I used to respect you a lot more Matt and Trey

I’m kind of annoyed with the boys over at South Park.

See, everyone on the net is abuzz at how Comedy Central refused to air an image of the prophet Muhammad, thus caving into censorship as a result of fear when South Park decided to poke fun at the Danish Muhammad Cartoon Controvery^tm. In case you didn’t see it, Matt and Trey crafted a scenario in the South Park Universe wherein FOX’s show The Family Guy was airing an episode featuring the prophet Muhammad. In the South Park Universe, FOX caved to political pressure and decided to censor out the image of Muhammad, angering the Family Guy writers (in the South Park Universe who threatened to quit if the next episode’s appearance by Muhammad was edited out as well. All the while Stan and Cartman travel to FOX headquarters to try to prevent them from airing Muhammad’s image, and the episode ended with a cliffhanger style teaser (“Will Cartman and Kyle succeed in preventing Family Guy from airing, will yadda yadda, etc”) finally adding “Will Comedy Central puss out? Tune in next week for the shocking conclusion.”

So upon seeing this, I reasoned that obviously Comedy Central is not going to air the image of Muhammad, and this is all an elaborate (and hilarious) prank to show that Comedy Central is a bunch of pussies, by just airing a completely unrelated episode the next week. People following the issue would get the joke, people not following the issue wouldn’t realize anything was going on. Well, I was wrong.

Even though they knew full well that Comedy Central wouldn’t air Muhammad’s image, they still carried on with the pointless second half of the episode, teaching all about how wrong it is to censor something out of fear. Finally the moment of truth was to come, when in the Family Guy episode (within the South Park Universe) Peter proclaims, “This is just like the time the prophet Muhammed came to the door and gave me a salmon helmet..” which prompted one of those fucking annoying Family Guy cutaways to a completely irrelevant gag. Instead of seeing Muhammed hand a salmon helmet to Peter though, the screen went black, and in white text the South Park crew explained that Comedy Central refused to air an image of Muhammed, and described what happened in the scene. In the immediate blog-o-sphere backlash against Comedy Central, an interview with a South Park producer explained that Comedy Central didn’t censor the episode, they> did, because they wanted people to know why it was edited rather than just let Comedy Central remove the scene.

So let me get this straight: you’re doing an episode all about how censoring things out of fear is never right, but you’re told that Comedy Central is going to censor your show if you deliver it as is, so you censor it yourself out of the fear that people will think you censored it? That is seriously fucked up.

Ever since the beginning of the show, the crew at South Park has had to deal with things Comedy Central refuses to air. There has been constant bargaining back and forth about many things, many, many times. Comedy Central taking this stand is not at all unprecidented, and while it is rather stupid, it is their decision to make. Matt and Trey trying to make it out that Comedy Central has suddenly lost balls and won’t let them show what they want to is just plain inaccurate. They’ve always had to play by the rules Comedy Central has put forth, and they’ve never made a big deal out of it before.

What should have happened is: upon hearing that Comedy Central wouldn’t air the episode as-is, they should have just not delivered it, subsequently suffering the consequences. (I don’t know what kind of consequences those are, other than fans being pissed off that there was no episode that week. Although, how pissed off could they really be, afterall the prior week ended with “Will Comedy Central puss out and not air the episode?”) Better yet, they shouldn’t have even wasted the time making the episode in the first place, since they knew full well what Comedy Central’s reaction was going to be and they’d have to censor it. Trying to bully Comedy Central into showing Muhammad is as equally bad as Christian groups trying to bully Comedy Central into not showing South Park in the first place.

I’ve always been really proud of the things Matt and Trey have done to point out hypocrisy and idiocy throughout all the greatly entertaining episodes of their fine show, but I cant get behind them on this. While the message presented by the episodes is a good and important one, I really feel that they are exhibiting hypocrisy here by caving into the very censorship they’re calling Comedy Central a “pussy” for. Not cool guys.

This week’s episode was started before both the “Cartooon Wars” episodes, so I’m hoping that next week’s episode might try to show me how they aren’t actually hypocrits. Maybe they can convince me, but until then, I’m very disappointed in them.