I know we don’t agree on much within the mortar-scarred walls of the South Park blog, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say I’m almost certain we can come together on at least one thing: Glenn Beck is the Larry The Cable Guy of right-wing punditry, a bottom-feeding opportunist who shamelessly mirrors the worst traits of his audience back to them and makes ass-loads of money doing it, and who’s so despicably, unabashedly open about being completely full of shit—but hey, whaddayagonnado, someone has to speak to the common man—that he shouldn’t even be a real guy, but rather the villain in some grad school liberal’s far-too-on-the-nose off-Broadway play.
I mean, not to sound partisan or anything, but the sooner Glenn Beck gets tricked into some kind of A Face In The Crowd-style comeuppance, or even better, gets lured into a rocket by the sound of the new Muse album and the wafting aroma of a couple of McDonald’s fried pies, then finds himself launched into the center of the sun, the better off all of us will be. Seriously. He’s like a walking editorial cartoon about the transparently pandering proud ignorance of neocon punditry, but instead he’s alive and constantly on my TV and sometimes even referred to with a straight face as a legitimate journalist—or worse, a “voice of the people,” which should really be enough to make “the people” realize that they sound like fucking idiots, and maybe sign up with Henry Higgins for some elocution lessons or something.
So for South Park, taking on Glenn Beck doesn’t really require much satire at all: He’s already a huge fucking joke, and all you need to do to point that out is stick to the script and play him verbatim. Like the way he uses the “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” style of interrogation. Or how he brings up ridiculous worst-case scenarios, teases them out in a parody of the very notion of logic, and then hides behind the defense that he’s “just asking questions.” And of course, the blubbering, and just generally behaving like a histrionic attention whore. It’s all ripe for the spoofing, and even if it’s already sort-of formulaic now thanks to recent, similar takedowns on The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live (Does Frank Caliendo have a Glenn Beck impression yet?), it’s still going to be funny, because again, Glenn Beck is a huge fucking joke, and the more you laugh at him, the more potential cancer cells you kill.
Or do you? I’m just asking questions. Like, are we sure that sending Glenn Beck to the center of the Atlantic Ocean to live out the rest of his days like the main character in that Edward Everett Hale story, “The Man Without A Country,” won’t instantly spur our economy to rebound, and our trees to start growing delicious tacos instead of boring old leaves? Look, someone has to say these things. For America.
Anyway, so “Dances With Smurfs” obviously took on a pretty easy target, but it handled it with just enough of the show’s usual surrealist bent that it was never wholly predictable. For example: As soon as Cartman won the job doing morning announcements (after beating out my favorite new character that we’ll likely never see again, Casey Miller, the kid with the “sultry summer sun” of a voice) and started using his airtime to question Wendy’s performance as class president (and definitely as soon as he said the words “socialist regime”), I may have known exactly where we were headed—chalkboard anagrams and all—but I never guessed it would end up with Cartman dressed as Wendy, mowing down a village of Smurfs and screaming, “Suck my fat tits!”