========================= SOUTH PARK: THE RUDE TUBE ========================= A twisted little underground cartoon is now a pop-cult obsession. But does the world really need a Mr. Hankey chocolate bar? BY RICK MARIN
"Wednesday night has turned into family night. The six of us don't get together often, but we do for 'South Park'...": - 17 YEAR-OLD SEAN MOSS
"I don't care for the disrespect. You have enough smart-aleck children running around without 'South Park' making it worse." - MOM PAULA HOWARD
"People think the show is just fart jokes. I wish. It wouldn't be so hard to find writers." - CO-CREATOR TREY PARKER
"I'd never seen anything that crude. Who would ever have a turd as a character?" - NONFAN SONJA JACKSON, 31
Visitors to the Los Angeles headquarters of the cult cable hit "South Park" sit on an absurdly low, turquoise velour sofa and gaze up at a poster above the reception desk. It features four cartoon kids, cute as "Peanuts," and reads, "Alien Abductions, Anal Probes & Flaming Farts. South Park. Why They Created the V-Chip."
Comedy Central printed the ad when this weekly animated series about four flatulent third graders and their paranormal Colorado town went on the air eight months ago. Last week the up-yours slogan proved prophetic. The Federal Communications Commission issued technical guidelines for V-chips to be built into all new TV sets. The handy home-censor chip will empower parents to block the very anal probes and flaming farts that have catapulted "South Park" to the coolest schoolyard craze since MTV's "Beavis and Butthead" introduced eight-letter words like "ass-munch" into the prepubescent vernacular. As in the heyday of "B&B," some grown-ups think that the cartoon is not appropriate for youngsters. Or, in the words of Action for Children's Television founder Peggy Charren, it is "dangerous to the democracy."
The difference between the last time the democracy was in danger and now is that, while "B&B" was a kid show with grown-up appeal, "South Park" is a grown-up show with irresistible kid appeal. It airs at 10 p.m. and carries a TV-MA warning, but 23 percent of the audience is under 18. In the last two weeks of February, 5.2 million viewers watched, huge by cable standards. One Wednesday night it even beat ABC's "PrimeTime Live." Blue-chip advertisers like AT&T, Calvin Klein and Snapple are paying as much as $80,000 for a 30-second spot, 20 times the network's original rate-card cost. T-shirt sales have topped $30 million, and the merchandising mayhem has barely begun.
Using artfully artless cutout animation, "South Park" story-boards childhood through the eyes of two creatively dysfunctional adults: Trey Parker, 28, and Matt Stone, 26. Their colorful brood of minimally altered egos - Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny - are foulmouthed li'l "bastards" (Stone and Parker's favorite description of 9-year-old boys) who abuse each other, delight in dissing authority figures and yet possess a dumb innocence that makes their bad behavior forgivable to anyone with an honest memory of third grade.
The adult population of this snowbound mountain hamlet - named after a real Colorado county notorious for alien sightings and other rural myths - is far more troubling. Stan's Uncle Jimbo is a gun nut with a Vietnam-vet sidekick. Mr. Garrison, the disturbed teacher, has a sidekick, too: a hand puppet named Mr. Hat. On the plus side, Jesus Christ, a guy in a white robe and sandals who hosts a local cable-access show, is a force of holy goodness. So is Chef, the town's singing school cook and only black soul (voiced by Isaac Hayes), who keeps an eye on the children as vigilantly as he does on the ladies.
Gleefully offensive and profoundly silly, the show revels in juxtaposing cute and crude, jaded and juvenile. In an episode called "Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride," Stan learns about tolerance after discovering that his dog is gay and suffering merciless "Stan's dog's a homo!" taunts from his friends. Another favorite, titled "Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo," is simply one long potty joke. And yet the cliffhanger episode, Cartman's quest to find his father, is almost poignant. Almost. The episode is called "Cartman's Mom Is a Dirty Slut."
