Practice With Verbs
LOS
ANGELES -- Its gleefully offensive, profoundly silly and the biggest
schoolyard craze since "Beavis
and Butt-head." The
hit Comedy Central program, "South Park," is the kind
of show that parents love to hate, and kids love to watch. In fact, 23
percent
of its viewers is under 18. Of course, that means more than three-fourths
of the people that are tuning in every Wednesday night is an adult. "South
Park," named for a real Colorado county infamous for the
large number of alien sightings reported there, is populated by a set
of weird
children and weirder grown-ups. Fart jokes and verbal abuse is favored
by the children. The adults include a deeply disturbed teacher, an
uncle who never met a gun he didn't like, and a mom who the kids refer
to as
a "crack whore" and a "dirty slut." The secret
of the show's success may lay in the fact that "South
Park" is
eerily grounded in reality. Kids really do talk that way to each
other, some grown-ups really are distinctly odd. "It
isn't a comedy, it's a documentary," a sheriff's deputy in the
South Park County town of Alma said recently after one resident
killed a former mayor and trashed municipal buildings with a front-end
loader. Others see
a different message in the show. Doug Herzog, the President of Comedy
Central, says the show's rebellious tone
speaks to an
audience bored with pop music so overly packaged that it looses
any edge it
might have originally had. If the show was tamer, its appeal
would diminish, he said. Some
say the cartoon is popular because it is so determinedly not politically
correct. None of the "South Park" characters show the remotest
shred of sensitivity, and their offensiveness may allow
a viewer to laugh harmlessly at themselves. Advertisers
and marketers also love the show. Not only AT&T
but also Calvin Klein is among the major advertisers. Sales of T-shirts
have topped
30 million dollars. There are more than 250 Web sites
devoted to news, gossip and general "South Park" adulation.
However,
the audience is not unanimous in supporting the show. Some adults
think the cartoon's content, including the
horrible death
of the impoverished
character "Kenny" each week and the non-stop
raunchy jokes, are inappropriate for youngsters.
But, the
majority of those youngsters disagree. They say, for instance, that
no one except the stupidest
of their classmates
think the
bigoted, obnoxious Cartman character is a roll
model. No one would try and
imitate his actions. "With
Cartman, you know he's just a complete idiot and you should sort of
do the opposite of everything he does," says
one seventh-grader in New York. As for the bleepable
expletives that fly out of all the characters
mouths, he added, "my daddy says them every
single day." |