The creators of “South Park” on Thursday said they plan to shift the show’s attention away from the Trump administration next season after finding themselves already fatigued from parodying the president and his policies.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone devoted a fair share of their show’s 20th season last year to mocking President Trump and his race for the White House. Weighing in this week, however, the Colorado-born creators of the cartoon said they intend to set their sights elsewhere when they begin work later this year on the program’s next season.
“It’s really tricky now, because satire has kind of become reality,” Mr. Parker, 47, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
“It’s really hard to make fun of, and in the last season of ’South Park,’ which just ended a month-and-a-half ago, we were really trying to make fun of what was going on, but we couldn’t keep up, and what was actually happening was much funnier than anything we could come up with,” he added. “So we decided to kind of back off and let them do their comedy and we’ll do ours.”
Mr. Stone, 45, agreed that the current political climate is already funny on its own.
“People say to us all the time, ’Oh, you guys are getting all this good material,’ like we’re happy about some of the stuff that’s happening.” he opined.” ’But I don’t know if that’s true. It doesn’t feel that way. It feels like they’re going to be more difficult. We’re having our head blown off, like everybody else.’
“They’re going out and doing the comedy. They’re already doing it, so it’s not like something you can make fun of.”
In a separate interview with Australia’s The Age this week, the “South Park” creators once more acknowledged their willingness to shy away from satirizing Mr. Trump for the time being.
“We don’t have [to record] more shows until August, we’re psyched about that. We’ll see if we can kick it up a level. South Park can only represent old white guys in so many ways,” Mr. Stone said.
“I’m so Trumped out already,” added Mr. Parker. “I’m so done. For me it would be nice to have a show that has nothing to do with that.”
The most recent season of “South Park” concluded with a character on the show, Mr. Garrison, being elected president after waging a campaign that mocked Mr. Trump’s own White House bid. According to Mr. Parker, however, the creators deliberately chose not to directly parody Mr. Trump.
“We were like, [expletive] him, we don’t want to give him the satisfaction,” he told ABC.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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