South Park Libertarians

Trey Parker and Matt Stone on liberals, conservatives, censorship, and religion.

Nick Gillespie & Jesse Walker from the December 2006 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

We actually did an episode five years ago with Muhammad in it. It was an episode called “Super Best Friends,” and Muhammad had super powers and turned himself into a beaver and then killed Abraham Lincoln. I thought, “They finally just saw it, and they’re all pissed off.” But no, it was those other cartoons that they were mad about.

So Matt and I were like, “This is great; we have our first episode.” Comedy Central kept saying, “We’re not going to broadcast a Muhammad episode.” And we said, “You totally have the right, it’s your network, but we’re going to make one, and it’s going to be one of the seven you pay for.”

Matt Stone: And then we made it two episodes out of seven.

It was life imitating art, because the whole week after the first one aired there was a teaser, “Will television executives take a stand for free speech? Or will Comedy Central puss out?” That whole week we were trying to get Comedy Central to show Muhammad. And they pussed out.

Reason: They did show most of the episode, but they blocked out the specific moment when Muhammad appears. I know people who assumed you decided to run those title cards yourself, as part of the satire: “In this shot, Muhammad hands a football helmet to Family Guy. Comedy Central has refused to broadcast an image of Muhammad on their network.”

Stone: It was really hard to come up with the right approach. What do you do other than just put black and white cards up to say this isn’t us, the network really wouldn’t show this image, they really have been bullied into this? We toyed with the idea of putting some really incredible quote up or making a big speech. At the end of the day it felt a little too high and mighty, so we ended up doing the driest thing possible.

Reason: Do you find yourself facing more restrictions on what you can do now or when you started out?

Parker: It started last Christmas when we did an episode—it was really an episode about alcoholism, but it happened to have a statue of the Virgin Mary shitting blood on the Pope.

Stone: So it wasn’t really about that.

Parker: Yeah. It was really saying these things about A.A., but that was the first episode that a Catholic group got really upset about, and Comedy Central pulled it [from the rerun schedule]. We were like, “Wow, that’s never happened.” Then a few months after that, suddenly they were pulling the Tom Cruise episode.

On one hand, we ’re thinking, “We’re living in a pretty different time now. All this stuff’s getting pulled off the air.” On the other hand, we’re thinking, “Well, the Virgin Mary is shitting blood on the Pope.”

Stone: Our point was that if you’re going to pull this off for offending somebody, you don’t have any episodes of South Park left. Somebody will complain about every single episode.

Reason: When it looked like Comedy Central wasn’t going to rerun the Mary episode, people were still able to download it illegally online. Did you see that as a victory for free speech, or did you think, “My God, these people are stealing our intellectual property”?

Stone: We’re always in favor of people downloading. Always.

Reason: Why?

Comments

|11.12.09 @ 9:47PM|#

Thanks for doing this interview! South Park is so hilarious! Matt and Trey are geniuses!