“Weird Al” Yankovic is the undisputed master of musical parody, and his turnaround times these days are impressive. The first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was only a few days ago, and already, Yankovic has come out with his satirical take on it, “We’re All Doomed.” Yankovic features on the song from The Gregory Brothers (the folks behind the Auto-Tune The News series and the viral “Bed Intruder Song” from 2010) on their Schmoyoho channel.
In the video, Yankovic serves as the moderator of the debate. After his smile quickly turns into a panicked scream, Yankovic reports, “We’re all doomed! People are breathing out this living poison and it’s trying to float into my orifices!” After being told in his ear to not be so hysterical, the song kicks off with Yankovic asking Biden and Trump questions. The pair answer via re-compiled and Auto-Tuned footage and Yankovic sings on the hook, “Who’s it going to be in the West Wing? We’re living in the apocalypse, I’m begging you to put a stop to this, please!”
The Gregory Brothers also shared a behind-the-scenes video of the making of the clip, which shows Yankovic filming in front of a green screen and other production goings-on.
Watch the “We’re All Doomed” video above, and also check out the behind-the-scenes video below.
Eminem’s fans are already known for being some of the most enthusiastic among a field of fandoms that gets more enthusiastic by the day, but one Eminem fan sought to set herself apart from the pack in a very unusual — and mostly permanent — way.
Nikki Patterson, a 35-year-old woman from Aberdeen, Scotland, is also being recognized for her passion by no less authority than Guinness World Records. She recently set a new record for getting her sixteenth tattoo of Eminem’s face, giving her the most tattoos of any single artist’s countenance (she has 28 Eminem tattoos total, including a list of his album titles).
The tattoos have made her the subject of a significant press buzz, bringing her attention from both fan sites and local news publications, as well as tattoo enthusiast magazine Inked. With 28 tattoos of the star and a new world record to her name, it’s safe to say, Patterson has fully earned her Instagram handle, @crazyeminemlady.
But before you make your judgemental comments about her for liking someone’s music (what a novel concept in 2020), at least give thanks that she found a harmless way to express her abundance of ardor for the subject. Earlier this year, Eminem had a brush with one fan who took his song “Stan” a little too seriously, breaking into his home after hunting down his residence over the course of nearly a year.
Describing yourself as a “nerd” isn’t the kind of anarchist “f*ck you” that it used to be for earlier generations of outcasts. Still, that’s what Aisha Tyler calls herself, and she’s been using that label long enough to earn its newly-recognized street cred.
As an avid gamer, actress, comic book collector, and now, host of Prime Rewind: Inside The Boys, Tyler’s been breaking new ground in a space that historically hasn’t been that welcoming to anyone other than white men. That’s changing, of course, and the success of The Boys is a good example of that shift. Eric Kripke and company have managed to take a fairly whitewashed property and transform it into a timely allegory on everything from race relations to the #MeToo movement, complete with a** bombs, superheroes with a mommy kink, and speed boats ramming through the intestines of humpback whales.
It’s peak nerd porn, and it’s totally in Tyler’s wheelhouse. We chatted with her about the new aftershow, finding her place in the space, and what a Boys video game adaptation might look like.
How did you end up being tapped to host The Boys aftershow?
When I was younger, I was big [into] comic books. I did not know these books, but I think people knew that this was my space because I’ve read The Walking Dead, and I used to collect Watchmen. They had come to me to host [a] panel, and I’m one of those people that really does my homework. I watch the whole show and I formulate my own take on moderating because I feel like the coolest part about Comic-Con is giving fans a unique experience. You want them to really feel like you’re connected to the material. So, I watched the show; I loved it. I thought it was so surprising, so extraordinary because it’s so entertaining, but also about these big sociocultural ideas about race and class and capitalism and culture and sexism. And I just remember being shocked at how hard it was leaning into this big stuff and really being delighted by it. So, I just moderated that panel and that was that.
