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After 12 seasons on the air, South Park is as good or better than it ever was. And how many TV shows can you say that about? But according to creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who will be in town this week as part of Just for Laughs, every laugh they deliver comes with more than just a little bloodletting. The Mirror spoke to the highly personable duo a little earlier this week. Mirror: Hey Trey, are you still doing the bulk of the writing for South Park because you still haven’t found anyone else you trust to do it, because it brings you personal satisfaction or, uh… why? Trey Parker: We’ve always fancied ourselves more like a rock band than animators. We really think every season is like a new album, that it should be from us. In seasons two and three, we had other people writing and I just didn’t like it and decided that I was going to write it from there on in. And the way we do a show in a week, we couldn’t do that with writers, there’s just no time to have other people write, passing notes back and forth. So since season three, I’ve pretty well written every episode myself. I think when we’re finally done writing it, we’ll just be done with the show completely. Matt Stone: Our writing process has always pretty well been the same. Me and Trey sit around and talk about what we should do with a scene, trying to make each other laugh, trying to find a joke—and it can come from anywhere; a line, a stupid voice or a really heady concept. Trey is credited as the writer of the show because, truth be told, he sits down and pounds out every script. I don’t have any ego about it, I don’t care, you know? M: Does South Park get easier or harder to do after 12 seasons? TP: That’s a good question because, you know, it’s fascinating to me that it’s exactly the same. It’s always been extremely difficult and painful. People think we have a great time making the show but the truth is—and everyone working on the show knows it—that we’re just digging our eyeballs out. It’s horrible, the stress is insane, but when the season is over, we’re always happy that we made it. And every season has been like that. Deconstruction and strip-miningM: You do what? Fourteen episodes a year? TP: Yeah, any more than that would be impossible, my blood pressure would shoot through the roof.
MS: In some ways, it’s easier to do the show now. There’re certain things we don’t stress about anymore, certain things we’ve figured out, everybody from top to bottom on the show is so much more competent now than when we were just these 25-year-old idiots. We can pull stuff off now. The harder part is constantly mining for new ideas and stories, new tones and stuff—and we’ve strip-mined a lot of our mountains. We’re always looking for fresh territory, and when we find it, that’s what excites us. TP: At first, South Park was just this very cheap little show. Part of the whole joke was how cheap it was, the anti-show of it, going down to the very fact that we originally did it on construction paper, the whole idea was de-constructionist. But now that we’re 12 years in and we’ve won Emmys and all that, it’s more like, “How do we stay kind of punk rock at all,” you know what I mean? MS: We’re kind of dickheads in a way. We don’t focus-group anything, we never have, we don’t get any notes from anybody, the network, nobody. I think we’re really unique in that way. And sometimes we probably need some notes, but right from the third or fourth episode, no network executive has ever told us what to do. We just do what we want and there it is. If Trey and I like it, it stays in the show, and if we don’t, it’s not in the show. We never go, like, “Well, I don’t really like this joke but 13-year-olds will.” We never leave jokes in there like that. The perils of 9-to-5M: How do you feel about Seth MacFarlane’s empire? TP: There’s more and more stuff every day finding its way onto American television that I think is really great, but then you get this bubblegum shit that’s just, like, by the book, what we call 9-to-5 comedy writers. They mostly have families and kids and that’s the most important thing and then they go in to work and write comedy and when it’s five o’clock, it’s time to go. It’s gag humour, and gag humour drives us crazy. Where it’s just, like, “Here’s a gag, here’s a gag”—it’s got nothing to do with what’s going on in the show, just like, “Here’s a gag.” And anyone who writes comedy knows that that is the very easiest, simplest thing to do and you don’t really need any talent to do it, you just learn the craft and do it. MS: Yeah, Family Guy’s just not a show I like. It’s funny, when we did that [Family Guy parody] show, it was more to point out that the similarities between our two shows is that they’re animated, and it stops there. They feel like very different shows. Family Guy, to comedy people, it’s kind of what that band the Offspring is to real punk rockers. TP: The biggest thing is that you essentially kill yourself for a show—it’s like, you’ve got to die for it. When you’re an artist, you’ve got to say to yourself, “This is all that matters, and if it kills me, so be it.” And then you have the Family Guy writing staff who come in 9-to-5, write their gags and go home. But what I absolutely must say to you is that this totally, purely 100 per cent completely, comes from a place of jealousy. Because when we’re sitting there in our room, it’s three in the morning and we’re 12 hours from having to air and we don’t have, like, a third act, wondering why we do this to ourselves, we’re just totally jealous of their job. Seth MacFarlane is basically in the same position as us except he hasn’t written a fucking thing in four years. I wish I was him. Laughing at XenuM: How often do you come across some of the people you’ve lambasted on the show? How do you deal with that? TP: The thing is, we’re both pretty big guys, and all actors are always these tiny-like guys [laughing]. So we’re not scared if Tom Cruise comes walking into the room, he’s about 4’8” and we’re both about 6’3”. M: Speaking of Tom Cruise, I realize that it’s animation, and that you can get away with a lot this way, but how do you get away with [the Scientology episode “Trapped in the Closet”]? Those Scientologists are so litigation-hungry… TP: At first, we wrote Tom Cruise as this really flamboyant gay character and Comedy Central told us we just couldn’t do that. And we were like, “Why not? He’s never going to act upon it.” But they still said no way. So then we came back and said how about if we say that he’s in the closet and they still said no way. So we said, “No, what if he is literally trapped in a closet and can’t come out?” And they said, “Yeah, you can do that.” You see, we don’t get notes from Comedy Central but we do still have to talk to a lawyer, so every script has to go through a lawyer, and we’ll go, “Okay, so we can’t say this, but can we say this?” At the time, everyone was saying you just can’t fuck with those people, so we