NP: Signal and Sign - Maximo Park
For those of you who missed the latest episode of South Park, you missed the most poignant defense of free speech in the last few years. In the episode (which was part 2 of a 2 part story arc), Family Guy is supposed to show a portrayal of Mohammed on an upcoming episode. Cartman claims to be offended and he and Kyle take off on their big wheels to Hollywood to have Fox pull the episode. Turns out, Cartman just wants Family Guy off the air and thinks that if you pull one episode, others will protest and you will have to pull them all.
Anyway, the point of the controversy about the episode is that Comedy Central refused to show Mohammed (Parker and Stone blacked out the screen with a message saying "Comedy Central refused to show a picture of Mohammed on their network"), but had no problems showing images of Jesus crapping on President Bush (as part of an "Al-Qaeda retaliation" for Family Guy showing Mohammed).
As a result of the images of Jesus, the Catholic League has came out and said that Stone and Parker should not have shown Jesus like that and are getting all blustery. These criticisms completely miss the point. In their own satirical way, the South Park guys have shown that free speech standards are dictated in the West by terrorism and double-standards. Comedy Central had no qualms showing Jesus (or Mohammed a couple of years ago), but now that we have a Danish cartoon controversy where riots break out, we can no longer show images of Mohammed in the western media. The official line is that the west can't offend people or their cultural sensibilities. The Catholic League should be pointing out the double-standard here and highlighting the fact that, while Christians may take offense to such unflattering portrayals of Christ, the Church is not out in the street rioting. Christians, Mormons, and Scientologists for that matter, who get offended address their grievances within the bounds of civil discourse.
Like Kyle said in the episode, paraphrasing of course, if you respect the values of one religion, you should respect them all. Likewise, if you choose to poke fun at them, you should be able to poke fun at all of them. The West is going to have to stand up for its values of free speech and not have them dictated by those who resort to violence and terror.
Sunday, April 16, 2006
South Park Controversy
3 comments:
Well, obviously that's what the Catholic League should have said, but that would have meant that a Catholic organization was saying something worth hearing.
The Blitzpope recently gave a speech bitching about genetic manipulation; I thought hey, he's setting the Catholic Church back about five to ten minutes with his anti-science rhetoric. But at least the Church is pro-evolution.
Also, in the spirit of your post, all other religions are also assbackwards, but it's late and I'm cutting this short to get to another point: I hope Family Guy finally goes all out and does a three-episode story arc where they shit all over their critics, even though most of their noteworthy critics are people whose work I enjoy. Kevin Smith, Parker and Stone, and various Simpsons writers have all taken shots at Family Guy for, and this is the only real reason I can see, being funnier with less effort. I have never laughed so hard at anything on TV than the "Family Ties" opening on Family Guy. Granted, I was stoned, but it hurt. Family Guy uber alles!
I can see the criticisms of Family Guy ... the nonsequitur gags being the primary one.
The commentary on the "Clerks" cartoon reinforces why I think Smith went from a pretty good writer/director to a self-fellating hack. Almost every episode's commentary, Smith has sand in his vagina about Family Guy being a more successful show than the "Clerks" show was.
The problem with the nonsequitur gag criticism is that a) the nonsequiturs are funny, b) they usually involve something ongoing at that moment related to the plot and c) they're far from the only device used for humor.
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