This Is What Happened to Matt Stone the First Time He Met a Celebrity That He’d Parodied on ‘South Park’

The first celebrity parody target whom a South Park creator ever met in person turned out to be a great sport. Thank God Trey Parker and Matt Stone waited until Season Seven to hit Jennifer Lopez.

In 2025, earning a parody in a South Park episode is considered a badge of honor among the rich and powerful, even if their depiction is anything besides honorable. The fragile egos of the upper class have come around to understand that, the more a snobby celebrity rages against a South Park insult, the more the show and its fans will mock them, so the only way to play off a parody is to lean so far into the joke that it obscures the rage tears streaming down their face.

However, when South Park first began in 1997, the notoriously sensitive celebrity community had no idea how to react to a cartoon ruthlessly roasting them as bad as Parker and Stone did on a weekly basis. Thankfully, Family Ties star Tina Yothers was able to set the tone when South Park name-dropped her in the Season One episode “Pinkeye,” choosing to embrace the South Park parody instead of raging against it like some other celebrities.

In the DVD commentary for South Park Season One, Stone revealed that Yothers was the first celebrity whom he met in person after making fun of her on South Park, and, as far as we know, she is still the only South Park target to turn her parody into a theme song.

“She just sucks, look at her, we made her look all crappy,” Parker said of Yothers’ South Park character model, revealing that his co-creator ran into Yothers after “Pinkeye” aired.

“I didn’t know it was her,” Stone said of his run-in with the celebrity costume contest judge. “She was playing in a band, I met her with (South Park theme song composer and Primus lead) Les Claypool, and somebody finally said, ‘Do you know who you’re talking to?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know, what’s your name?’ It was Tina Yothers.”

As Stone was still inexperienced when it came to meeting his parody targets face-to-face, he immediately found the situation to be painfully awkward. “I just wanted to crawl out of my skin. It was the first time — that was that first experience of meeting someone who we’ve made fun of,” Stone remembered, though Yothers quickly assuaged his fears about a possibly fiery confrontation.

“She actually thought it was great,” Stone said of Yothers’ reaction to her “Pinkeye” appearance. “She has a band … and she used a sound-bite from the show where Kyle says, ‘Up yours, Tina Yothers!’ to start her show. So she’s actually a big fan.”

Yothers herself confirmed her South Park fandom in a 2000 interview with TheCelebrityCafe, saying of the episode, “It was really funny. All of my nieces and nephews were like, ‘Oh my God, you were on South Park. They said your name on South Park.’ That made me the coolest aunt on earth.”

“I thought it was great. I couldn’t be offended; that cartoon of me was a foot tall and three feet wide, because all of them are. It’s all in fun,” Yothers continued.

Clearly, no matter how unflattering a celebrity portrayal may be on South Park, the target can always take the joke gracefully so long as they don't take themselves so seriously. But, hey, maybe J.Lo really is that insecure about her resemblance to Cartman’s hand.