It's been 11 years since creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone launched their animated Comedy Central series South Park, but against all odds, it's still funny, and they keep finding new sacred cows to kill. Sometimes the show is topical, with episodes taking on the Terry Schiavo right-to-die case, or the overbearing popularity of Pokémon or World Of Warcraft. At other times, it focuses more on the cheerful gross-out gags and shock value that have characterized Parker and Stone's live-action films, like Orgazmo, Cannibal! The Musical, and the marionette feature Team America. In October 2007, Parker and Stone pushed boundaries again with the three-episode story arc "Imaginationland," in which their kid protagonists travel to a fantasyland full of familiar fictional characters, just in time to witness a bloody terrorist attack taking out the likes of Charlie Brown, Mickey Mouse, and Dorothy from Wizard Of Oz. In conjunction with Imaginationland's release as a DVD movie and the commencement of South Park's 12th season, The A.V. Club recently spoke separately with Stone and Parker about dealing with copyrights, why they never want to do films again, and why having a popular ongoing show is both a blessing and an aggravating grind.
The A.V. Club: Has there been any fallout from all the copyrighted characters you have killing each other horribly in the "Imaginationland" series?
MS: No! Surprisingly not. We have a pretty crack legal team at Comedy Central that everything gets okayed by, so in an episode like this, they gave us pretty explicit guidelines about how much had to change. To a layperson, it's kind of mystifying as to why it's legal to use Strawberry Shortcake as long as she has cherries on her hat, and different-colored shoes.
AVC: Even though you still call her Strawberry Shortcake?
MS: Yeah! I don't know why that's legal. I guess the legal thing is, as long as it's clear that it's parody, and the people who made Strawberry Shortcake had nothing to do with this show, then I guess it's legal. But believe me, I don't know. I am not a lawyer. Every one of those characters was checked by a group of lawyers who approved it and had it altered in some small way. They're not the exact versions, but they're enough to evoke them. No, we haven't heard a thing from anybody.
AVC: You've said in a lot of interviews that you can do whatever you want on the show at this point—that that's your agreement with Comedy Central.
MS: Creatively, that's true. We don't get a single note like, "Eh, we don't like that scene… Can we put the boys in the middle more?" We haven't for, like, 10 years. But we do have Standards & Practices look at the script, and Legal does too. But we probably get more leeway than most shows. And if we want to do something special—like, we just did this Tourette's show, and we said "In order to do this show, we need to say 'shit' a bunch, or else it doesn't make any sense." So we made a case for it, and they let us say "shit" a bunch. And they let us say "cock," too. But it was within the realm of Tourette's, so it was okay, I guess. So there's always a negotiation process, and if we can give a reason for it that's defendable to them, and to our advertisers, then they let us do it.
AVC: Some people have theorized that you've actively been trying to get fired for years, that your writing is a continual process of "What could we do that Comedy Central just couldn't air, that would be a deal-breaker as far as keeping the show going?"
MS: [Laughs.] Yeah! We haven't found it yet. And to be fair to them, by the time a show goes on the air, they've given it the okay, so they're culpable too in the court of public opinion. [Laughs.] Sometimes I wish I could get fired.
AVC: Do you feel pressure to top yourself, to be more current, to be more outrageous every season?
On The Pressure To Top Themselves by Matt Stone
MS: Hmm. No, we don't feel pressure that way. The overriding pressure we feel… On one hand, I'm feeling less pressure lately. We have a four-year contract. No one in television has a four-year contract. We have crazy job security, so it's in our own hands. And so the pressure is more like, we have this body of work that we're pretty proud of, and we don't want to muck it up in the last couple of years. Although, obviously, you're trying to get an emotional charge out of a show that's been around for a while, so you're looking for fresh snow to clomp around in. We don't feel pressure of, "Let's make this really raunchy." It's more about making a good story, which is 10 times harder. The raunchy stuff's really easy for us. We just really are offensive, raunchy people. The work part of it is making it have a story and make sense and make it worth 22 minutes of your time, which I feel is a tough thing.
AVC: A lot of the humor in South Park feels disgusted and frustrated with the world, like you're basically asking "Why are people such idiots?" Are you actually emotionally involved in the issues you address with the show?
MS: Sometimes. But it's cool, because we get to express our frustration through a little fat kid screaming at the top of his lungs. So it can be taken semi-seriously. We get to enjoy that same distance that the Jon Stewarts of the world get to too. They demand that they be taken seriously, and as soon as someone takes them seriously, they crack a joke. I love the fact that Trey and I have gotten awards for being topical and satirical, but at the end of the day, we are just making jokes. If you ask me how to really solve the health-care crisis, I have fuckin' no idea, and I don't want to be a part of it. But I can make a little fat kid yell some emotional truth about it. That's what we've figured out over the years. If you're gonna make it a TV show, you would never do the actual politics of something, but you would do the emotions behind the politics. Who cares if it's a right-or-wrong policy—here's how it makes me feel. You're not gonna get into a policy discussion with Cartman and Mr. Hankey and Jesus and shit.
AVC: Do you still get outrage from your viewers?
MS: We never hear about it. They might complain to Comedy Central, but those letters never get to us. There's a really funny thing that was on the Internet. If you search for FCC violations for South Park… Somebody published a bunch of the actual FCC complaint forms that people had filled out. Penn and Teller are on there, The Simpsons, Family Guy—we're not the only ones. And those are hilarious. There's just a bunch of people bitching about the show. But we never hear any of that. And anybody who knows us—like, if my mom doesn't like something, she probably just doesn't tell me.
AVC: Do you ever want more feedback? Do you want to know how people are reacting, or are you happier being insulated?
