This Is The Best Joke On ‘South Park’ So Far This Year

It often feels like our current government is beyond parody. How can you out-write a guy who, on a random Thursday, starts suggesting that politicians who oppose him should be charged with sedition? But, through an immense amount of lewd humor, South Park continues to throw incredibly sharp elbows at President Donald Trump and the cabal of ne'er-do-wells that pad out his administration. 

Across both Season 27 and 28 this year, one incredibly sharp elbow stands out. Season 27, Episode 2, “Got a Nut,” featured Trump’s Department of Homeland Security and the leader of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem is portrayed as a woman whose face requires constant maintenance from a pit-stop style team of beauty professionals, in order to keep it from melting off. 

Throughout “Got a Nut,” Noem and her face slippage lead a barrage of increasingly horrifying ICE raids. She commands her terror squad to round up immigrants at a Dora the Explorer concert, then Heaven itself. 

But the real pun-unavoidable kill shot of the episode parodies a moment Kristi Noem wrote of in her 2024 memoir No Going Back: The Truth on What's Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward. In the book, she describes needing to shoot and kill her family’s 14-month-old puppy Cricket because of its extensive behavioral issues. 

“It was not a pleasant job,” Noem said of executing the puppy. “But it had to be done. And after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.”

In an early scene of the South Park episode, Noem is featured in an ICE recruitment video. “A few years ago, I had to put my puppy down by shooting it in the face,” Noem said in the video before murdering a dog. “Because sometimes doing what’s important means doing what’s hard.”

Noem then proceeded to shoot five dogs. The sheer brutality—and the fact that it was merely an exaggeration of a real-life incident, cemented “Got a Nut,” as one of the strongest South Park episodes of the year. The final kill of the originally aired episode, took the show's prior events—Noem’s face slippage, the ICE raids, and the gunning down of puppies—and delivered the crispest punchline. While at the Epstein-ified Mar-a-Lago, Noem blasts Krypto, Superman’s dog. 

It was the perfect way to remind everyone that Noem is no hero; she’s just a woman who killed a puppy she didn’t train properly—and now she’s leading a terror campaign on some of the most vulnerable people in America. 

In the alternate Paramount + ending of the show, Krypto's not even her final kill. For that ending, Kristi Noem enters a pet store and goes on a 25-second mass shooting spree, killing an incalculable number of dogs. 

The whole thing paints Noem, who goes to great pains to cosplay as a G.I. Jane-style military hero, as a pathetic little puppy murderer whose worldview is seriously warped. Parker and Stone's genius was just to take her admitted horrible behavior and do their thing.