Of all the celebrities ripe for a good South Park skewering, Kanye West is definitely up there, so when I heard that he’d play a big role in tonight’s “Fishsticks” I had high hopes. I’m not sure if you’re all aware of this, but besides making hip-and-hop records and jamming on the one, it’s also rumored that Mr. West has very high self-esteem. Some would even say he borders on boastful, and making light of that could be very droll. Very droll, indeed.
Another guy who could use a swift kick in the parody pants is Carlos “Retarded Noise” Mencia, a comedian whose popularity is a fine argument for hurrying the Apocalypse right along. As you have hopefully already learned from myriad YouTube videos of Joe Rogan shouting from his neck veins, Mencia is not only a notorious joke thief, but a man whose persona is so reliant on “beaner” stereotypes that it’s borderline minstrel. Joo know what I’m saying, holmes?
Unfortunately, instead of episodes focusing on throttling the comedic crap out of either Mr. SQUIDBRAINS!!! or Señor Panderito, we got this mish-mash that sorta kinda picked on both for being such slaves to their egos that they won’t—or maybe even can’t—listen to criticism. A salient point, sort of cleverly made, but something about the way it was executed left me underwhelmed. Let’s retrace our steps and see if we can figure out why!
As the episode begins, Jimmy’s trying to work up some new comedy material; Cartman is “pitching in” by eating potato chips and rejecting all of his ideas. (This is why it’s better just to write all your ideas down anyway, and leave the vetting to anonymous commenters on the Internet.) Inspiration strikes when Jimmy figures out that “fish sticks” sounds an awful lot like “fish dicks,” and thus the “you’re a gay fish” joke is born. It quickly takes the world by storm, turning up on all the major late-night talk shows, so naturally Carlos Mencia comes along to take credit for it. (“Because my brain is so full of ideas because I’m so funny and stuff.”)
Pissed-off Cartman tells Jimmy that they should take out a patent on the joke, despite the fact that Cartman actually had nothing to do with its creation. (Playing his usual role in a Cartman-centric episode, Kyle tells Jimmy to stand up to him; Craig, ever the pragmatist, tells Jimmy to save himself the trouble and just give Cartman half.) Of course, that’s not the way Cartman remembers it going down: In a series of increasingly funny flashbacks, Cartman goes from writing the joke singlehandedly, to writing the joke singlehandedly and slaying a dragon, to wearing a cool leather jacket, becoming the Human Torch to save the town from a legion of Jew-bots, and then writing the joke singlehandedly. Kyle points out that he believes Cartman really thinks he did all of this, because “that’s how people like you work”—i.e., their brains go into self-protection mode because their egos can’t handle the truth.
Meanwhile, Kanye West is the one person on Earth who doesn’t seem to get the “fish sticks” joke, or why everyone is suddenly insinuating he’s a gay fish, but he vows to do everything he can to get to the bottom of it. When diagramming on the dry-erase board fails, he makes the natural leap to having his entourage find Mencia, tie him up, and beat the shit out of him. Mencia makes the mistake of repeating the punchline, so Kanye—unswayed by Mencia’s admission that he has no dick and pees in a little plastic bag—takes Mencia’s head off with a baseball bat and stuffs some fish sticks down his neckhole.