You must’ve done a good job.
I was stoked when they decided they were going to do an aftershow, and they came to me because I felt like what’s cool about this show, and what would be cool about this aftershow was it wouldn’t just be a rehash. It wouldn’t just be a recap of what you had just seen. It would really expand The Boys’ universe and then tie the themes on the show to what’s happening in the real world. And that’s really what we’ve been able to do.
I’ll be honest, I don’t normally enjoy aftershows, but there’s such a good mix of story-related conversations and just ridiculousness that this thing is addictive. What’s the secret?
Without knocking other aftershows, I think it’s really important that it be a conversation and not like I’m a caller at a rodeo. Do you know what I mean? It really should be a dialogue. I get to be the audience. I get to try to ask the questions I think a fan would ask. And I think something that is important for people to understand about this show is that the artists really are putting a lot of their own heart and soul and energy into the performance. It’s not like they’re just reading words and kind of robotically going through the motions. Even thinking about Aya Cash playing Stormfront. I mean, we talked about it on the show. It was really hard for her to say and do those things as a person. And then cut and be like, “Oh my God, this is not who I am.” And of course, no one thinks that about her, but you’re putting so much of yourself into a character that inevitably you’re going to be connected to it emotionally.
And then you tackled BLM with Laz Alonso, who plays Mother’s Milk on the show.
I really love that conversation. It was just so personal and authentic and emotional. I think these are important stories to tell and we feel that it’s an important conversation to have, and to peg it to the real world in a way that helps people see that this is stuff we’re still working on, and we’re going to continue to work on as a culture. Not everybody is reading the newspaper every day, right? Not everybody’s marching and organizing, but these are conversations that need to be had everywhere, in every corner of our culture. And this is a great way for us to do it. I think we really believe in what the show is trying to do.
It’s refreshing because I think this space — comics and gaming — has been closed off to people of color, especially Black women for a while now. Is that something you’ve had to confront?
I was a very nerdy kid. I was two heads taller than everybody else in my grade. I was the only Black kid in my school until I was maybe 15 and I felt really isolated. And nobody liked the stuff I liked. The narrative of Black kids and girls is you don’t like that kind of stuff. You’re weird that you like that kind of stuff. For younger people, and especially for women of color, for queer kids, I want the kids who feel isolated to know, not just that there are people like them, but that it’s okay to be who they are; that they could point to somebody and be like, well, she’s doing it, so I can do it too, because I didn’t really have those examples when I was growing up. I really felt just very isolated. But weird kids make iconoclastic adults. So to look around and see it’s not weird that I’m a gamer. It’s not weird that a Latino kid loves heavy metal or a little Asian kid loves punk. We do a lot of gatekeeping in nerd culture. I think it’s getting better, but nerd culture should be about embracing exactly the things that make you different and really celebrating them. So for people to be able to see a Black woman who games and loves comic books, hosts a show, and have it be validating for them, I think is really important. I wish I had that when I was a kid.
You’re on another show, Archer, that’s done this as well, but do you think The Boys might crossover into gaming in the future?
You know, it’s so interesting because some of the games that we love have been turned into film properties, and most of the time it doesn’t work because gaming is so immersive, right? I mean, I played 300 hours of Fallout 3 and there’s just no way a TV show or a movie can mimic that experience. You really want it to be complimentary. I think this is a property that definitely could go in open world and be really, really fun. It’s hard because it’s so granular, so character-driven, you’d want campaign, but I don’t know that campaign would be as satisfying as watching the show. So you’d want it to have some open-world components. I would want like a big, console, rich, visual game with a dope campaign and lots of open-world, off campaign tasks and stuff to do — like cool little side missions.
That sounds like a pretty good one-sheet to me.
That was my elevator pitch.
And for The Boys after show? Is the pitch: Great conversations and then, ya know, weird sh*t?
