FCC Chair Brendan Carr Lucked Out That His Senate Hearing Is After The 'South Park' Finale

Three months after Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr publicly intimidated ABC and its affiliates into suspending Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Donald Trump’s censorship czar is finally answering the Senate’s questions about the controversy. Apparently, he’s regained his freedom of speech.

At the time of writing, Carr is in front of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, and he's answering questions related to his and the Trump administration’s targeting of public broadcasters, including his own efforts to remove Kimmel from the air back in September, among other inquiries.

Carr faced bipartisan criticism following his appearance on a right-wing political podcast in which he seemingly implied that any ABC affiliates that didn’t pre-empt Jimmy Kimmel Live! could lose their broadcasting licenses, and, today, our lawmakers are addressing the public’s concerns with Carr’s custodianship over American media. Meanwhile, Carr's harshest critics in TV comedy will have to sit on the sidelines as the Project 2025 co-author dodges and weaves around pointed questions about his handling of the Kimmel controversy because South Park just wrapped up its 27th/28th season last week. 

Considering how Trey Parker and Matt Stone have spent the last few months literally dumping shit all over the show's version of Carr, if the Senate held this hearing just over a week earlier, their months-long abuse of the FCC chair could have had a perfect cap-off as they found a creative new way to torture, humiliate and disfigure comedy's biggest enemy in the federal government.

As South Park fans will recall, back in “Conflict of Interest,” the first new episode of the show following the swift removal and slightly less swift reinstatement of Kimmel, South Park and President Donald “Saddam Hussein” Trump went full Kevin McCallister on Carr, as they threw him down a flight of stairs, gave him jet-propulsion levels of diarrhea and dumped hundreds of pounds of parasite-infested cat shit on the FCC chair, leaving Carr broken and freedom-of-speechless in the closing moments of the episode.

Since then, Carr has been more of a secondary punching bag in the series, but it's clear that Parker and Stone are still angry at the federal government official who brazenly threatening a TV network into silencing a comedian who calls out the rich and powerful, an understandable stance for iconoclasts such as themselves. 

Though it's unlikely that any member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation will hit Carr with as much fury as professional political satirists, it sure would have been nice if South Park concluded its spectacular 2025 with one last grand parody of Trump's censorship crony. Then again, it's unlikely that Carr will stop being a partisan hack anytime soon, so there's always room for more satire next season – so long as he doesn't step underneath any more trap doors.