Parker stresses that nasty gets boring fast. "People think the show is just fart jokes," he says, as we head to their new expanded production space in Marina del Rey. "I wish. It wouldn't be so hard to find writers." Anne Garefino, 37, a co-executive producer and den mother to its postcollegiate staff of 35 animators and production slaves, says, "Trey and Matt both have a sweetness that balances out the grossness."
Trey (the voice of Stan and Cartman) is the one people call the "genius" of the pair, the self-directed hustler who won a Student Academy Award and, while still in school, raised $125,000 for his feature, "Cannibal: The Musical." Matt (who does Kyle and Kenny) is more practical and business-savvy. But both still come off like dorks whose vocabulary is dominated by the words "rad" (cool), "lame" (uncool) and "dude" (dude).
They're smart guys - Stone majored in math - who love acting stupid. "Girls are so dumb!" says Stone, complaining about a frustrating conversation the previous night with his significant other. Parker, recently broken up from his girlfriend, sympathizes. "Talking's dumb," he says. One rad thing about Matt and Trey is that they still haven't hired a publicist. why bother? The story of how this goofball duo made it writes itself. They met at the University of Colorado - Boulder, and bonded because "we were the only ones who didn't want to make black-and-white films about lesbians," says Parker. Stone graduated. Parker cut too many classes to get his degree. Their professor Bruce Kawin is not a fan. "Trey doesn't remember anyone who helped him," Kawin says. "So he's not my favorite person." Stone's response: "We hate Kawin."
In 1995 they hit L.A., sharing a dump in Playa del Rey and peddling an animated short about Frosty the Snowman terrorizing some mountain-town kids until a dashboard-size Jesus vanquishes him. Brian Graden - then a Fox development exec, now head of programming at MTV- liked their twisted little fable and ponied up $1,200 of his own money for a holiday video for his industry pals. They came up with "The Spirit of Christmas," a refined version of "Frosty," only with Santa and Jesus kung-fu fighting while the kids cheer on.
The video became an underground bootleg obsession. George Clooney alone duped dozens of copies, and later offered to record the "Grrrs" of Stan's gay dog. By this time, Stone and Parker had William Morris agents and many offers, among them "Barney: The Movie." They chose Comedy Central because, Parker says, "when we asked, 'How do you feel about talking poo?' they said, 'Love it!' " Another historic moment in the annals of American culture.
After the show premiered in August the virus kept spreading, well beyond the 47 million households wired for Comedy Central. More than 250 unofficial Web sites have sprung up devoted to news, gossip and general worship. The largest site (at www.beef-cake.com) has received more than 2 million hits since a 21-year-old engineering student at Caltech started it almost a year ago. The show's stop-motion style makes it a natural to download. Comedy Central encourages the sites, since many cable systems (including the Colorado-based TCI) don't carry the channel. "Without the Internet I doubt I would have ever even heard about it," e-mails Oskar Horyd, 15, from Troy, Mich., a Detroit suburb.
The availability of "South Park" on the Internet is another pesky issue for grown-ups worried about whether kids are or should be watching. Take Canton, Ga. Two weeks ago the principal of the town's Hickory Flat Elementary School banned the wearing of "South Park" gear on school property. That made Donna Beavers, a hairdresser and PTA co-president, very happy. She says the show is off-limits to her two boys, Mark, 11, and Wade, 8: "I want to keep them innocent as long as I can."
But keeping kids innocent is like squeezing toothpaste back into the tube. One 15-year-old Canton freshman sneaks her weekly fix. "When my dad comes in I change channels," she says. "He's, like, all Christian and stuff, and one time he gave me a big lecture about how bad the show was for me." But some parents are cooler about it. "I understand that kids have to learn to filter things for themselves," says Deborah Redford, whose 14-year-old son Blair is in middle school. "Hopefully it's not going to corrupt him." Besides, Blair chimes in, "it's just a cartoon!"
