These Are the ‘South Park’ Characters Trey Parker and Matt Stone Say They Modeled After Themselves

Maybe the real lesson of South Park is that, deep down, we’re all just a bunch of Cartmans who think that they’re Stans.

On May 3, 1999, Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s widely beloved and massively criticized cartoon South Park was gearing up to start its third season when the pair of creators had a little fun with a behind-the-scenes special for admirers and attackers alike. That night, Comedy Central aired Parker and Stone’s mockumentary, titled Goin’ Down to South Park, which told the semi-fictionalized and intentionally obnoxious story of South Park’s origins. The pair bragged about their success from a hot tub next to their soon-to-be-former animator Martin Cendreda while addressing some of their criticisms and revealing insider knowledge about their creative process.

Recently, a clip from Goin’ Down to South Park in which Parker and Stone explain the origins of their main characters and their personal connections to the crass, chaotic kids went viral on TikTok as the younger generation learned that, while Stan and Kyle are originally based on Parker and Stone respectively, when it comes down to it, Parker and Stone are “big fat bastards” who see the most of themselves in Cartman.

Worth repeating is the fact that, despite the actual informational content found in Goin’ Down to South Park’s 60-minute runtime, Parker and Stone are playing parodies of themselves as they gloat about their wealth and claim to have completely unrealistic work habits that anyone familiar with the show’s infamously procrastinatory production schedule would know to be false — in interwoven scenes, the pair claim to sleep at the office “almost every night” as they sip champagne while the actual office workers walk by their empty desks.

Thus, Parker and Stone’s assertion that Cartman is the closest character to their actual personalities should be taken with a grain of salt, especially considering that Stone himself is half Jewish. Somehow, I doubt he actually has an imaginary alter ego who appears on Infowars to praise Hitler while dressed as Kanye West.