of course I still love the show, and I’m sure next week will be back as usual.

Posted in Reviews
Shows: South Park