[Laughs] We want to give you an enhanced Boys experience, so you’re definitely going away with something that you didn’t know, maybe something that you didn’t want to know.
There’s the tagline.
Amazon Prime is streaming new ‘The Boys’ episodes on Fridays.
2016 was an exhausting year, although not even a fraction as exhausting as the one we’re enduring. Yet as nonsensical and downright unmoderated as this week’s Trump-Biden debate turned out to be, it’s hard to judge whether that was more or less bonkers than what transpired between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz during the 2016 Republican primary season. That’s when Trump repeatedly threatened Ted’s wife, Heidi, and he flat-out insulted her looks, but Ted somehow forgave his rival when Trump captured the nomination. Well, CNN’s Chris Cuomo hasn’t forgotten, and he chastised Cruz for capitulating to Trump, even when he refused to condemn white supremacists during Tuesday night’s debate.
Even Fox & Friendstook issue with Trump telling the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” but Cruz attempted to tell Cuomo that Trump had backtracked (he did not). Cuomo wasn’t having it and pressed the senator from Texas for “stand[ing] by and strok[ing] your beard like a wise man, instead of telling the president to get on it when you have power.” Cruz responded by throwing a barb at NY Governor Andrew Cuomo. And it got ugly with Cuomo reminding Cruz that Trump is not only the president but the guy “who called you a liar, the one who said your wife was ugly!”
Chris Cuomo to Ted Cruz after Cruz attacks his brother:
“Why don’t you talk to the president like you talk to my brother? You afraid of him? … My brother’s not the president. I’m talking about the president. The one who called you a liar, the one who said your wife was ugly!” pic.twitter.com/k5rbElyzPy
When reminded of the “ugly” remarks from Trump, Cruz averted his eyes and deflected with the allegation that Republicans don’t want to talk to Cuomo. The CNN host continued, though, and asked, “Was the president wrong to go soft on the proud boys in the debate last night?” Cruz decided to counter by mentioning, “Ten years ago, 2010, Joe Biden gave a eulogy for Robert Byrd who was a Grand Cyclops of the KKK.” And that turned into Cuomo blaring (while noting that Byrd had recanted his ways before death), “You’re going to go with this weak-ass argument here?”
Oh Ted…Ted Ted. Only reason why he agreed to go on #Chriscuomo is to promote his book. And now he can’t handle hard ques. He HATED #tRump 4 years ago…and now is a member of the #cult.
Keeping track of all the new albums coming out in a given month is a big job, but we’re up for it: Below is a comprehensive list of the major releases you can look forward to in October. If you’re not trying to potentially miss out on anything, it might be a good idea to keep reading.
Friday, October 2
Ailbhe Reddy — Personal History (Street Mission Records)
Aidan Baker — There/Not There (Consouling Sounds)
Alex Gough — Forever Classic (AWAL)
Aloe Blacc — All Love Everything (BMG)
Amanda Holden — Songs From My Heart (Universal Records)
Angie McMahon — Piano Salt EP (AWAL)
Andrew Farriss — Love Makes The World EP (Rockingham Holdings)
Bartes Strange — Boomer (Memory Music)
Blackpink — The Album (YG Entertainment)
Born Ruffians — Squeeze (Yep Roc Records)
Brent Cobb — Keep ‘Em On They Toes (Thirty Tigers)
Briqueville — Quelle (Pelagic Records)
Bryson Tiller — Anniversary (RCA)
Carys — To Anyone Like Me EP (Warner Music Canada)
Chris Smither — More From The Levee (Signature Sounds Recordings)
Like a lot of musicians, Adrianne Lenker decided to use her newfound free time during the pandemic productively. She retreated to a cabin in western Massachusetts and emerged with a pair of new albums, Songs and Instrumentals. Lenker announced both projects a month ago, and now she has shared a new Songs cut, “Dragon Eyes.” It’s a tranquil acoustic number that lets Lenker’s soothing voice provide tender comfort for three minutes.