Saying the show corrupts young minds is selling short the show and the young minds. Underage fans grasp that the selfish, racist fat kid Cartman is not a role model. "We got a letter from a kid in Mississippi who said he was in a school play about Rosa Parks and played the bus driver as Cartman," Parker says. "Which shows how kids get it." Cartman dressing up as Hitler for Halloween might have alarmed some parents, but New York seventh grader Nick Farrar says, "With Cartman, you know he's just a complete idiot and you should sort of do the opposite of everything he does." As for the bleepable expletives that fly out of the mouths of Kyle, Kenny & Co., an 8-year-old boy from Larchmont, N.Y., says they weren't new to him: "My daddy says them every single day."
The kid's on to something. As trippy as some of the show's plots can get - like Barbra Streisand's transforming into a giant robot - they're grounded in reality. "It isn't a comedy, it's a documentary," B. J. Macumber, a sheriff's deputy in the real-life South Park county town of Alma, recently told an AP reporter after a local resident trashed government buildings with a front-end loader and killed an ex-mayor. Another docu-dramatic truth is that kids have foul mouths and can be total bastards. Like real third graders might, Stan and Kyle make fun of Cartman because his mother is on the cover of Crack Whore magazine, without really knowing what a crack whore is. They're raunchy but naively presexual.
Don't think the "South Park" guys haven't thought this stuff through. When they were developing the pilot, Brian Graden says, "we went away for a whole day and said, 'Who is Cartman? Who is Kenny?' We decided Kyle is the Jewish kid (like Matt) who's a bit smarter. Trey was the group leader, a B student who was good at football and probably the first one to get a girlfriend - and that's Stan." Kenny is the poor kid in every group - except he dies violently every week.
For all the noise about "South Park" and kids, it's worth remembering that the show's core viewers are of voting age. Almost 60 percent of them are 18 to 34. But Generation X's attention span is as fleeting as Generation Y's. So how long before the backlash? Now that "Oh my God, they killed Kenny!" has spread from subculture password to catchphrase, some hard-core fans are worried. "It seems like it's gonna start selling out soon," says Noah Gordon, a 14-year-old Boston devotee. May could be the watershed. The next season of 20 more "South Park" episodes starts then (after an April 1 teaser). There'll be a "South Park" movie, maybe a Mr. Hankey chocolate bar. Parker's movie "Orgazmo" (he plays a Mormon porn star) comes out. So does "BASEketball," David Zucker's sports spoof starring Trey and Matt. The two have a $1.5 million deal to write the prequel to "Dumb & Dumber." At a comedy festival in Aspen, Colo., two weeks ago, Parker had a recurring nightmare. "People kept surrounding my bed asking for autographs," he says. "But I'm sure some of that stems from being really, really drunk."
The price of fame. Parker just bought a $1.2 million house in Bel Air, Calif., "with a hot tub overlooking the city." But he's quick to complain that he and Matt are only seeing a fraction of the "South Park" profits. "I have a friend who writes for 'Just Shoot Me' who makes more a week than I do," he says. "Thirty million in T-shirt sales, and I got a check for $7,000." They might have thought twice about doing "Dumb & Dumber" except "it came at a time when we were getting really bitter about how little we were making off 'South Park'," says Parker. William Morris is renegotiating their deal, and Comedy Central wants to keep its star attractions happy.
The five remaining members of Monty Python were also in Aspen. "I wrote Terry Jones's home phone number on a napkin!" says Matt, as if he'd snagged the Shroud of Turin. "I'm gonna frame it." During their reunion show at the festival, the Pythons reminisced about how when their "Flying Circus" debuted in 1969, the BBC was saturated with political satire, which is why they wanted to do "something completely different." It's no accident that "South Park" has also taken off at a time when Monica Lewinsky jokes have overloaded our humor receptors. New York Times columnist Frank Rich explained the boys' appeal as "post-ideological."
That analysis may be too meta for the throng of raucous twentysomethings crowding the Bulldog bar in New Orleans last Wednesday night. Barkeep Billy Norris, 29, followed his weekly custom by turning the jukebox off and "South Park" on at 9. "It's the exact opposite of politically correct," Norris says, noting approvingly that the characters "show no sensitivity at all." Proving Parker's theory that offensiveness isn't enough, Norris adds that the writing is "subtle and clever" and that "the characters are all different and you can see them develop." How many TV shows can that be said of?
