America has always needed its court jesters. Kings and presidents come and go, ruling with pomp, paranoia, and paranoia dressed up as policy. But the jester—the clown with a knife behind the punchline—never leaves. In 2025, that jester wears a Colorado beanie, carries a construction paper sign, and is contractually obligated to Paramount+ for $1.5 billion dollars while simultaneously calling their bosses idiots.
That’s right: South Park has returned, sharper, meaner, and, God help us, timely. And against all odds, it is working.
Why South Park Is the Only Show That Can Touch Trump
It’s not that other comedians aren’t trying. Late-night monologues and Twitter memes have been in a constant Red Bull-fueled race to dunk on Trump since he descended that escalator in 2015 like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon that ran out of helium. But most satire has a fatal flaw—it assumes shame works.
Trump has no shame. He doesn’t just survive mockery; he metabolizes it like a photosynthetic lizard basking in the ultraviolet glow of your disdain. Which is why Jon Stewart rolling his eyes, or SNL trotting out Alec Baldwin again, lands with all the force of a damp sponge.
South Park, though? South Park doesn’t play shame. South Park plays vulgar absurdity, a relentless carnival where everyone is equally stupid, grotesque, and worthy of ridicule. That’s the language Trump speaks. You don’t embarrass him—you out-crude him, out-shameless him, and turn his whole act into a parody so shameless even he looks like a supporting character.
So when Cartman decides to join ICE because “they have better jackets,” or Mr. Garrison-as-Trump interrupts his own cabinet meeting to hawk steaks and NFTs, it hits. Because it’s not parody in the traditional sense—it’s escalation, a feedback loop of idiocy where reality and cartoon sprint each other off the cliff.
The Corporate Irony: $1.5 Billion to Be Mocked
Here’s the part that makes me laugh hardest. Paramount+, the perpetually “up next” streaming service you only remember exists when you’re trying to find RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, is the one footing the bill. A five-year, $1.5 billion pact for Matt Stone and Trey Parker to not only make episodes, but to directly roast Paramount itself.
And they wasted zero time.
In the premiere, a parody ad for “Paramount+ Plus Plus” offers subscribers “all the shows you didn’t want on Paramount in the first place, plus your dad’s VHS porn collection.” Another gag showed the Paramount logo cracking apart as executives scramble to staple it back together with Post-it notes labeled “Merger” and “Synergy.”
This, mind you, while Paramount is still writing checks to Trump himself—$16 million to settle that lawsuit after the network pulled out of airing one of his post-presidential rallies.
The math is exquisite: Paramount pays Trump, Paramount pays South Park, and South Park uses Paramount’s money to clown both Trump and Paramount. If capitalism ever needed a mirror held to its face, this is it: the ouroboros of corporations eating their own tail while we laugh at the digestion.
Why It’s Landing in 2025
Let’s be blunt. People are exhausted. The news cycle is basically a kaleidoscope duct-taped to a hamster wheel. Between Trump’s “productive” but utterly detail-free summit with Putin, hurricanes intensifying on climate steroids, and billionaires launching rockets to colonize their midlife crises, the average American is too numb to laugh at traditional satire.
But South Park doesn’t ask you to laugh politely. It grabs you by the throat with a fart joke, then sucker-punches you with a line about DHS surveillance creep. It’s comedy as blunt force trauma, and in 2025, that’s exactly the level of anesthesia we need.
Nearly six million people tuned in for the premiere. Episode two cracked 6.2 million across platforms. For comparison, that’s bigger than many NFL regular-season games. Why? Because people want something that matches the madness of reality. And frankly, a cartoon about a fat kid screaming at Alexa feels more realistic than whatever Trump said about “next time in Moscow.”
The Trump Paradox: A Character Who Writes Himself
You don’t even have to exaggerate Trump to make him a South Park character—he’s already a grotesque caricature. He speaks in run-on monologues, contradicts himself mid-sentence, and obsesses over ratings like a high school theater kid reading Yelp reviews.
South Park has leaned into this. Instead of pretending Trump is a master manipulator, they treat him like what he is: a toddler with nuclear launch codes. In one scene, he’s shown trading Alaska to Putin in exchange for a gold-plated golf cart. In another, he interrupts peace negotiations to complain about Nicolle Wallace’s ratings, then declares “MSNBC IS DEAD!” while holding a McRib.
Sound familiar? It should—it’s ripped directly from his own Truth Social feed.
When the Network Is the Joke
One of the most daring threads this season is how gleefully Stone and Parker are biting the hand that feeds them.
Take the fake Paramount+ boardroom scenes: executives sit around a giant Monopoly board labeled “STREAMING WARS” while drawing names out of a hat—“Okay, so this week, One Piece spinoff, Yellowstone: Montana Side Quest, and a documentary about koalas who vape.”
Or the gag where the boys try to watch South Park itself, only to discover it’s split across three separate Paramount subscription tiers, each more expensive than the last. “You want Kenny’s death scene? That’s Paramount+ Max Ultra. $14.99 extra.”
The show is telling us outright: yes, streaming is a scam, and yes, you’re paying too much. And the audience? We’re eating it up, because it’s the rare moment a corporation is forced to broadcast its own scam with a laugh track.
The Legacy of Vulgarity
What makes this season feel almost historic is how it’s reminding us why satire matters. We don’t laugh to make pain disappear—we laugh because it’s the only tool we have left to name what we see.
South Park is crude, yes. It’s offensive, often deliberately. But beneath the fart jokes is something genuinely subversive: the insistence that power is always ridiculous. Presidents, police, pop stars, Paramount—none are sacred cows. All are just targets, waiting for construction-paper animation to skewer them.
And maybe that’s why, after nearly 30 years, the show feels sharper than ever. Because in a world where politics itself looks like bad improv, only a cartoon can tell the truth.
Closing Beat: Laughing at the Apocalypse
As I finish writing this, Trump is probably posting “BELAAA” into the void, Putin is probably annexing a cafeteria in Ukraine, and Paramount is probably announcing yet another Yellowstone prequel starring Kevin Costner’s chiropractor.
Meanwhile, South Park will keep doing what it does best—making us laugh, cringe, and see the circus for what it is.
The joke isn’t just on Trump. Or Paramount. Or ICE. The joke is on all of us, trying to make sense of a world that stopped making sense years ago.
And that’s why we keep tuning in. Not because it’s comfortable, but because it’s the only comedy left that feels like reality.