Lenker previously said of recording the albums, “I had a handful of songs that I was planning on recording, but by the time [engineer Phil Weinrobe] arrived I was on a whole new level of heartsick and the songs were flying through my ears. I was basically lying in the dirt half the time. We went with the flow. A lot of the focus was on getting nourishment from our meals. We cooked directly on the woodstove, and we went on walks to the creek every day to bathe. […] I’m grateful that this music has come into existence. These songs have helped me heal. I hope that at least in some small way this music can be a friend to you.”
Listen to “Dragon Eyes” above.
Songs and Instrumentals are out 10/23 via 4AD. Pre-order them here.
Fourteen years after attempting to kidnap Pam Anderson and bringing then-cutting edge technology like iPods to his native Kazakhstan, Borat is returning to the United States in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe To American Regime For Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Or Borat 2. Just call it Borat 2.
The Borat sequel was the first movie “made during the COVID-19 shutdown” and made with a small crew, including Sasha Baron Cohen, returning as the Kazakh journalist, and Borat’s daughter played by Maria Bakalova. The film follows the pair as they travel across America in an attempt to get “the girl” to marry Vice President Pence. Along the way, they get pulled over the cops, visit a Halloween store (upon seeing a Harry Potter costume, he asks, “This man sex criminal?), attend a fancy party, and visit a women’s health center. “I have a baby inside me,” Borat’s daughter tells the doctor. Her dad adds, “Can you take it out? I feel bad, because I was the one who put the baby in her.”
Along with the trailer, which you can watch above, Cohen, in character as Borat, tweeted, “Jagshemash. If you see only one moviefilm this year, please see the only one that got made – mine. Great success! Please, you look. Chenquieh.” Borat Subsequent Moviefilm premieres on October 23 on Amazon Prime Video.
The Social Network, written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher, winner of best adapted screenplay, editing, and score at the 2011 Oscars, turns 10 years old on October 1st. If movies haven’t changed much in that time, Facebook certainly has.
It’s impossible to separate The Social Network from the social media milieu it depicts and in which it was created, a story about a group of inventors that is fundamentally tied to our shifting view of what they invented. In 2010, Facebook wasn’t that far removed from its founding (in 2003), and its mission statement hadn’t evolved all that much. It was still, in the view of the general public, a place where one shared pictures and relationship statuses, posted thoughts and chatted, doing more or less what the site had originally intended: making and maintaining connections, lubricating the social networking process.
Inasmuch as The Social Network promised a lurid exposé of Facebook’s “asshole” founder (quoting Rooney Mara in the movie’s first scene), everything about the film’s initial marketing seemed geared towards convincing us how impossibly cool all these guys were.
David Fincher’s The Social Network is the stunning tale of a new breed of cultural insurgent: a punk genius who sparked a revolution and changed the face of human interaction for a generation, and perhaps forever. — Sony Pictures Entertainment
A revolutionary punk genius! Mark Zuckerberg! It’s hard to remember a time when the guy who frequently becomes a joke meme for his ghostly sunscreen, casual munching of dry toast, and pathological repetition of the word “smoked meats” could be considered a punk, a revolutionary, maybe even a genius.
I’d love to lay the sexification of Mark Zuckerberg (everyone’s favorite alabaster AI bot) at the feet of Aaron Sorkin, whose chief skill even long before The Social Network had been his ability to write catchy screeds into the mouths of prickly nerds. For my money, I love a good dumbass whisperer, like Richard Linklater or Nicholas Pileggi or the writers of The Sopranos, capable of cobbling together smart, hilarious dialogue out of interactions between people who really aren’t that smart. Sorkin does the essentially the opposite, which is to say, a kind of competence porn, where characters much smarter and more articulate than us converse in ways we wish we could, like extended, stylized staircase wit. Sorkin isn’t the only one who writes this way (Good Will Hunting might be the apotheosis of the genre) and while his style is easily parodied (ahem) it’s hard to deny that he’s very good at it (even if his characters are all kind of assholey in a way that you eventually come to think of as autobiographical).
