verbalizes the drives and desires that we often repress; and it allows us to laugh so as to reveal these inhibitions. This is what makes the show's crudeness essential. By showing us “Token” or the conjoined fetus nurse, or saying shit over and over, it brings out the aggression and desire that we feel we cannot express. And, for things that really shouldn't be said, Kenny says them in a muffled way, and the other boys comment on it. By verbalizing these drives, the show lets us begin to think these through – it makes it possible to analyze them, and thereby distance ourselves from them. For instance, many episodes address how outsiders are berated and subjected to racist or xenophobic slander. However, by working through these statements, the show argues that in many cases, such slander is used among friends as well – and that such verbal sparring, when so understood, need not lead to violence or exclusion. It doesn't justify such speech, but it does create a space in which the hostility can be interpreted and analyzed.
Likewise, one can analyze all of the farting on Terrance and Philip. At least two interpretations of this show‐within‐the‐show are possible. First, there is the issue of why the boys love such a stupid show so much. It's not that they wish they could fart all the time. Rather, when they fart, Terrance and Philip do what is forbidden: they transgress the parents' social prohibition. This appeals to the boys, because they wish they too could be free from parental control and regulation.
Second, regular viewers (mostly my students) have noted that Terrance and Philip is self‐referential, a way for South Park to comment on itself. The opening of South Park tells us that, like Terrance and Philip, the show has no redeeming value and should be watched by no one. The stupidity and vulgarity of the cartoon is better understood, however, if we look beyond South Park. Is Terrance and Philip really more vapid, crude, and pointless than Jerry Springer or Wife Swap? Is it more mindless than Fox News, The 700 Club, or Law and Order? Some would say no. When we see Kyle, Cartman, Kenny, and Stan watching Terrance and Philip, it shows us that television fulfills our wish for mindlessness. What offends the parents in South Park, and the critics of South Park, is not that the show is vulgar and pointless, but that it highlights the mindlessness of television in general.
What both of these interpretations show is that there are multiple levels of censorship that need to be questioned. On the one hand, there is the censorship that simply looks at vulgarity, and decides what can and cannot be seen, based upon social norms. South Park clearly questions this sort of censorship, saying so often what cannot be said and challenging social forms of repression. But, if part of South Park's message is the need for thinking, then it also questions how television, by fulfilling our wish for mindlessness, supposedly represses thinking. Of course, such mindlessness can't simply be blamed on one's parents, or television corporations, or two doofuses from Colorado who can't draw straight. Like the mindless Athenians who were to blame for their own ignorance, or Eichmann's responsibility when he thought he was just obeying the law, if we really hold a mirror up to ourselves, as political philosophers say, we will find that our own mindlessness is the heart of Wal‐Mart. Like Socrates, perhaps South Park – and Kyle and Stan more specifically – presents us with a way to reflect on what we think we really know, and through reflection move beyond our mindlessness.
The Talking Cure for Our Culture
By ceaselessly testing the limits of our culture's tolerance, South Park asks us to examine the things we think we know, why certain words and actions are prohibited, what we desire, and what we are teaching our children. Through its provocation, it asks us to think about what is truly harmful and what issues we really should be outraged about. Breaking the silence of our culture's repressions could be the starting point for a Socratic dialogue that helps us to think, analyze our desires and aggression, and become good. If we take the opportunity to discuss the show, why it is funny, and what it tells us about our culture and our own desires, then the show need not be mindless, vulgar, or corrupting, but rather a path to thinking that helps us to live with one another, and with ourselves.15
Notes
1 1 For pop culture resources and philosophical resources related to this chapter please visit the website for this book: https://introducingphilosophythroughpopculture.com.
2 2 Plato (1981). Apology . In: Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo (trans. G.M.A. Grube). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing . Also see Xenophon (1965). Recollections of Socrates, and Socrates' Defense before the Jury (trans. A. Benjamin). Indianapolis: Bobbs‐Merrill.
3 3 Apology, 30.
4 4 Apology, 28–29.
5 5 H. Arendt (2003). Personal responsibility under dictatorship. In: Responsibility and Judgment , 40–41. New York: Schocken.
6 6 Arendt, 49.
7 7 See Plato (1991). The Republic of Plato (trans. D. Bloom). New York: Basic Books ; Aristotle (1999). Nicomachean Ethics , (trans. T. Irwin). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing .
8 8 Apology, 41.
9 9 Arendt, H. (1964). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil , 135–150. New York: Viking Press .
10 10 Arendt, Some questions of moral philosophy. In: Responsibility and Judgment, 96–7.
11 11 I owe this insight to Kyle Giroux.
12 12 See Freud, S. (1965). The Interpretation of Dreams , 156–166. New York: Avon Books.
13 13 For more on this issue, see Lear, J. (1990). Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis . New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux .
14 14 Freud (1993). Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious (trans. A.A. Brill), 261–73. New York: Dover.
15 15 My thanks to Kyle Giroux for his work as a “South Park consultant” and his suggestions for ways to update this version. Additional thanks to Keith Wilde and Nicole Merola for their comments and suggestions on this essay, and to numerous students from Endicott College for their discussions of an earlier version of the essay. Errors remain my own.
2 The Chewbacca Defense: A South Park Logic Lesson
Robert Arp
Summary
