But the sequence winds up speaking as eloquently, startlingly, and hilariously to the issue at hand as a monologue ever could. From Parker and Stone’s official statement, we know that the theme of the monologues was “intimidation and fear,” and that the bleeps weren’t a “meta-joke”-they were added by the network.
The co-creators have Comedy Central to thank for this absence, as more than a half-minute of monologues from Kyle, Jesus, and Santa Claus toward the end of “201” is completely bleeped. Unlike the “Cartoon Wars” episodes, “200” and “201” feature no speechifying interlude-the moment, traditionally, when Parker and Stone risk underestimating our intelligence and lay out the “moral” of the episode. In “200” he is stuffed into a piece of moving equipment. This time around, Parker and Stone take an inspired, show-don’t-tell approach: The episodes vibrantly illustrate the idea-fascinating both in its political and philosophical implications-that a U-Haul van, a bear suit, and a “CENSORED” bar can themselves come to represent precisely the thing they were meant to obscure.Īnd Parker and Stone do this in a way that thumbs a nose at censorship itself, demonstrating that Comedy Central’s skittishness actually made South Park’s representation of Mohammed more “offensive”: In 2001’s “Super Best Friends,” Mohammed was a hero. The last time South Park took on the depiction-of-Mohammed issue, in 2006, it did so with a far heavier hand: In one subplot, Americans afraid of violent al-Qaida reprisals for a cartoon of the prophet literally buried their heads in sand, and the script featured several speeches about the slippery slope of censorship. In “200,” they are at the top of their game. In the wake of the “200” controversy, Comedy Central has tried to scrub the old episode, “ Super Best Friends,” from the Internet, but you can find a streaming version easily enough. Or perhaps it’s simply because the episode aired way back in July of 2001, in a very different world.
Perhaps this is because South Park’s depiction of Mohammed wasn’t negative: The theme of the episode-different religions have different things to recommend them, unless the religion is Scientology-was hardly provocative. What’s funny, of course, is that when South Park first featured a cartoon depiction of Mohammed back in its fifth season, not a whisper of scandal ensued. If there is one absolute here, it is the precedent of violence both real and intimated-the 2004 murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, to which Revolution Muslim alluded in its original post the deaths of more than a hundred people protesting the Danish cartoons throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa and the threats that sent several of these cartoonists into hiding.
Which is all to say, the “200” scandal rests atop a mountain of contingencies.
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