Isaac Hayes Didn’t Know What ‘South Park’ Was Until His First Recording Session

Before being written off of the show completely — for reasons that have been recently called into question — the late Isaac Hayes was a massively important contributor to South Park’s early years. 

The legendary soul singer famously voiced Chef, South Park Elementary’s resident cook, who has a penchant for crooning highly inappropriate tunes, and was apparently close personal friends with Sir Elton John and Ozzy Osbourne.

As Trey Parker and Matt Stone revealed in a South Park DVD commentary, casting Hayes as Chef was a key part of their original vision for the show. So, naturally, they were thrilled when he agreed to do it — although they were less thrilled when it turned out that he hadn’t actually agreed to do it. “We knew we wanted Chef all along,” Parker explained. “He was a character we talked about even in college, and Isaac Hayes was our first choice.” 

They specifically mentioned wanting Hayes during a meeting with Comedy Central, while still thinking that actually landing the star for their pilot was a “pie in the sky kind of thing.” “We got a call when we were going to do the pilot, (and) Comedy Central said that Isaac Hayes was totally into it, totally excited to do it,” Parker recalled. “But we had to fly out to New York to record his voice.

So the duo flew to the Big Apple on the now-defunct airline “Tower Air.” Stone called the flight “the worst experience of my life. It took us, like, 12 hours to get there.” But Parker pointed out that they still “thought we were the shit, being flown to New York by a network to record Isaac Hayes’ voice. We just thought we had arrived.”

But when they showed up at the studio to record Chef’s lines, Hayes seemed to have no idea what Parker and Stone were talking about. “We meet him, and he’s really cool and he basically says, ‘So what are we doing again?’ And we’re like, ‘Well, this is the cartoon thing.’ And he said, ‘What cartoon?’”

“We found out he actually knew nothing about it,” Parker added. “His people just sort of were like, ‘Sure, any sort of voiceover work Isaac can do.’” While Hayes reps had read and approved the script, they “hadn’t really told him about what he was doing at all.” 

So Parker and Stone had to essentially pitch South Park to Hayes, literal moments before he was scheduled to record his part. “We had to explain it to him, and then he just totally embraced it,” Parker said. “And within two or three minutes he was singing the song, and he just basically is Chef, so it was perfect.”

So it all worked out, even though someone at Comedy Central really dropped the (chocolate salty) ball.