The All-Time Funniest South Park Episodes

South Park Animated Series funniest South Park episodes

When “Cartman Gets an An-l Probe,” the first episode of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Comedy Central series South Park, premiered on August 13, 1997, no one could have possibly imagined that it would last for over two decades. They would also surely scoff at the show’s impressive awards haul (including five Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award).

Over the years, however, Parker and Stone have proven themselves as some of America’s sharpest satirists, with a knack for pumping out episodes about news stories that just happened. While their tendency to exaggerate political views on both sides of the spectrum has drawn ire from some, it has made many episodes seem even sharper in retrospect. Others, though, have only grown more cringe-inducing over time. From the creatively crass juvenile humor of its earliest seasons to the sophisticated social satire that cemented it as one of the all-time greats, South Park has showcased every type of humor imaginable over its seasons. With over 300 entries to choose from, these stand out as the funniest South Park episodes.

Chinpokomon (Season 3, Episode 11)

South Park Animated Series
Image Credit: South Park Studios.

The Chinpokomon fad has hit South Park! The parents don’t understand it, Kyle struggles to keep up for fear of being left behind, and the local toy store employee notices that some of the talking toys’ pre-programmed lines sound rather anti-American. The plot is funny enough, as the boys fall under the spell of the Japanese Chinpokomon toy fad, eventually revealed to be a scheme by the Japanese government to get revenge on the United States for WWII by turning their children into mindless soldiers.

“Chinpokomon” serves as a perfect dissection of Pokémon and, by extension, all silly childhood fads and how they essentially brainwash everybody into thinking they’re all that matters. The brilliantly bawdy lines given to the Japanese toy company’s representatives about how the American men all have large genitalia as a way of distracting them from their complaints add another hilarious dimension to this Emmy-nominated episode. All that, and a perfectly vicious “Battle of the Network Stars” joke! Let’s all get together and celebrate with our Alabama Man dolls!

The Red Badge of Gayness (Season 3, Episode 14)

South Park Animated Series
Image Credit: South Park Studios.

When Cartman joins the Confederate side of South Park’s annual Civil War reenactment intending to defeat the test of the boys on the Union side, they make a bet that the South won’t win. Whoever loses must serve as the winner’s slave for a month. Never one to let a little thing like history stand in his way, Cartman (dressed as Robert E. Lee) breaks the rules of the reenactment and gets the South to win. When Stan and Kyle point out that the Confederacy still didn’t win the Civil War, Cartman gets the rest of the reenactors drunk on Jagerminz S'more Schnapps and takes them on the path the Confederates would have taken had they won the battle in South Park.

Cartman is on fire in this episode, with Parker adopting a ridiculous, fake, old-timey voice to read the letters Cartman sends home from the front, which makes him sound even more hilariously pompous. Watching the men of South Park get increasingly drunk and then increasingly sheepish as they realize what they’ve done and how they need to get back home to their wives is funny enough, but it doubles as a sharp satire of the Civil War in general. The episode’s final moments are among the series’ best, with Cartman’s memorable scream when his Robert E. Lee beard gets ripped off and a perfectly-timed dig at President Bill Clinton.

Cartman Joins N-MBLA (Season 4, Episode 5)

South Park Animated Series
Image Credit: South Park Studios.

When Cartman realizes that Stan, Kyle, and Kenny don’t share his excitement about politics, he decides to get some more mature friends. In online chatrooms for Men Seeking Boys. Meanwhile, Kenny worries about his parents’ desire for another child and does whatever he can to stop it. The humor kicks into high gear once Cartman becomes the poster child for N-MBLA – the North American Man-Boy Love Association.

Since Cartman remains utterly unaware of what “Man-Boy Love” means to the N-MBLA members until the climax, we get some fantastic double entendres at his expense. Kenny’s storyline is full of hilarious sight gags, including the carnival ride The John Denver Experience, and one of the series’ funniest excrement jokes. The episode even ends with a classic cartoon door chase scene for extra laughs. 

Butters’ Very Own Episode (Season 5, Episode 14)

South Park Animated Series
Image Credit: South Park Studios.

Butters is probably the best character on South Park, a sweet, gullible little boy whose parents will ground him at the drop of a hat. The almost toddler-esque vocal performance by Matt Stone makes nearly everything that comes out of his mouth sound pretty funny, and in this episode devoted to him, he gets a doozy of a story. Butters’ parents’ anniversary approaches, and his mom sends him out to find out what his dad is buying for her. In doing so, Butters inadvertently discovers his dad’s secret gay life, and after Butters presents his evidence, his mom has a nervous breakdown.

The dark material gets punctuated at the end of every scene by the episode’s perfect sitcom theme song: “Everyone knows it’s Butters!” “That’s me!” The dialogue dials the melodrama up to eleven, and Linda Stotch’s frazzled hair and wet eyes make for one of the show’s most hilariously striking pieces of character design, perfectly matched by Mona Marshall’s committed vocal performance. Parker and Stone have structured practically every other line for maximum comic effect, making this quite possibly the funniest episode of South Park ever.

Asspen (Season 6, Episode 2)

South Park Animated Series
Image Credit: South Park Studios.

Sometimes, Matt and Trey go all in on making an homage to a specific storytelling genre, and those episodes can be hit and miss. In “Asspen,” the 80s teen movie gets the South Park treatment, as the boys inadvertently find themselves on the wrong side of the biggest bully of the teenage regulars at a ski resort. Meanwhile, their parents get stuck in a never-ending timeshare presentation, desperately attempting to get one ski run in.