More than likely though, this juiced-up, sexified conception of Mark Zuckerberg most belongs to Ben Mezrich, the author who wrote The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal, the book on which The Social Network was based. Written in Truman Capote, novelized non-fiction style (which is to say, supposedly based on exhaustive research, but unsourced and written like narrative fiction), it too was full of imagined scenes and imagined dialogue representing supposedly true events, seeming thoroughly sensationalized. Sample prose: “Time was only another tool of the establishment to Mark.”
Some of the most Sorkin-y-seeming scenes from the movie actually came directly from the book. Like Eduardo Savarin (Andrew Garfield, in the movie) contemplating why Harvard Jews like himself were always dating Asian girls. Even the scene in The Social Network where Eduardo and Mark hook up with Asian girls in adjoining stalls comes directly from the book. Specifically, this passage:
Eduardo’s heart slammed in his chest as he careened into the bathroom stall, his Italian leather shoes skidding against the tiled linoleum floor. The tall, slender Asian girl was straddling him, her long bare legs wrapped around his waist, her skirt riding upward, her lithe body arching as he pressed her back against the stall. His hands roamed under her open white shirt, tracing the soft material of her red bra, his fingers lingering over her perky, round breasts, touching the silky texture of her perfect caramel skin. She gasped, her lips closing against the side of his neck, her tongue leaping out, tasting him. His entire body started to quiver, and he rocked forward, pushing her harder against the stall, feeling her writhe into him.
You think Mezrich got all that detail from his research? Also, how was the floor both tiled and linoleum?
All of which is to say that, inasmuch as The Social Network seems like typically slick mythmaking from Aaron Sorkin, it’s actually a kind of Russian nesting doll of bullshit, with Sorkin turning Mezrich’s horny prose into his signature overlapping dialogue.
The book was the product of an author who was himself a Harvard grad, who seemed to specialize in stories of brainy, corner-cutting precocious success stories, always from Ivy League schools. In addition to Accidental Billionaires, Mezrich also wrote Bringing Down the House, about card counting math whizzes, which was adapted into two movies, 21 (starring Jim Sturgess and Kate Bosworth), and The Last Casino. Later he wrote Ugly Americans, about Ivy Leaguers who arbitraged Japanese index futures, and the more or less self-explanatory Rigged: The True Story of an Ivy League Kid Who Changed the World of Oil, from Wall Street to Dubai.
The aughts had us convinced that snot-nosed Ivy League overachievers — who were suddenly being positioned as clever punks and plucky underdogs — were soon going to rule the world. And that this might even be a good thing, or at least, a cooler thing. What both The Social Network and Mezrich’s entire oeuvre as a writer reveal is the general public’s appetite for the mystique of the founder in the aughts — some punk rock supergenius who never slept and only thought about his invention, with barely time for earthly pleasures like clothing, sleep, or food. The Zuckerberg of Mezrich/Sorkin/Fincher’s creation only wore hoodies and sandals, and stayed in coding while his peers were out partying, and generally contributed to the outsider aura we associated with brilliant people back then.
Some of the bloom was probably already off the rose by the mid-20 teens, even before Elizabeth Holmes — with her Steve Jobs turtleneck, green juices, and canned anecdotes of self-mythology — and the Theranos saga exposed the founder’s mystique for the con it was. It makes sense that 2010, two years post-financial crisis, would belatedly give us the high-water mark of hip disruptor tales.
A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A billion dollars.
