Jokes about Donald Trump aren’t funny anymore,”
The Economist declared in 2015. The magazine took the example of the Roman poet Juvenal,
noted practitioner of the art of Satura, who once noted that it was hard
not to write satire, when one lived within the corruption and decadence of the “unjust City.” Trump, the magazine noted, “poses a curious inversion to this: He makes satire almost impossible.”
It’s a complaint that has been often articulated about Trump, as the larger-than-life mogul became a larger-than-life presidential candidate became a larger-than-life actual president: How do you mock someone who so readily mocks himself? How do you penetrate those layers of toughness and Teflon to reveal its underlying absurdities? How, as
The Economist noted, do you take
a tweet like this—“Sorry losers and haters, but my IQ is one of the highest and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure, it’s not your fault”—and make it even more ridiculous?'
One answer: You don’t. That’s the solution come to, at any rate, by Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators and writers of, among
other works of irreverent pop culture, the long-running show
South Park. As Parker told the Australian Broadcasting Company
in a recent interview, while promoting the Australian premiere of
The Book of Mormon: Making fun of the new U.S. government is more difficult now than it was before, “because satire has become reality.”
Parker noted how challenging it had been for him and Stone to write the last season (season 20) of
South Park, which attempted to create a pseudo-Trump through the person of South Park Elementary’s fourth-grade teacher,
Mr. Garrison. Mr. Garrison’s political fortunes rose throughout the season, to the extent that its finale—spoiler—found Garrison becoming the 45th president of these United States. It might have been a cheeky take on Trump’s own unconventional rise to power; instead, the season struck something of a sour note. As
Esquire put it, “
South Park’s 20th Season Was a Failure, and Trey Parker and Matt Stone Know It.”
