Four Times A Celebrity Played Themselves on ‘South Park,’ and the Results Were Totally Lame
From Mecha-Streisand to Donald Trump’s teeny-tiny penis, Trey Parker and Matt Stone are well known for mercilessly skewering celebrities. That said, they’ve also dropped the ball a number of times by delivering too soft of an attack (like with Jared from Subway), or by inviting celebrities to lamely play themselves.
The trend began in Season One when Robert Smith of The Cure played himself trying to take down the evil Mecha-Streisand by turning into a Mothra-type character. The cameo was hilariously random, so it worked well, but it set a precedent for Parker and Stone to ask celebrities they like to appear on the show. And most of the time, that’s only yielded less-than-stellar results.
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Here are four particularly painful examples…
Jay Leno
Early on in South Park’s run, Leno gave Stone and Parker the most respect and attention of all the late-night hosts. Perhaps because of this, Leno made a few guest appearances on the show. Originally, he voiced Mr. Kitty — who only meows. This was a fine bit of anti-stunt casting, but his subsequent appearances in a Thanksgiving short and Season Two’s “City on the Edge of Forever” fell flat. There’s also something strange about the association between South Park, the most punk-rock cartoon ever, and someone who is viewed as the most milquetoast comedian of the last 30 years.
PewDiePie
Given that South Park prides itself on topicality, it always has to keep up with the times. That said, there was something especially obnoxious about Parker and Stone bringing on Swedish YouTuber PewDiePie in 2014. First, Cartman became a video-game commentator like PewDiePie, then the episode tried to take a weird meta approach, with PewDiePie breaking in on Cartman’s stream and insulting him.
At its best, South Park feels cutting edge by skewering what’s new, but they didn’t lampoon PewDiePie, they invited him to lampoon Cartman. The result wasn’t a show that felt hyper-relevant, but a show that felt hyper-desperate for relevancy by stunt-casting someone they didn’t understand (and who couldn’t act). The fact that PewDiePie appeared in two episodes in 2014 was also hard to swallow.
Korn
South Park isn’t always the best at executing someone else’s brand of humor. For example, in an episode in which Cartman tries to catch Osama bin Laden, he attempts a bunch of Bugs Bunny-style gags to trick the Al-Qaeda leader. While both Cartman and Bugs Bunny are funny, Cartman as Bugs Bunny is not.
The same can be said of the Scooby Doo parody episode in which the band Korn investigates some pirate ghosts. In “Korn’s Groovy Pirate Ghost Mystery,” the guys from Korn deliver cheeseball catchphrases from Scooby-Doo — like “jinkies!” — while flatly reading their lines. This occupies about half the episode, which makes “Korn’s Groovy Pirate Ghost Mystery” among the most painful watches of the entire series.
Elon Musk
Pre-MAGA Elon was still a douche, yet Stone and Parker saw fit to cozy up to the billionaire by casting him as himself. When Cartman and his smart, funny girlfriend Heidi try to leave Earth, they go to SpaceX to hop on a flight to Mars. With a performance more wooden than Mr. Twig, Elon gives them a tour of SpaceX, which is handled entirely with kid-gloves.
Unfortunately, this is also when South Park went all-in on serialization, so Elon’s appearance stretches across three whole weeks, or about the same amount of time he worked in the White House — and equally as agonizing.