Comedy Central president Doug Herzog explains his hit not as a political but as a pop phenomenon. "It's dangerous comedy, and I think the rebellious nature of the show is really speaking to the audience. Pop music gets packaged so quickly now that the spirit of rebellion gets left out." In this age of poser punks, Trey and Matt truly are, in the words of their idols, something completely different. Rude bastards.
With T. TRENT GEGAX in Atlanta, DEBRA ROSENBERG in Boston, STEVE RHODES in Chicago, JAMES GILL in New Orleans and ELIZABETH ANGELL in New York
================== FROM SHAFT TO CHEF ================== Isaac Hayes is back - and cooking
Isaac Hayes, the hot-buttered voice of Chef, began his career as a songwriter and producer at Stax Records, crafting '60s hits like Sam & Dave's "Soul Man" and Carla Thomas's "B-A-B-Y." In the superfly '7Os, he became Black Moses, a bald sex bomb in chain vests and tights. After a spectacular bankruptcy, he's now riding the blaxploitation revival, as both actor and funk icon. NEWSWEEK's John Leland caught up with him at WRKS-FM in New York, where he hosts a classic soul program.
NEWSWEEK: Chef walks the line of being an oversexed racial stereotype. How do you keep him from going over?
HAYES: That's up to Matt and Trey. Somebody asked me, "Is that an insult to black people?" Of course not. Chef is not demeaned in this series. They've made fun of Indians, Jews, whites - they spread that stuff around generously. When they first showed me the script I said, "Do you guys have insurance?" The juicy part is that Matt and Trey were unknown at first. I was the only one people could recognize, so I got all the juice. Now people call me Chef on the street. From Shaft to Chef.
NEWSWEEK: Is the show too nasty for kids?
HAYES: People would be surprised what their kids already know. All the things that happen on "South Park" are like what we did as kids. We smoked behind the outhouse and cursed like sailors. I had a friend in north Memphis who had a gay dog, and we [teased] him. He was humiliated.
NEWSWEEK: How would you like to see Chef evolve?
HAYES: Right now Chef is on a roll; I don't think you need to mess with him. So rather than take a shot at Chef going solo, let me stay right here and enjoy some of this success.
NEWSWEEK: You came out of the segregated South as Black Moses, a spiritual, political, sexual figure. Were you trying to stir things up?
HAYES: I was militant, in the Movement. I hesitated to do Black Moses at first, because I thought it was sacrilegious. But I realized the relevance it had for black people in this country. So I tried to wear it with as much dignity as I could. But I never saw myself as sexual. I didn't think all the chains were going to do it. I was just trying to be different.
NEWSWEEK: Did you start with one chain and just get carried away?
HAYES: I started with a chain necklace, then a chain belt. Then I put a chain vest on, and women went crazy. So I said, why not give them a cheap thrill? I had the tights, chains, French rabbit-fur boots. All auctioned off now [in a bankruptcy sale].
NEWSWEEK: When you see pictures of your-self in those old outfits, what goes through your mind?
HAYES: Those were great times.
NEWSWEEK: Do you feel responsible for the current hip-hop pimp style?
HAYES: That whole look came out of "Shaft." It was very masculine; the music was very masculine: "Who's the black private dick that's the sex machine with all the chicks?" These guys now have to go back to that in order to project what they want to project. I'm just glad to be part of the creation of that.
NEWSWEEK: Many people put on Isaac Hayes when they want to get romantic. Have you ever done that?
HAYES: No. It's too distracting to me. I'd be thinking, damn, I could have taken this in that direction. I go to Luther Vandross or Maxwell. Barry White's too close to me, I can't go there.
NEWSWEEK: Rappers are sampling your records, and John singleton is making a new 'Shaft.' Your whole era is back. Why now?