went, “Okay, let’s fuck with those people.” MS: The reason Scientology was so upset about it is because they want people’s introduction to their organization to be from them. And the idea that there’s a bunch of kids around America and the first time they hear the word “Scientologist” is on South Park, and their first information about it comes from that show… I think the kids will already know what they’re being talked to about. If you see that show and that’s the first thing you learn about Scientology, it will affect the way you think about Scientology forever. You can’t ever think about it the same, if only because it’s the first time you hear about it. Shrug the voteM: Are you rooting for anyone in particular come the November elections? MS: I’m not really that emotionally invested. I’m not really a big voter. M: Do you think South Park has much influence over its audience’s political or social views, the way certain people proudly proclaim they get their news from the Daily Show? TP: The guys working on the Daily Show are all smart guys, as smart as anyone writing for the Washington Post. But the Daily Show is a lot more political than we are. Like, I know my place. I know what my job is and that is to make people laugh. I’m the first to admit that I don’t know enough about politics to say what should happen. I mean, I care enough about what’s going on, but at the end of the day, my job is to tell a fun story of a little kid and what he’s doing. And if there’re some political overtones, then that’s great, but we try to never let that interfere with the story. You know, getting up and preaching our politics. MS: We worry about that, but first and foremost we try to be funny. And then maybe try to make a point. But some of my very favourite shows are the ones where we’re absolutely, positively, totally, purposely confusing. Like, “What the fuck did you mean by that?” I like those the best, where we purposely try to be politically confusing. Colorado punkM: It seems to me like you guys get it from all angles, the left, the right, from everywhere, because you don’t automatically conform to some movement’s political dogma. TP: When we were growing up in Colorado, the way to be punk rock was to be kind of liberal, basically because we were surrounded by a bunch of rednecks. But I think both Matt and I kind of grew up being these rebellious kinds of liberals. But then we came to college and it was all those people, a bunch of hippies that we couldn’t fuckin’ stand, and then we go to L.A. and we’re like, “How the fuck do you be punk rock in L.A.?” So we figured, “What the fuck, let’s be Republicans.” It was the only way we could just say, “Fuck you, we think this way.” So I think that really confused people. It wasn’t until Team America that people got this Republican message—actually I don’t think it’s Republican at all, but more just this anti-super-liberal message—and that was the most anger we’ve ever got out of people. The thing was, it came out just before the election, and people were telling us that we might be encouraging people to vote for George Bush again, and we were, like, “Well, we don’t really care, the other option is just as bad.” And anyway, really, if you’re going to base your vote on what you saw at a puppet movie, seriously, dude, you shouldn’t be voting. MS: The funny thing is, almost always in American entertainment, when a show has as much, like, cussing on it as South Park, those shows are almost always left-wing or whatever you want to call it. But we’ve done it from both sides and I think that’s just what freaks people out. Like, they don’t know how to react when we do something that isn’t exclusively left-wing. Then we get labeled right-wingers or conservatives. Even if you’re a liberal person, or a Republican, both sides, it’s like, if you can’t find some funny shit with your own stuff, then you’re just as humourless as some fundamentalist Christian that can’t hear shit and get offended. But it’s just as funny when we’ve done shows on the smugness of hybrid car owners. And people get really mad about that, going, “Can’t you see that hybrids can save the world?” Music, or somethingM: What are you planning to do at this Montreal show? MS: We’re gonna do some music. I don’t think it’ll be a ton of music, maybe 10 to 15 minutes, I dunno. It’s not going to be a complete musical show but we’re going to play some songs. And then we’ll try and work out a show, talk about the show—I don’t really know what we’re going to do. M: Is writing songs one of the more fun aspects of doing South Park? TP: Oh yeah, that’s why songs always end up in our stuff, that’s what I really love to do. It’s definitely been the most enjoyable part for me. And getting ready for this Montreal show has been pretty fun, because we’ve been going over all these old songs we wrote for the show that we haven’t played since we recorded them. So sitting down and playing them, discovering what will work live, yeah, it’s a good time. M: Canada jokes seem to almost be like a staple on South Park. How come? Is it because Canadians are just so thrilled that someone is paying attention that they don’t care—or recognize—that they’re being insulted? TP: No, we always make those Canadian jokes because to us—and Canadians will probably hate this—we see Canadians as pretty much the same people as we are. So it’s funny to play on these issues of bigotry and racism for these two peoples, who are, basically, exactly alike. If you break it down and look at South Park: The Movie, you’ll see that there is absolutely nothing in that movie that makes fun of Canadians, it’s all making fun of Americans. The Canadians don’t actually do anything wrong in that entire movie. Happy satireM: It’s funny, in spite of all the pressure of doing South Park, I always come away from the show thinking it has a good spirit, that in spite of it all, you’re enjoying what you’re doing. TP: Well, [laughs] we’re usually not—but I think the reason why we’re still here after 12 years is… both me and Matt, we’re happy people and so the show might come out that way. A lot of shows we’ve seen, things that have tried to copy South Park but don’t work, it always ends up that they just churn out something that is really cynical. And we’re not cynics at all, we’re both optimists, really. And no matter how much we rip on something or find it ridiculous, in the end, it’s like, isn’t this all fun? Aren’t we having a great time? Even if we’re not exactly having a great time making it, that is the attitude that we want to see in the show. That’s the attitude I want to see when I’m watching TV. You want to escape, you don’t want to see something telling you the world sucks. Nobody wants to watch something that is just mean. M: Hey, am I ever going to see my favourite South Park character Towelie again? MS: Yeah, we’ll do Towelie again, I love Towelie too. It’s been awhile but we’ll definitely have to do him again. I love Towelie. South Park Live at the Imperial Theatre
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