Hey all, here we are at another South Park rap session, and one that’s coming off a couple of episodes that most of you kinda shrugged your shoulders at. I actually thought “Butters’ Bottom Bitch” was pretty damn funny, but I’m predisposed to Butters in general as well as the wide world of pimping. I’ll say one more thing about last week before moving on: I’m so glad they didn’t make Cartman the pimp. It must’ve taken all their strength not to.
So on to “W.T.F.,” in which the boys explore the world of professional wrestling, a subject near and dear to my heart when I was approximately the age of the South Park boys. I thought the premise was funny, but this was definitely one of those episodes with a pretty low JPM—jokes per minute—rate. The three overriding jokes—that professional wrestling is like silly musical theater, that rednecks don’t understand that it’s not real, and that Greco-Roman wrestling is something altogether different (and gay)—have been told a million times before. They’re not really jokes at this point.
That said, the true-to-life way in which the kids approached starting their own professional wrestling (not “real wrassling!”) organization was pretty great: Their instincts to imitate were right on—I could actually see real-life kids coming up with their own story lines; after all, the WWE stories aren’t much more ridiculous than the ones Cartman (sorry, the Rad Russian) could think up.
The stuff about “real wrassling” rang a little stale for me, though. Obviously they had to get the coach in there to move the “they killed Kenny” plot forward, and it was pretty funny when Butters said, “I have a mind to report you to the police, sir!” but there weren’t a ton of one-liners or even sight gags to go with this guy. (Okay, him posing in the mirror a couple of times was fairly funny, too.)