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2015-05-07

At what age is it appropriate for humans to watch South Park?

Megan owns a sizeable collection of South Park seasons on DVD, and Beatrix loves to look at them. They look kid-friendly if you judge them by their covers, right? (Marketing—sell it to the kids' money-having parents.)

We don't let Bibi watch South Park. She'll be four years old in less than a month, and her tastes are still child-specific. She loves to play Super Smash Brothers Brawl, and watch Curious George, Daniel Tiger, and My Little Pony. And Pingu, Busytown Mysteries, Dora, and Diego before Netflix removed them. Funding, rights, revenue, Nickelodeon, whatever.



Some day, she's going to see South Park. There's nothing I can do about that. But, what if there were any child-friendly episodes? A quick Googling gave me this article via Hot Air critiquing an article+video combination from Reason entitled, "3 Reasons All Kids Should be FORCED to Watch South Park!"

I want to argue a few points contained in the meat of the Reason piece, by Nick Gillespie & Jim Epstein, from 09.25.13. Though the piece makes good arguments, as does Ed Morrissey's same-day rebuttal from Hot Air, I want to make a few of my own.

First of all, that title is unnecessarily aggressive. It screams either 20-year-old-intern, or out-of-touch-and-angry; it's difficult to tell the difference. Furthermore, in all facets of life, forcing something is usually wrong and ineffective.

From Reason:
Today’s kids are constantly force-fed hosannas to tolerance and diversity that ring hollow and false.
The phrasing there indicates a nod to intolerance, all in the service of protesting the practice of teaching our kids positively about tolerance and diversity. It's a sentiment that takes us socially backwards.

I'd like to know which 'hosannas' they're talking about. They don't unpack the statement either, other than to say that Mormonism is a stretch to believe, and it's like, yeah duh, but our schools aren't teaching our kids to cults, they're teaching them math, grammar, and science. How can you drop a bomb on tolerance and diversity and not explain yourself?

Is Reason aware of the world in which we live? Tolerance is on the rise, my friends. There's nothing anyone can do about it. Get on the right side of the fight.

Point #2 from me: kids these days aren't going to understand the cultural references (I don't understand what Trey and Matt are so angry about half the time), nor are they going to care. South Park is dated, and worse, it's now a caricature of itself, amounting to little more than a mouthpiece for Trey and Matt. That's fine, though. Let them have their half-hour per week. They're earned it. It's really funny when dudes' penises fly off like little rockets in the gluten-free episode, but that's about all the new episodes are good for—cheap laughs.

For teenage and 20-year-old me, those early episodes of South Park were perfect. I knew how not to swear and be a dick to people in public, so I was at a good age to watch it. And when I did, some of them with my dad, I got it. I understood it. I tried to tell my mom that the social commentary was awesome, but in my teenagerdom, I lacked the words to accurately explain myself. Dad laughed at a lot of it. I knew I could count on him.

Sound Park was good, during its early years. It spoke directly to not only us 80s kids, but to the world at large. It opened up the world to the joys of toilet humor and doing things on the cheap, and how funny that all is. To take what looks like a show about four nice boys in elementary school and have all the insanity that happens in South Park, combined with the citizens' redneck sensibilities, was hilarious! It helped us breathe easier and let go of a lot of the stuff that was crippling us, like fear of being tainted by jokes and swearing and stuff we see with our eyeballs and hear with our ears.

Currently, South Park does not hold the same social sway. Comedy Central pours money into it because people still watch it, but is it still game-changing? I would argue it's devolved into teen-service.

Kids these days won't get the cultural references. Al Gore and 'An Inconvenient Truth'? Mormonism? Street Fighter 2? These made for great episodes then, but now we have current events. We have bigger fish to fry.

So, I'm not going to expose my little kids to a bunch of swearing to teach them stuff I can already teach them at home, stuff that I feel South Park teaches well:

MY ETHOS: Respect others, watch out for the little guy, do good things, do big things, think big, look for multiple ways out of bad situations and of solving problems. Don't swear, and don't break the rules. Be good to your body and put healthy food in it. Other than that, enjoy life!

It feels like the Reason article has an agenda; some inner hate-speech waiting to be voiced. They're arguing that kids should be forced to watch South Park as a way of learning life's harder truths, and good values.

I'll agree, it is effective to use entertainment media to teach, and with it to include humor. South Park does excel there. And, South Park always looks out for the little guy, and they value life, liberty, and happiness, and fiercely. The values are there, but the problem is that they're included alongside as much vulgarity as was allowed on TV in those days.

Kids are young, untainted, vulnerable beings. They get really excited about little things, like when something's funny. They have no restraint—they hear swearing and end up blurting those words out to teachers and rooms full of people. South Park is just not going to work for young kids.

Teenagers? Sure, why not. Older ones. When I was 16 and watching South Park, I got it. But—did I have a terrible potty mouth when I was that age? Yes, I did. Was it influenced by popular media? I think it was.

It's like we had to purge swearing from our systems in the 80s and 90s. It's like society was a giant, little kid, who'd heard swearing all his life but was never allowed to utter it. Then, as soon as censorship standards got a little more lax, we really let it out! Big, dumb action movies and big, dumb music were really having their heydays.

South Park was a retaliation against all that. Society still deemed itself to be pure, yet it was full of depictions of physical and verbal violence, not to mention a miasma of barely concealed racism, sexism, and homophobia. Now, we have the internet, and literally billions of people who can raise their voices, and now it's not just the big and powerful who can sway public opinion. As technology grows, the world belongs more and more to the people over the proletariat. (Somehow that 1% of the world's wealth has to be toppled, though—that's a big problem. Hoarders. Meanwhile, people go hungry.)

The world of today is different than the world South Park spoke to. South Park is such a Goliath now that it's even paved the way for successors, like Tim and Eric, fellow titans of low-budget, insane humor.

I'd honestly be more okay with showing my kids Tim and Eric than South Park, because T&E was more about having fun, than having a political agenda. I don't want to give my kids stuff to fear. South Park rails against all kinds of things, and my kids don't need to be thinking about scary monsters and social villains, which, furthermore, were a product of a time 20 years ago, making them even less relevant today.

This Reason guy wants kids to see South Park because of some personal reason, not because he's thinking about how to really enact change in today's social climate.

As far as my search goes for any kid-friendly South Park episodes: I was thinking maybe the Underpants Gnomes one, but even that has a, "Oh my God, they killed Kenny!" "You bastards!"

Heheheh.

Sigh.

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