So far, South Park’s 27th season has had one clear goal: to provoke Donald Trump into a tantrum. Every episode has managed to pick on a new and different facet of his authoritarian rule – the silencing of his media critics, his use of Ice agents as an intimidation tactic – while simultaneously telling everyone what a tiny penis he has.
So the anticipation levels were off the charts for this week’s episode, entitled Wok Is Dead, which promised to take on Trump’s tariff policy. And in fairness it did do this, but only in a couple of scenes where a Chinese character with an uncomfortably Mickey Rooney-esque accent complained about them. The rest of the episode just settled for a bunch of jokes about Labubu dolls, as well as calling Donald Trump “Satan” as many times as it feasibly could.
For the most part, Wok Is Dead found itself split in two. The bulk of the episode was taken up with a very traditional South Park storyline about a cultural fad pushed to extremes. Everyone at South Park Elementary has become obsessed with Labubu dolls, a line of vaguely creepy collectible plush dolls sold in mystery boxes. In real life, the Labubu craze has been ramped up to the level of fidget spinners and loom bands before them, prompting the market to be flooded with a rush of carelessly manufactured fakes that potentially pose a danger to children.
In the world of South Park, however, the dolls prompt satanic rituals, with children sacrificing poultry and summoning plagues in their desire to find ever-rarer dolls, much to the dismay of Jesus, who is serving as the school counsellor. And that’s about it for that particular storyline. It’s South Park by numbers: find something newly popular, mock it for 20 minutes, and then go home.
But that isn’t why people have been watching South Park in record numbers this year. No, they’re doing that because of how nakedly aggressive the show has been towards Trump. And this week it chose to achieve this by having as many characters as possible repeat the line: “Donald Trump is fucking Satan.”
This is for two reasons. First, throughout the season it has been evident that the cartoon Donald Trump has literally been having sexual intercourse with the devil, who makes a reappearance after his dalliance with Saddam Hussein in the South Park movie. Second, maybe the writers just wanted to call Trump “Satan” a bunch of times.
In essence, this was South Park pulling the same trick it did with its controversial 2005 episode Trapped in the Closet, in which Tom Cruise locked himself inside a cupboard while everyone around him repeatedly stated: “Tom Cruise won’t come out of the closet.” On one hand, Tom Cruise was literally inside a closet. On the other, it was winking at unproven rumours about his sexuality.
However, Trapped in the Closet had a grander aim, which was to describe the opaque beliefs of Scientologists. And it worked. Not only was it one of the best episodes of South Park ever made, but it changed the way the world talks about Scientology.
Meanwhile, the aim of Wok Is Dead (aside from showing its disdain for Labubu dolls) seems to be to call Donald Trump Satan. Which, compared with the anger and specificity of the episodes preceding it, feels a little lazy. From everything we know about Trump, it feels like the jabs that land the hardest are the ones that undermine his ego, which is why he expends so much effort responding to claims about the size of his hands. Meanwhile, comparing him to Satan – the all-powerful embodiment of evil – feels as if it might actually be taken as a compliment.
Still, the payoff to everybody saying “Donald Trump is fucking Satan” so often is that Satan is now pregnant with Donald Trump’s butt baby, which is bound to play out in future episodes somehow.
If you’re a fan of South Park, then Wok Is Dead’s scattershot cultural satire will have more than passed muster. But for those of us who have been tuning in to watch Trey Parker and Matt Stone take down Trump, it represents the first disappointment of the season. Perhaps it’s a blip, but this week’s episode suggests that Parker and Stone are starting to run low on ammunition, and want to broaden their horizons away from Trump in future episodes.
Still, if that’s the case, the outcome would be a regular South Park season, and there are many worse things than that.
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