{"id":316776,"date":"2025-11-27T13:22:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-27T13:22:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/316776\/"},"modified":"2025-11-27T13:22:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-27T13:22:08","slug":"south-park-is-thankful-it-can-drill-into-some-of-this-saudi-arabia-stuff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/316776\/","title":{"rendered":"South Park is thankful it can drill into some of this Saudi Arabia stuff"},"content":{"rendered":"

Never let it be said that\u00a0South Park\u00a0isn\u2019t grateful for its ability to be a lot more timely than almost any other animated show on television, allowing the Comedy Central series to tackle almost any aspect of our modern political and social clusterfuck (that isn\u2019t the influence of any billionaires who might be personal friends with Trey Parker and Matt Stone<\/a>, anyway). Certainly, no other cartoon on TV has now dived in more gleefully in tackling recent criticisms of American athletes and artists taking money from the government of Saudi Arabia<\/a>, as the series did with its pre-Thanksgiving installment, \u201cTurkey Trot.\u201d<\/p>\n

The episode\u2014reportedly the penultimate episode of\u00a0South Park\u2018s bizarrely truncated 28th season\u2014dealt with a bunch of the usual suspects, lightly touching on the show\u2019s ongoing Trump plotline (albeit without going to the graphic lengths it recently achieved<\/a>), and allowing Eric Cartman to once again be a force of town-wide menace. (In this case, getting obsessed with \u201crace science,\u201d which involves him recruiting South Park\u2019s one Black kid onto his team to try to win the titular event.) Oh, and it got some swipes at Pete Hesgeth in there, but Hesgeth is so obviously buffoonish that even the series seems to realize that clowning on him\u2014by depicting him as a rampant attention seeker in a fight with Kristi Noem<\/a> to see who can milk more attention out of any given situation\u2014is at least a little bit redundant.<\/p>\n

As it usually has over the last few months,\u00a0South Park\u00a0reserved its actual satire for chunkier material, in this case the controversy surrounding the recent Riyadh Comedy Festival, and some of the comedians who participated in it. To some extent, the show drew from an older playbook, doing a bit of the old \u201cboth sides\u201d maneuver: Having usual moral voice Token repeatedly try to drop out of the town\u2019s Saudi-backed Turkey Trot over the queasy feelings associated with taking Saudi money, only to have Cartman point out that ostracized regimes rarely improve on topics like human rights abuses. Or, to put it in the show\u2019s terms, asking if he wouldn\u2019t prefer \u201cthem to pay America for sports rather than hacking up reporters and paying Pete Davidson to do comedy?\u201d (Kevin Hart also took a similar hit.) Putting the words in Cartman\u2019s mouth certainly suggests that the series is ascribing cynical motivations somewhere, but it still makes South Park one of the only mainstream American TV shows\u2014outside of, like the news, and the late-night programs\u2014that\u2019s directly addressing the controversy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Never let it be said that\u00a0South Park\u00a0isn\u2019t grateful for its ability to be a lot more timely than…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":316777,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[88,92],"class_list":{"0":"post-316776","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=316776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/316776\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/316777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=316776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=316776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=316776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}