(3 of 3)
Graden says Parker and Stone are two of the sweetest people he has ever met, and others use the same words about them. They seem to be easygoing and unpretentious. Despite their irreverence, they aren't a pair of would-be Lenny Bruces living on comedy's dangerous edge. Whatever one's view of South Park, it's hard to dislike two filmmakers whose greatest heroes are the members of Monty Python and who talk about them with such enthusiasm. "To this day, when our heads are getting a little big," Stone says, "if we go and put on an old Flying Circus or something, you just watch that and you're like, 'What the hell are we doing?'" The two take an appealingly humorous view of their success. In Hollywood, executives sometimes actually pay to be the first to hear a hot writer's ideas, and Parker and Stone joke that they're going to charge $40,000 and then just go in and improvise.
All in all, then, the South Park phenomenon is a benign one. Nevertheless, there is a problem: while the show has many virtues, it should be smarter and more surprising. It's a pretty stale idea now to think that Streisand and David Hasselhoff and MacGyver are instant punch lines, and in general Parker and Stone express too much fascination with cheesy pop culture, a subject whose interest has been exhausted. As for their "satire," is it really so very clever to give Jesus a public-access show? Were not stoned sophomores dreaming up this sort of thing 20 years ago? Most troubling is that the series already seems to be running low on imagination, which even the most maniacally contrived sequences cannot hide.
Still, South Park can be inspired, and not only on account of its vibrant vulgarity. It has subtle touches too, like the traffic sign that looms above the boys as they wait for the school bus at the beginning of most episodes. The sign, one of those iconic warnings to drivers that children are at play, shows a little girl and boy running hand in hand. This is the kind of vernacular image that Parker and Stone, like so many visual artists, love to use, and here it quietly sounds the notes of childhood and danger, two subjects at the heart of South Park. Just ask Kenny.
--Reported by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles