From Pakistan to Lizzo, Here Are the Targets That Got It the Worst in ‘South Park: The End of Obesity’
South Park: The End of Obesity is now streaming on Paramount+, which won’t be breaking into the Pakistani market anytime soon.
The newest South Park special is four minutes longer than its predecessor, the less punchy South Park: Not Suitable for Children, and with that extra runtime, Trey Parker and Matt Stone injected even more attacks on pop-culture figures and world cultures than we expected from an extra-long Ozempic episode.
The End of Obesity doesn’t just take on Ozempic and Ozempic users — it targets every business interest and individual associated with obesity treatment while saving some room for a typical crop of stray-catchers who probably didn’t expect to see themselves skewered on South Park when the special was sneak-announced earlier this month.
Seriously, the new special has about as much restraint toward its targets as Cartman has toward a cereal bomb while he’s sitting on the shitter.
In ascending order of enormity, here are the biggest butts of the jokes in The End of Obesity that aren’t attached to Cartman, starting with…
Pakistan
We probably could have guessed that Cartman wouldn’t have anything positive to say about this South Asian country, but, man, we had no idea how much Pakistan-shit-talking he had in him. In The End of Obesity, Cartman dreams about flying to Pakistan to flame the entire populace twice and then achieves his goal in the closing credits. I don’t know what they possibly could have done to Cartman to deserve insults like, “Your whole country is fucking dumb, and it smells like ass! Okay Pakistan? Why don’t you get your shit together?”
Breakfast Cereal
The sugary, vitamin-deficient breakfast cereals marketed toward rotund children aren’t exactly an original target for comedy — stand-ups have been saying that the Cocoa Puffs box has more nutrients than the cereal itself since before that bird went cuckoo. However, having Tony the Tiger, Captain Crunch and the Trix Rabbit graphically murder an entire factory in India because their weight loss drugs are helping people kick their sugar addictions is a new take on the topic that General Mills certainly won’t appreciate.
Upper-Class Ozempic Moms
You gotta think that, in whichever bougie neighborhoods Parker and Stone raise their kids, the South Park creators took inspiration from seeing so many middle-aged women in crop tops showing off their toned tummies and injection marks at PTA meetings to include a takedown of them in The End of Obesity. Ozempic is, famously, the current drug of choice of the rich and vain who will spend over a thousand dollars a month just to shed five pounds, but in South Park, those inappropriately dressed housewives are willing to kill — and die for — their fix.
Lizzo
Late last year, disturbing stories of Lizzo abusing her backup dancers sullied the image of the plus-sized Minnesota singer as a beacon of positivity. In The End of Obesity, Lizzo isn’t just a shitty boss — she’s the obesity treatment alternative for poor people who can’t afford Ozempic, and her music causes people to have explosive diarrhea out of their ears. The joke that listening to too much Lizzo can give you diabearties is one of dumbest puns I’ve ever heard, and it’s embarrassing how hard I laughed when Sharon got her diagnosis.
The American Health-Care System
If the entirety of The End of Obesity was just the music montage in which Butters sings about how he, Kyle and Cartman kept bouncing back and forth between the insurance company and various doctors while filling out dozens of forms and never getting any closer to getting treatment, this special still would have been a spectacular satire of how our health-care system works. The smash cuts to the poor insurance worker with his buzzing fax machine perfectly punctuate the banality of the health-care industry’s evil, and have Parker and Stone ever written a more perfect line than the insurance guy’s admission, “The medical director’s job is just to say no”?