The Facebook founders, who are all about my age — I still remember a drunk friend shouting “find us on Facebook!” at a group of girls in 2004, so novel was Facebook’s existence at the time — came up those heady days of the aughts, when money seemed to be everywhere. Money was just there for the taking, and all the players in The Social Network are in some way trying to get a piece. The already-rich Winklevoss twins and their associate, Divya Narendra, still just college seniors, were trying to muscle into the online dating sector with their proposed project, Harvard Connection (later ConnectU). Zuckerberg, who strung them along for a bit before coming up with the idea for Facebook, got the seed capital for his site from Eduardo Savarin, who had recently made a six-figure profit betting oil futures. And how did he make “$300,000 in a summer,” according to The Social Network? “He likes meteorology. You can read the weather, you can predict the price of heating oil.”
Making money was just that easy back then. All you had to do was be a shrewd overachiever from a prestigious college (or maybe learn how to flip houses or sling mortgages, as seen in The Big Short). These kinds of stories may help explain why my entire generation is drowning in student loan debt. Who cared how much we borrowed to attend prestigious colleges? We were all going to be rich!
From Connection Engine To Outrage Machine
As even The Social Network itself notes, Facebook wasn’t entirely a novel idea. “The difference between what we’re talking about and MySpace or Friendster or any of those other social networking sites,” Tyler Winklevoss explains to Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, “is exclusivity,” Zuckerberg finishes.
Exclusivity. You needed a Harvard email address to use Facebook (“girls want to get with guys who go to Harvard,” Divya says in the movie). And soon after, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, and eventually just about every college, and then basically anyone in the world. The Social Network depicts the feud between Facebook’s founders (Savarin and Zuckerberg) and between its pseudo-founders (The Winklevi and Narendra).
Savarin, as the book and movie tell it, wanted to start selling ads to recoup some of the server costs. Zuckerberg thought Facebook’s biggest asset was the fact that it was cool, which having ads would ruin. It’s striking that The Social Network never attempted to grapple with what was already happening by the time it was released: Facebook was no longer exclusive. By the film’s own logic, that meant it was no longer cool.
Ten years later, Facebook being enormously uncool is self-evident, having transformed from a place where friends share pictures and write on each other’s walls to a tool for weaponizing disinformation, where unhinged conspiracy theories warp the brains of susceptible Boomers. Did it get this way because it stopped being exclusive, or because it started selling ads? Facebook seems to have become infected by the same impulse that has warped cable news, the weird incentives and impulses that make it more profitable to make us hate each other than to help us connect.
The Social Network is crystal clear about the initial driving motivation behind Facebook: sex. It was designed by college boys who wanted to get laid. Even as it depicts Mark Zuckerberg as more or less a bitter incel whose initial, embryonic incarnation of Facebook, Facemash, was a site for rating hotness (and occasionally comparing women to farm animals), the tool-for-trying-to-hook-up version of Facebook seems innocent and preferable to the perpetual outrage machine we have now.
You Can’t Get To 500 Million Friends Without Making A Few Enemies
Originally there was some irony to the plot of The Social Network, that the creation of a site dedicated to making friends and connections had been so beset with acrimony and betrayal. Time has stripped away that irony. It now makes perfect sense that a group of shark-eyed businessmen who sued each other the minute they smelled a nickel would’ve founded a site where people go to share misleading stories about how terrible people are. Antifa! Poison vaccines! George Soros!
If there’s anything notable about the difference between The Social Network in 2010 and The Social Network in 2020, it’s that the founders seems to matter so much less to the story. The players in the story at the time seemed like they’d be household names, and other than Zuckerberg, they simply aren’t. Eduardo Savarin renounced his US citizenship and moved to Singapore in 2012 (reportedly avoiding $700 million in taxes). The Winklevi invested heavily in Bitcoin and show up in the news every now and then in crypto-related stories. Chris Hughes (Patrick Mapel in the film, who gets the least screen time of the first four Facebook employees) ran The New Republic for a few years and last year wrote an op-ed in the New York Times calling for Facebook to be broken up. Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake in the movie, the guy who dropped the “The” and said a million dollars wasn’t cool) said in a 2017 interview that Facebook “literally changes your relationship with society, with each other. It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
We seem to care much less about Facebook’s individual founders in 2020 because we realize that Facebook (even with Zuckerberg still maintaining majority ownership and control), like so much of the internet, social media, and e-commerce as a whole, has grown into a monster beyond our control. The question has become not “who made this” but “how can we kill it?”
