Trey Parker Never Wanted People to Compare ‘South Park’ to ‘SNL’ — But That’s Exactly What’s Happening

Not since the time that George H.W. Bush publicly dunked on Homer Simpson (before attempting to garrote him) has the White House had such a contentious relationship with an animated series. 

The first two episodes of South Park’s 27th season famously portrayed President Trump as a micropenis-equipped dictator, JD Vance as his toddler-esque sidekick and Kristi Noem as a Botox-riddled sex trafficker who has killed more dogs than the producers of the Air Bud franchise.

South Park has since earned rebukes from both White House officials and Noem herself, while also being awkwardly praised by some of the show’s satirical targets. One source claimed that Trump himself has been privately “seething” over the show’s “childish attack.” And, to be fair, he is the world’s leading expert on childish attacks.

Following the recent season premiere, the show’s already high ratings doubled, seemingly because a number of people wanted to see if the show would continue to gleefully stick it to the Trump administration. As a result, there have been a number of articles singling out South Park as the successor to Saturday Night Live.

As you may recall, back during Trump’s first term, SNL routinely mocked the president with mid-at-best sketches featuring a revolving door of gratuitous celebrity cameos. But at least Alec Baldwin single-handedly changed the course of a federal election thus saving democracy forever, as evidenced by that sign he held up at the end of a November 2020 episode. 

Baldwin’s smug self-satisfaction aside, SNL’s Trump parodies did capture the zeitgeist and annoyed the real Trump so much that he became the first sitting president to publicly call for the return of Darrell Hammond. 

Now it seems as though South Park’s culturally-relevant weekly Trump roasts have, to a certain extent, filled that void, arguably becoming the “new SNL,” at least according to Slate, who recently claimed that “South Park has swiftly become the Saturday Night Live of the Trump 2.0 era” but with “the potential to irk the forces and figures around Trump in a way SNL can’t.”

Meanwhile UnHerd theorized that “South Park hurts Trump more than SNL” because it “occupies different cultural real estate than Saturday Night Live,” and The Advocate noted that the show “largely left the political conversation years ago” but has “suddenly zipped back with a ferociousness that late-night and SNL can’t match.”

There’s no doubt that South Park’s recent episodes have been far more brutal than, say, “The White Potus,” but it will be interesting to see how the rest of the season plays out, considering that the show’s creators have publicly professed their desire to avoid occupying the same lane as SNL’s topical political comedy. Or even the same freeway, for that matter. 

In a 2017 interview with The Los Angeles Times, Trey Parker admitted that the Trump-inspired storylines (involving Mr. Garrison’s presidency) had gotten boring, and rejected the suggestion that South Park was ever a show predicated on responding to current events. “We weren’t ever really that show,” Parker argued. “We would do an entire season and there would be one moment that played off something that had just happened and people would go, ‘South Park is the show that does that.’ And that’s just not true. We’re not.”

But during the 2016 election, Parker and Matt Stone’s episodes became politically timely in a very SNL-esque manner, which the duo clearly didn’t enjoy. “We fell into the same trap that Saturday Night Live fell into,” Parker admitted, “where it was like, ‘Dude, we’re just becoming CNN now.’ We’re becoming: ‘Tune in to see what we’re going to say about Trump.’ Matt and I hated it, but we got stuck in it somehow.”

Parker also told the paper that the “bread and butter” of South Park has always been “kids being kids and being ridiculous and outrageous” and not “did you see what Trump did last night? ... We probably could put up billboards — ‘Look what we’re going to do to Trump next week!’ — and get crazy ratings. But I just don’t care.”

Earlier that same year, Parker similarly told Bill Simmons that South Park wasn’t about to follow the SNL route of attention-grabbing political commentary. “Every week I’m seeing a headline about how SNL ripped on the Trump administration this week,” Parker stated. “They’ve become that show. And that was part of the bummer for us about (the previous) season was we didn’t want to make it a big Trump thing, and we kept thinking it was gonna go away and we didn’t want to get caught up in just being a political show.”

“It’s interesting ‘cause now people are (saying), ‘Okay, well let’s see how you deal with Trump this coming season,’” the Orgazmo star added. “No one ever said, ‘Oh, the new season’s coming, how (are) you gonna deal with Obama in this season?’ We’re not that show, and we never were.”

Of course, now it seems as though South Park very much is that show — but it’s seemingly due to a sense of genuine indignation rather than tacit obligation.