TELEVISION REVIEW Cute but crude, sly kids can kick 'Butt-head'
By Matthew Gilbert, Globe Staff, 01/28/98
The oddest thing about ''South Park'' may be the fact that it hasn't yet kicked up the sort of controversy that helped make ''Beavis and Butt-head'' into a full-fledged pop spectacle. This rude, crude, not-for-prudes cartoon series, one of the straight-outTelevisionReview meanest and funniest shows on TV, makes heavy-metal kids Beavis and Butt-head look like the Little Rascals. It's the ''Peanuts'' gang by way of Kafka - with a flatulent Pigpen as the star.
Why hasn't an oh-so-moral force like Kathie Lee Gifford taken a stand against the ''harmful influence'' of ''South Park,'' which is so popular among the younger demographic? Gifford, after all, like many celebrities, has already been ridiculed on ''South Park,'' when her character visited the Colorado town, almost got assassinated, and ended up sleeping with the oversexed Chef, who sang to her, ''Oh, Kathie Lee/How I'd love to lay you down/And lick every inch of your body with my tongue.''
Maybe ''South Park'' goes unattacked because no matter how nasty and scatological it gets, it's never just dumb and dumber. Besides all the bathroom humor, the show is built on clever, equal-opportunity satire as it stomps over every politically correct sensitivity of the past decade. In the town of South Park, Jesus Christ hosts a public-access talk show; Stan's randy new dog is gay and runs away to Big Gay Al's Big Gay Animal Sanctuary; Kyle's pushy Jewish mother humiliates him and lands him in a mental institution singing ''I Have a Little Dreidel''; and the black character named Chef (voiced by Isaac Hayes) is the incarnation of a few uncomfortable stereotypes. In one uncuddly episode, the ''South Park'' kids adopt a needy child from Sally Struthers to get a free watch, and they name the kid Starvin' Marvin.
In other words, ''South Park'' doesn't tiptoe around, and that's a sometimes refreshing switch from most TV fare. Environmentalism, the fragility of childhood, death - they are all detonated in the subversive fantasia that is ''South Park.'' It's as if the cartoon's creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, have taken the dark paranoia of tabloid-obsessed culture - from UFOs to weight-gain products - and dropped it on a bucolic Colorado landscape and into the silly mouths of babes. The result is jarring, illuminating, and sometimes hysterical.
Don't get me wrong: ''South Park'' is not a high-minded sendup of American society. It's a show that revels in immaturity, right down to its construction-paper look, and you won't like it if you don't do lowbrow. The four third graders, Kyle, Kenny, Cartman, and Stan, can be vulgar and cruel, and their explicit language is heavily bleeped. And in keeping with its kiddie-cartoon roots, the show features plenty of savage knock-'em-sock-'em slapstick, with Kyle kicking his baby brother, Ike, through windows and into mailboxes. In every half-hour (except the Christmas episode), Kenny, the incomprehensible one in the hooded jacket, is violently killed - attacked by mutant turkeys, impaled by a flagpole, run over by a police car.
''South Park'' also relies heavily on bodily functions for laughs. The infamous Christmas episode, ''Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo,'' had Kyle, distraught by his mother's attempt to politically correctify the holiday season, communing with a rather mischievous bowel movement. The flatulence jokes are constant, one bit revolved around explosive diarrhea, and every time Stan talks to classmate Wendy, he vomits - sometimes on her. It's fair to say the show fully embraces its own bad taste when an elephant mates with a potbellied pig.
How psychotic can life get in the small American town of ''South Park''? That's the thrill of watching this edgy vision, a little piece of twisted culture hiding out in the back hallway of cable TV.
This story ran on page D01 of the Boston Globe on 01/28/98. � Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.
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