HAYES: Those movies are back because they were a lot fun. We as black people were winning, and we finally had heroes on the screen, instead of butlers and maids. Now I'm doing "Woo," with Pam Grier. Also, since I've been in Scientology, I've had success after success. Five years ago I was struggling, trying to make something happen for myself. As soon as I got clear [through Scientology], I started to roll.
NEWSWEEK: Of all the things you lost, what would you most like back?
HAYES: I had an 8-mm film of my kids, and also my acceptance speech at the Academy Awards [for "Theme From Shaft"]. Someone stole it right out of my office. I wish I had that back.
==================== MEANWHILE BACK AT HQ ==================== "South Park" is a hit, but Comedy Central can't be a one-joke wonder. Will it stay on the laugh track?
Here's a dirty little secret: Doug Herzog can't tell a joke. "I really am bad," he says. There's nothing wrong with that, necessarily-except that for the past two and a half years Herzog, 39, has been president of Comedy Central. People have expectations. "My biggest frustration in this job is that everybody is like, 'Hey, Doug! Comedy Central! Tell me a joke!' and I never have a joke."
For years, the same might have been said of Comedy Central. Sure, it had jokes, but the network's programming never quite lived up to the promise of its name. "They'd run a set that you did at a club in Jersey in 1987 for 24 hours a day, along with, like, 'Mary Tyler Moore' reruns," says comedian Dennis Leary. "Who the f--- wants to watch that?" Not nearly as many people as are drawn by a hit like "South Park." Since its premiere last August, the raunchy animated romp has lent new luster to a network that once trafficked in must-flee TV. Launched in 1991, the product of a shotgun marriage between competing comedy channels owned by HBO and MTV Networks, Comedy Central turned its first profit last year. The network now reaches about 47 million homes, up from 31 million in 1994, and ad rates for spots during "South Park" have rocketed from about $5,000 to as much as $50,000. Ratings are still paltry by broadcast standards, but in February an average of 329,000 households tuned in during prime time, an increase of 73 percent over a year ago. "There's definitely a feeling that they're coming on strong," says Larry Gerbrandt of Paul Kagan Associates, a media-research and -consulting firm. "The next challenge is not to fritter away the 'South Park' success."
Comedy Central has, after all, watched prior triumphs evaporate: the vodka-soaked Britcom "Absolutely Fabulous" drew attention, but its producers pulled the plug after a measly 18 episodes. Another potential breakout show, "Politically Incorrect," broke right out of the building and ended up following "Nightline" on ABC. "One show does not a network make," says Jon Mandel, senior vice president at Grey Advertising. "They need more 'South Parks'." Herzog clearly realizes that; since taking over at the network in 1995, he and programming head Eileen Katz have feverishly added to Comedy Central's roster of original offerings. "The Daily Show," for example, is a well-received faux newscast hosted by former ESPN wise guy Craig Killborn. Designed to replace "Politically Incorrect" as an outlet for topical humor, it's drawing better ratings than its predecessor did at the same point in its life span. "We're starting to bring it all together," says Herzog. "We still have a much longer way to go, but it beats having one show here, one show there."
To really hit the big time, Comedy Central needs to expand its universe. The network still reaches only about two thirds of total cable households. "The three most important things for a cable network are carriage, carriage and carriage," says Gerbrandt, alluding to the number of cable systems that offer a channel. "If you're Comedy Central, a 'South Park' helps you get to the top of the list of networks that a cable operator will add when channel capacity becomes available." Herzog has his sights set on, say, 60 million homes, which would put Comedy Central in a tier just below the CNNs and TBSes of the world. But that could take years; for now he's content to revel in the success of "South Park." "It's what guys like me dream about," Herzog says. So what's it matter if he can't tell a joke? He's laughing all the way to the bank.
KENDALL HAMILTON
======================================================== Darwin Stearns e-mail: [email] �Consume at a rapid rate, if you don't mind. It is very important that you consume. As you have already been born and you are not yet dead, you must, then, consume...� - Rev. B.D. Buckingham ========================================================