Comedians have tried to satirise Trump for years. Nothing comes close to this

2 hours ago 2

There’s been nothing more comforting in the past month than curling up on the couch with my wife and watching the President of the United States have a “butt baby” with Satan.

The latest season of South Park – now into its 28th year – has become must-watch television for this political moment, drawing near-record audiences and getting direct pushback from POTUS himself.

Donald Trump (right) depicted in the new season of South Park, in a relationship with Satan.

At a time in which we can’t escape Trump’s unabating tirades – including misguided claims about autism and open threats to the media – the lunacy can feel so extreme that it’s hard to imagine any comedy cutting through. But South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have risen to the challenge and done what no other satire has been able to do: out-ridiculous Trump.

Rather than subjecting us to another familiar Trump impression, South Park gives him a far sillier, high-pitched voice – the same one they used when portraying Saddam Hussein more than two decades ago. But the parallels don’t stop there. Like their fictionalised Saddam, Trump is also in a relationship with Satan – or as the show puts it “Trump is f---ing Satan”. And he’s also depicted as an abusive, domineering partner to The Lord of Darkness, the most evil entity in the universe.

This season has also featured Donald Trump jnr answering the phone for every government department, complete with a human smile frozen to his cartoon face, and Vice President J.D. Vance as a tiny, Fantasy Island-inspired lackey applying baby oil to Satan’s “asshole”. Even if jokes about butt sex aren’t your thing, South Park is proving itself to be the most original and exciting show on TV.

This show is a cultural institution that has always appealed to and ridiculed the whole political spectrum from Hillary Clinton to Kim Jong-un. Everyone watches South Park: Democrats, Republicans, centrists, libertarians, mid-Western working-class folk, Hollywood elites, and even lawmakers in Washington. South Park has been around so long, the show is exciting for younger generations and nostalgic for the older ones. So there is an added thrill in watching, knowing that every celebrity or politician in it will either see themselves being lampooned, or at the very least know about it.

It’s not some little partisan or generational echo chamber. People from all walks of life are tuning in.

South Park is also uniquely positioned to react to current events, given its famously short turnaround. As shown in the 2011 documentary 6 Days to Air, the show was always made in less than a week. This season has an extended production, releasing new episodes fortnightly – but this is still infinitely faster than other animated series which take months to produce. And this is why the show has always felt culturally relevant: it can process the zeitgeist into a half-hour of comedy mania in real time.

Mr. Mackey goes on an ICE raid in this season of South Park.

Parker and Stone don’t always react to politics – more often targeting pop culture and broader social issues – but when they do take aim at their government, they don’t hold back.

In 2003, three weeks after the US invasion of Iraq, the town of South Park split over support and protest of the Iraq War, then joined together to celebrate American hypocrisy. A few years later, the show depicted George W. Bush posing as the real culprit behind 9/11 because it made him look competent. Then there’s the always relevant episode about immigration policy, where future immigrants time travel to the present to take people’s jobs, spawning the famous chant: “They took our jerbs!”.

South Park creators Matt Stone, left, and Trey Parker.

Creating the series within their own entertainment company, Park County, Parker and Stone have a large amount of creative control of their show, and they’ve proven time and time again that their priority is always to say what they truly think, no matter who it offends.

A clear example of this is when they made fun of Scientology, even though they knew it would create difficulties with their long-time voice actor Isaac Hayes (Chef) who later left the show. Before the start of this season, while they were negotiating a $US1.5 billion ($2.27 billion) deal, the duo also had the gall to openly criticise Comedy Central’s parent company Paramount saying its controversial merger with Skydance was “a shitshow” and “f---ing up South Park”.

It’s satisfying watching something knowing its creators’ unfiltered opinions are making it to air, and this track record has solidified the show as a trusted institution. They don’t seem as beholden to networks telling them what they can and can’t say, which is an exceptionally rare occurrence in TV – even before the recent pressure on late-night talk show hosts to tone down their criticism of Trump. South Park refuses to pull punches for anyone.

Cartman is styled as far-right podcaster Charlie Kirk in an early episode, released before Kirk’s assassination.

Even when they receive pushback from the television censors, they find a way to duck and weave. This season, the creators were told they couldn’t show a CGI-version of Trump’s penis and instead of backing down, Parker and Stone simply added googly eyes to it. Pushing further into the absurd is the kind creative brazenness we need right now.

As a TV writer myself, it feels sacrilegious to say, but South Park is the only show that seems capable of making the current state of politics more ludicrous than it actually is.

It’s an issue comedy writers have been struggling with for the past decade. When I wrote for Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell, Tony Abbott had just made himself the Minister for Women. How the heck could we satirise something that’s already so outlandish? And US political comedy has had it even worse: sketches on Saturday Night Live, late-night talk shows and online have been far too close to the real thing to provide any escapism.

When Jimmy Kimmel had his show pulled off the air, all the late-night talk shows made the same sort of joke: sarcastically praising Trump. At least three of the hosts quipped: “I just want to say, Mr President, that you’re so handsome.”

South Park stands alone in responding to the authoritarian threat of censorship by making the head of the Federal Communications Commission fly off into the air propelled by his own explosive diarrhoea.

That might not be to every viewer’s tastes, but it’s original – and it’s exactly the catharsis I was looking for.

South Park is streaming on Paramount+, with new episodes dropping every second Thursday.

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