The Deep End of South Park: Critical Essays on Television's Shocking Cartoon Series

by Leslie Stratyner (Editor), James Keller (Editor)

No American television show of the past decade has been vilified as has Comedy Central's South Park. This is the show that has featured, in turn, a nine-year-old boy enmeshed in an affair with Ben Affleck, a maniacal Mel Gibson smearing feces everywhere, and the misadventures of Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo, a talking, bouncing, singing piece of poop. While it's not always an exercise in good taste, South Park is a socially significant satire that has also devoted entire episodes to interpretations of Great Expectations, Ken Burns' Civil War, and Hamlet. This volume explores the popularity and cultural relevance of South Park and its place as an artistically and politically worthy satire.

Genres: Nonfiction

204 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Wendy Darling · Rating 2 out of 5]

I spotted this book at the McFarland Books table at Dragon*Con and was excited because although it's an academic title, a quick scan showed it was more readable than the usual academic book. That said, I can give it only two stars because too many of the essays either used needlessly convoluted academic language or simply made specious arguments that seemed downright stupid, i.e. the kind of thing a tenth grader would toss in an English essay to impress the teacher. I suppose some people would lap it up but I found it both laughable and annoying at times. To be fair, this is a compilation of a dozen different essays, so some of the analyses are better than others. The good: "South Park" and Shakespeare, Kyle as a "cool Jew," a look at the "Cherokee Hair Tampons" episode. The bad: "South Park" and GLBT tolerance, environmental activism, and whatever the last essay was supposed to be about (could not get through it).