MS: It's two-sided, because on one hand, it's really fun when you flip off the principal and the principal yells at you. But in general, we do the show because we want people to like it. [Laughs.] We are entertainers. We're trying to entertain people. At the same time, we've been doing it long enough to realize we're still not a mainstream show. We still get a fifth or a fourth of the viewership of Family Guy. So we're still on cable, we still consider ourselves an alternative show, and we've always been that show that realizes there's this group of people that's not into South Park, but there's this group of people that loves it. Twenty percent of people got this joke, and they love us for it, and we'll piss off the other 80 percent just for them. But in general, we want people to like the show. [Laughs.]
AVC: Speaking of ruffling people's feathers, have you spoken to Isaac Hayes since the Scientology episode blowout?
MS: We haven't. I heard he was on tour, I heard he had a stroke. We haven't.
AVC: Has that been hard?
MS: Not really. It's not like we were really good friends. I think there was something going on more with the Church of Scientology than with Isaac, though I haven't talked to him about it, and I have no evidence of that. It's not something we keep in the front of our minds.
AVC: With "Imaginationland," it felt like the germ of the whole thing was the line "The terrorists have captured our imagination." A lot of South Park episodes reach a point like that, with a line or an exchange that suddenly reveals what the episode is really about. How do those episodes get started? Do you begin with a story, or the central issue, or does it vary?
MS: It totally varies. That's the ephemeral, like, I wish I knew what the process is. You're totally right that someone said that: "Oh, the terrorists bombed us in our imagination," and then instantly everyone got it. And once we got that metaphor going, we realized we could do so much with that. Also, aside from the whole political metaphor, it's so rich as far as making fun of the Chronicles Of Narnia, Harry Potter—little kids in fantasylands. We actually entertained making another South Park movie based on that, but we ended up making a three-parter, which I think was better. But sometimes it's a joke, sometimes just a line, and we follow it and see where it takes us. The "Imaginationland" idea felt big enough to where we could make a whole episode of that at least.
AVC: Some reports on the Internet make it sound like you started off trying to make it as a feature film, and for some conspiratorial reason it never happened.
MS: We talked about it, and it just didn't feel right. It didn't feel big enough. It felt somewhat derivative of all the other imaginary characters. And also, more than anything, we have to make 14 episodes a year, and that's our hungry baby that has to be fed, so that was part of the decision. The other form we kind of made fun of was—there's been a lot of great TV writing in the last few years, and I'm not a big TV viewer, but you know, the 24s and the Losts and those kind of serialized shows that keep those balls up in the air every week. We kind of wanted to try that. How do you take it to the next level? That was fun for us, to be able to serialize something, and do that "Okay, see what happens next week!" That was the form we were going after.
AVC: How involved are you these days with the storyboarding and animation?
MS: Trey is. Trey's really the director, so he approves the look of new characters and stuff like that, and he really directs the shots, directs the episodes, but we have a whole team of storyboarders, like, six people now, and character designers, they do all that stuff. Really, 90 percent of our work is just writing and coming up with ideas. And a lot of times, that crosses with "That character doesn't look good, what do we want it to look like?" But most of my day is spent in the writers' room, sitting there trying to think of what's funny. And for Trey, it's a combination of that and directing. And because it's animated, we get to write, animate, look at it, change it, go "Oh, that's working great, let's do more of that; oh, that's not working great, let's not do any more of that," so it's a little more organic and holistic than normal writing. We don't write a script, then shoot it, then look at it. We get to work on it the whole time.
AVC: How has the collaboration between the two of you changed through all of the projects you've worked on together over the years?
MS: I don't know. We don't really think about it that much. We started out in independent films, and you do whatever you have to do to get it done. Obviously, we have a lot of people helping us who've been here for 10, 12 years, so it's more than just me and Trey that have evolved into this weird huge organism that does the show. A lot of times, we're just co-writers, a lot of times it's a producer-director relationship. Sometimes it's just buddies. It changes with whatever needs to be done. But Trey has always been the director. I've never really wanted to be. I'm not good at it. I probably deal with more business stuff than Trey does. But interviews, we kind of split it up and have fun with it. But it changes from thing to thing.
AVC: What can you say about your current movie projects?
Current Movie Projects by Matt Stone
MS: We don't really have any—we're not really doing much with movies right now. We're kind of just concentrating on the TV show. Movies are hard.
AVC: What have you learned from your past live-action movies that you want to put into effect on the next ones?
MS: Uh, they're hard, and I don't want to do 'em any more. If you're gonna do a movie, you'd better be damn sure you want to do that movie, because it's gonna suck to make. They are really, really tough to make. It's the business of movies, it's the fights that go along with the level of budget, and more than anything, it's the creative constipation of having to live with one idea for two or three years. It's just not that fun. And what we love about South Park—even though we've been living with South Park for 10 years—we feel like we can do anything in any show, and we can say "Oh my God! The things we talked about today will be on the air in nine days!" And that's a fantastic way to live your life. I feel like we have this incredible, blessed existence, where we can really work on something, get into it, get our hands dirty. Sometimes we're like, "Oh, we're doing an episode about the Vatican," and I'll go read a bunch of stuff online—you have this excuse, kind of like a writer, to get into new ideas and subjects and stuff. And that's fantastic. I mean, I love Team America. I'm glad we did it, I'm proud of it. But would I ever do it again? No. It was horrible—it was a hard, hard thing, to live with a joke for two years, and go "This is still funny, I think this is still funny." It's just not as fun a way to live your life as TV. I don't know how else to say it—TV's just fun. And even then, it's not fun! It's still hard work, it's just, movies are really hard work.
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