Here’s How A Hot Tub Became ‘Ground Zero’ For So Many ‘South Park’ Storylines

The original writers’ room of South Park says that their experiences with Trey Parker and Matt Stone in a hot tub changed their lives – but not in the Randy-and-Gerald kind of way.

When a group of early South Park writers spoke to Cracked’s Brian VanHooker back in July, it came as no surprise to hear that Parker and Stone didn’t run their seminal series like any other creators on television. As leaders, Parker and Stone were non-traditional, aloof and just generally “odd,” as one writer reported, but there was one perk for working underneath the duo during those early years – the retreats.

In South Park Season One, Parker and Stone weren’t particularly concerned with the office culture, but they did afford their staff the regular opportunity to escape the rat race of Los Angeles and blow off some steam at idyllic Big Bear Lake, where, as veteran screenwriter, executive producer and creator Dan Sterling put it, a group soak in a hot tub turned out to be “ground zero for a lot of career inflection points.”

I don't know if he was supposed to tell anybody about that.

During the discussion, South Park Season One writer Phil Stark asked Sterling and Dave Polsky if they were around for “the retreat in Big Bear with the hot tub,” and, upon confirmation, launched into the life-changing story about a special office getaway. “I remember a writers’ retreat in Big Bear in a hot tub where all the writers and Matt and Trey were talking about scheisse films and going on a big run about that,” Stark recalled, “The writers were looking at each other, like, ‘Okay, do we pitch on this? How long do I need to stay in this hot tub?’”

That scheisse film discussion would eventually become a joke in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, but it wasn't the only classic South Park joke that came out of the writers' trips. “The first retreat was just me, the guys, Brian Graden and Pam Brady, and that was at the Inn of the Seventh Ray,” Sterling remembered, “They were playing a lot of Enya, and the guys were laughing about it.” 

“In an early episode, there’s a moment where Stan’s grandpa is trying to kill himself constantly and nobody is sympathizing with him,” Sterling continued, referencing the episode “Death” from South Park Season One, “They don’t understand why he wants to die. And finally, he locks Stan in a closet with Enya playing, and he’s like, ‘This is what it feels like to be my age.’ Then they got it, and they let him kill himself, although I guess maybe he’s still around.”

However, for Sterling, the fateful hot tub itself was less of a petri dish for South Park ideas than the setting for the beginning of the end of his South Park tenure. Sterling said that, during one trip, Parker and Stone brought a couple of lady friends to the tub, but Sterling insisted on playing the third wheel. “I got into that hot tub, and it was clear that I felt superfluous,” Sterling remembered, “But I wasn’t taking the hint that it was time to go. I was trying to match Trey and some of the new, dirty lingo that I had learned from him.” 

“I had learned the term ‘cum dumpster’ from him, but it didn’t occur to me that maybe while he was trying to charm these women I shouldn’t use the term cum dumpster,” Sterling admitted, then referencing how he would not be invited back for South Park Season Two. “I don’t know that I would have survived very long on that show even under the best of circumstances, but I feel like that might have accelerated the timeline for my firing.”

While that Big Bear hot tub turned out to be the worst kind of “career inflection point” for one writer, he should take pride in knowing that, by Season Three, Parker and Stone came around on mixing hot tubs and “cum dumpsters” during the episode “Two Guys Naked in a Hot Tub.”