‘South Park’ Quits Poking Fun Of Donald Trump: ‘Satire Has Become Reality’

Trey Parker and Matt Stone have announced that South Park will no longer be satirizing Donald Trump. Just two weeks after the new president was inaugurated, the South Park creators have decided to stop keeping up with Trump’s antics on the newest episodes of the Comedy Central cartoon. Their reason for ditching The Donald was due to their belief that “satire has become reality.”

In an interview with ABC News Australia, Parker and Stone explained why they have decided to stop making fun of the latest U.S. political events and let Donald Trump be his own joke. It turns out that there’s just too much going on for the South Park creators to keep up with.

“It’s tricky now because satire has become reality,” Trey Parker said. “It’s really hard to make fun of and in the last season of South Park, which just ended a month-and-a-half ago, we were really trying to make fun of what was going on but we couldn’t keep up and what was actually happening was much funnier than anything we could come up with.”

“So we decided to kind of back off and let them do their comedy and we’ll do ours.”

It would be hard to turn some of the most recent events in U.S. history into satire. How would South Park explain the “Bowling Green Massacre” created by Kellyanne Conway? After all, a “Bowling Green Massacre” sounds like the satire version of the story considering that it is a historical event that never actually happened.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuxsAHu67SE

Not to mention “alternative facts,” which is probably the point where Matt Stone and Trey Parker realized that it was time to hang it all up and focus on something else. How do you turn alternative facts into satire without getting called out for just telling what happened in the way that it actually did happen?

South Park Season 20 just ended in December and some of the most recent episodes have featured a character who closely resembles Donald Trump. Surely the South Park fans out there remember the “Oh, Jeez” episode that aired just days after the election. The episode had to be completely rewritten because the original was written under the assumption that Hillary Clinton was going to be the president, not Donald Trump.

The previous year, South Park made satire out of Donald Trump’s declaration that he planned to build a wall between the United States and Mexico. In Season 19’s “Where My Country Gone,” the premise was that a wall would be built between the United States and Canada rather than the wall that is apparently really being built to the south.

It seems like Donald Trump’s presidency would be a dream come true for shows like South Park and Saturday Night Live, both shows that have been drawing on the hilarity (or lack thereof) of recent events in order to keep laughs going. While the easy material is nice, Matt Stone says that it’s not all giggles on their end when trying to put together episodes of the Comedy Central satire cartoon.

“People say to us all the time you know like ‘oh, you guys are getting all this good material,’ like we’re happy about some of the stuff that’s happening but I don’t know if that’s true. It doesn’t feel that way.”

It would be difficult to continue writing South Park episodes centered around the chaos in Washington D.C. right now. Matt Stone and Trey Parker are right, after all, when they say that “satire has become reality” and Donald Trump is providing way too much material for them to keep up.

[Featured Image by Jesse Grant/Getty Images]