The Social Network stands as the high-water mark of a certain kind of mindset, a time capsule from a time when we took tech companies’ marketing materials and self-mythologizing more or less at face value, and thought of billionaires as cool punk revolutionaries who helped us connect with each other, rather than amoral profiteers benefitting from the destruction of society’s social fabric. If anything, it makes me nostalgic for the days when the internet didn’t seem like a mistake.
Vince Mancini is onTwitter. You can read more of his retrospectives here.
It’s BTS Week on The Tonight Show, so last night, the group visited the program again for yet another performance. This time, they busted out a Map Of The Soul: 7 favorite “Black Swan,” singing and dancing in an outdoor cathedral being re-claimed by nature, like something out of The Legend Of Zelda.
For the first time this week, the group also sat down with Jimmy Fallon for an interview. They discussed their upcoming album Be, saying, “We poured in the emotions that we feel now, such as joy and sorrow, into this album. There are a lot of good songs as good as ‘Dynamite,’ so we hope that they can all make it onto the Hot 100 chart. Please look forward to it.” Fallon also asked the group if they would release any more English songs, but they skirted the question by asking the host, “Can you write the lyrics?”
Elsewhere during the chat, they reminisced about their last time on the show, buttering Fallon up by saying, “Every moment with Jimmy Fallon was special. It was special because we were with Jimmy.” They also looked back to their high school days, with RM sharing what he was like as a teenager: “I was kind of like a nerd, all about studying. I like to listen to rap music, like Eminem and Nas, but I was just like a good student.”
Watch clips from BTS’ Tonight Show appearance above.
South Park is the ultimate Both Sides show. As in, both sides of the political spectrum, Republicans and Democrats, are equally stupid; one’s a turd, the other’s a douche. As the AV Club‘s Sean O’Neal wrote, “It’s a scorched-earth, deconstructionist approach steeped in equal-opportunity offensiveness that’s made South Park one of the funniest satires ever produced, and particularly potent in the time in which it debuted.” This “everyone’s full of sh*t” attitude was more digestible in 1997, when the Comedy Central series premiered, but that was a long time ago — in 2020, it’s no longer cool to not care.
But in Wednesday’s “Pandemic Special,” co-creators Matt Stone, who once said that he “hate[s] conservatives, but I really f*cking hate liberals,” and Trey Parker allowed a rare genuine plea to viewers: vote. (Or die.) As President Garrison — the show’s Trump stand-in — is burning a pangolin to death with a flamethrower, ending our best chance at finding a vaccine to COVID-19 (it makes sense in context… sort of), he looks at the camera and says, “Don’t forget to get out and vote, everybody! Big election coming up!”
It’s the rare fourth-wall-break for South Park, but don’t worry, the special also had one of Stan’s patented speeches. “I can’t take these shutdowns anymore and I’m scared what it’s doing to me. I’m looking for who to blame — saying I’m trying to help people to make myself feel better. The truth is I just want to have fun again,” he said. “I wanted to see that I could go out in the world and do things I used to do, but I can’t. I’m not any better and I don’t care any more than anyone else. I did all this because I just want my life back. I just want my life back.” Same. The episode also laid into the president.
“I made a promise to the American people: to get rid of all the Mexicans… All I have to do is guide the avalanche in the right direction and I’m fulfilling my promise to the American people. I was doing a crap job until this pandemic happened,” Garrison/Trump tells Stan, who asks him if he’s going to do anything about the pandemic. “I am going to actively not do anything, and you can eat sh*t off my balls and die.”
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(@CamJunior1972) 
