What the Yuk? The Creators of South Park Could be the Two Greatest Coloradans...Ever

How did two smartasses from Colorado, South Park's Matt Stone and Trey Parker, become free-expression heroes during an era in which incautious opining can have dire consequences?

The path taken by Stone and Parker, as tracked by Westword since damn near the jump, has been long, winding and undeniably weird. But one consistent theme remains their irrepressible eagerness to speak truth to power — and to do so as rudely as possible.

Take the portrayals of President Donald Trump seen in the first two episodes of South Park's 27th (!) season on Comedy Central, which launched July 23. While liberal politicians and the progressive punditry decry The Donald's divisive policies and call him out for his obvious efforts to distract the public from focusing on more important issues (which they unconsciously enable every time they raise those sidetracking subjects), Stone and Parker simply de-pants him — the better to display the tiny penis they believe he packs.

And when it comes to Trump, size matters.

Parker, 55, is a native of Conifer, while Stone, 54, moved with his family from Texas to Littleton when he was a kid. As he told Playboy in a 2000 interview, Parker was drawn to the funny side of movies and music from an early age, and after graduating from Evergreen High School and briefly attending the prestigious Berklee School of Music in Boston, he entered the film department at the University of Colorado Boulder. There, he met Stone, a Heritage High grad. Before long, the two were collaborating on shorts such as 1992's Jesus vs. Frosty, a showdown between the Christian savior and a demonic snowman that served as an early South Park blueprint.

But it was another project that led to Westword conducting one of the first-ever interviews with the pair in April 1993: a musical about Alfred Packer, famed cannibal and namesake of the grill on the CU Boulder campus. The movie, which debuted in Boulder that October, evolved from what Parker described as "a fake preview for a fake movie" that he made for his senior thesis — but the faux trailer also gave him the chance to get even with his ex-fiancée. He memorialized his former love by giving her name to Packer’s beloved horse, which ultimately dumps Alferd for a group of trappers.

"Basically, the whole preview was shot so I could get this one line on film,” Parker admitted. “Packer says to this trapper, ‘Tell me something, Frenchy. How does it feel to be riding my horse?’ And Frenchy says, ‘Come off it, Packer. Everyone in town has ridden your horse.’" As for the film's gore, it was definitely not tasteful, he said: "Absolutely not. That would ruin it."

Although Alferd Packer: The Musical (later retitled Cannibal: The Musical) didn't become a smash, it served as a calling card when Stone and Parker dropped out of school and moved to Los Angeles with the goal of taking the entertainment business by storm. But for several years, the best they could provoke was an occasional drizzle. After creating a couple of failed pilots for Fox Kids and writing the script for what became the 1997 non-hit Orgazmo (foreshadowing: Parker played a Mormon missionary in the flick), they finally began getting some traction after creating Jesus vs. Santa, a sort of sequel to Jesus vs. Frosty, at the request of Fox executive Brian Graden, who sent the video to industry pals as a Christmas present. Parker and Stone benefited most from the gift, though, parlaying the popularity of their efforts into a deal to make South Park for Comedy Central.

South Park arrived on August 1997, and the shenanigans of Colorado characters such as Cartman, Kyle, Chef and the eternally doomed Kenny quickly became a TV phenomenon. Their popularity spawned a feature film, 1999's R-rated South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, featuring the Academy Award-nominated song "Blame Canada" (which lost to Phil Collins's "You'll Be in My Heart" from Disney's Tarzan), and provided Stone and Parker the opportunity to branch out with other offerings. Most of these efforts were flops, including the 1998 movie BASEketball, the 2001 series That's My Bush! and the 2004 epic Team America: World Police, which is mostly remembered for its ultra-prolonged puppet sex scene. They finally achieved success beyond South Park with The Book of Mormon, a missionary-centric 2011 Broadway extravaganza that won nine Tony awards, including best musical, and is still touring.

Stone and Parker again sat down with Westword in August 2012, when The Book of Mormon first came to Denver, and among the queries they addressed was the topic of comedy crossing the line. "We're certainly not in the position to tell anyone how far is too far," Stone said, "but we recognize that people have boundaries. For us, it's another matter because we have characters to stand behind. In some ways, it's not me saying that. It's Cartman."

As the dollars continued to pour in, Stone and Parker needed somewhere to put them, and in 2021, they found just the money pit: Casa Bonita, a restaurant they loved and had already feted in a classic 2003 South Park episode. They wound up buying the joint for $3.1 million and then set out to restore it to its former glory — an exceedingly pricey task ($40 million and counting!) amusingly chronicled in ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!, a documentary for Paramount, parent company of Comedy Central.

Paramount had a vested interest in keeping Stone and Parker happy. South Park had become the backbone of the channel, and on July 21, the company announced a five-year, $1.5 billion streaming deal to keep the episodes coming.

Paramount had canceled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert just before the federal government approved the firm's $8 billion merger with Skydance Media — a move widely viewed as a concession to Trump, who Colbert has regularly pilloried. But this development didn't induce Parker and Stone to play nice. Days later, they used deep-fake technology (and a willing finger) to unveil Trump's miniature genitalia in genuinely horrifying fashion.

The day after the July 23 season premiere, White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers tried to shrug off the slam with typical bluster, saying, "This show hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention" — which Parker and Stone definitely received. Amid the hoopla at Comic Con that day, Parker responded, with maximum sarcasm, "We're terribly sorry."
Just how unapologetic they were was clear when ICE agents appeared in preview images from "Got a Nut," South Park's August 6 episode. The Department of Homeland Security's X account tried to take advantage of the opportunity by pairing one of those images with the link JOIN.ICE.GOV. "We want to thank South Park for drawing attention to ICE law enforcement recruitment,” a Homeland Security rep told Newsweek. "We are calling on patriotic Americans to help us remove murderers, gang members, pedophiles and other violent criminals from our country. Benefits available to new ICE recruits include an up to $50,000 signing bonus."

That last perk was just one of many ICE elements sliced by South Park's satirical scalpel in the August 6 episode. ICE was depicted as throwing cash at potential new hires despite how stupid, lazy, mentally unstable or unqualified they might be. Additionally, Homeland Security Secretary Krisi Noem was shown repeatedly murdering dogs (last year, she proudly wrote about killing her own pooch) during moments when her face wasn't melting; a veritable pit crew kept reattaching it with help from Botox injections. Also spotlighted was a raid at Denver's Ball Arena during which a costumed Dora the Explorer was rounded up; meanwhile, a naked-from-the-waist down Trump tried to lure gentle school counselor-turned-ICE-agent Mr. Mackey into a three-way with him and Satan, aided by a downsized J.D. Vance ready to help apply baby oil.
No one would call the episode's dialogue refined: One running gag pivoted on Cartman's ambition to become a "masterdebater." But jokery at its most juvenile has always been a big part of South Park's appeal.

Indeed, the work of Parker and Stone provides a mighty good argument in favor of arrested adolescence. Their sense of humor is just as unsophisticated as it was when they sat down with Westword in 1993, and that's great news for everyone.

Or at least everyone who's not in shouting distance of Donald Trump.