Stan’s ski training montage makes for one of the series’s funniest scenes, underscored by an 80s-styled song singing the praises of training montages. The soundtrack even uses some of the most iconic songs of the decade filtered through a South Park vocal filter for more period fun. Calling out genre tropes in a way that feels fresh, the episode displays a geek-like level of love for its subject that becomes as inescapable as the timeshare salesmen in the parents’ plotline, but in a good way.

The Return of the Fellowship of the Ring to the Two Towers (Season 6, Episode 13)

South Park Animated Series
Image Credit: South Park Studios.

All young boys love p-rn. But if the young boy watching thinks it’s The Lord of the Rings, the world could end up with a Gollum situation, as happens to Butters in this classic episode. Randy has tasked the boys to deliver their rental copy of The Fellowship of the Ring to Butters’s house. Unfortunately, though, he accidentally put the intense p-rn he got for him and Sharon in the wrong box, sending the boys on an increasingly dangerous journey to The Two Towers Video Store to get the seemingly cursed rental out of their lives.

The boys’ insistence on making everything a quest adds fantastic childlike detail, and the episode becomes even more fun as more characters get added. The boys’ LOTR costumes provide some delightful character comedy, and Parker and Stone set up numerous visual references to the film so skillfully that audiences don’t realize it until after they've started laughing. The boys’ reaction to the p-rn escalates slowly but humorously, culminating in Butters following the tape into the video return drop box like Gollum following the One Ring into the fires of Mordor. By the time the horrified parents lecture their kids about consent, sexuality, and all sorts of acts, your response can only mirror that of Stan: “WOW.”

The Biggest D-uche in the Universe (Season 6, Episode 15)

South Park Animated Series
Image Credit: South Park Studios.

After Cartman mistakenly drinks Kenny’s ashes and ends up with Kenny’s soul in his body, the boys and Mrs. Cartman go to Chef for help. Chef takes everyone to John Edwards’s popular psychic TV show Crossing Over, but no one believes his vague generalities. Except for Kyle, who sees the four white doves Edwards told him his grandma wanted him to look for and promptly enrolls at the Jewleeard school. Stan, appalled that his friend would so easily believe this bull, explains all the old mentalist tricks Edwards uses and applies them on random passers-by, but no matter how much he says he’s just guessing or leading someone on, everyone believes that he’s actually talking to the dead.

Funny enough, but South Park can’t stop there, so Stan gets his own John Edwards-style show, and Edwards challenges him to a psychic showdown. This storyline engages in some of the show’s most pointed satire during these scenes, always getting a laugh when the audience members ooh, ah, and applaud Stan’s tricks while he gets increasingly frustrated. In Cartman’s storyline, we meet Chef’s parents in Scotland. Chef’s parents are two of the funniest barely-recurring characters in the show’s arsenal, and this episode shows why. So many of their asides and tangents land solely because of the crazed commitment of the vocal performances. And the humor doesn’t even stop there, with increasingly deranged Rob Schneider movie trailers, starting with a thinly veiled spoof and ending with Schneider eating the pot roast with Kenny’s soul and becoming Kenny, which… we’d maybe kind of want to see?

Christian Rock Hard (Season 7, Episode 9)

South Park Animated Series
Image Credit: South Park Studios.

When the boys’ rock band Moop can’t decide on a sound, Cartman quits, betting that he will make a platinum album before Kyle. Naturally, since he knows enough about Christianity to exploit it, he forms a Christian rock band. In a classic example of South Park exaggeration, Cartman’s songs treat Jesus as a lover, taking well-known love songs and rewriting them to be about the son of God. Songs like “Three Times My Savior,” “Jesus Baby,” and the instant classic “Body of Christ” get showcased during a dead-on parody of those Time-Life compilation album commercials.

While Stan, Kyle, and Kenny’s storyline, which finds them learning about the dangers of downloading music via Napster, feels a bit outdated now, it’s still full of hilarious line deliveries, like the Sheriff’s increasingly exaggerated “not a big deal?!” And to top it all off, Cartman receives an all-timer comeuppance: Learning that Christian albums can’t go Platinum (but can go Double Myrrh!), he destroys the band’s Myrrh album plaque at the giant ceremony he spent all the band’s money on, publicly humiliating himself and getting the most satisfying “f— you, Eric” from Butters. 

Grey Dawn (Season 7, Episode 10)

South Park Animated Series
Image Credit: South Park Studios.

When the senior citizens of South Park start causing deadly automobile accidents trying to get to Country Kitchen Buffet, the town decides to take their licenses away. Stan’s grandpa calls the AARP in, and they take over the town, annexing the adults until they get their demands – not just their licenses, but stopping kids from skateboarding on the sidewalks, too!

The older people's voices on South Park are funny enough on their own, but here they’re the focus for several hilarious setpieces – each car crash is wilder than the last – and both the verbal and physical comedy are top-notch. Watching a sweet old grandma fire a rocket launcher is just inherently funny in a way that watching a younger adult doing it just isn’t, you know? It may be just the one joke, but Parker and Stone find an impressive number of funny variations on it.

Casa Bonita (Season 7, Episode 11)

South Park Animated Series
Image Credit: South Park Studios.

Cartman’s climactic run through the Mexican theme park restaurant has become one of the show’s most iconic moments, undoubtedly a series highlight. The rest of the episode builds up to it steadily, with lots of little laughs along the way until that big explosion at the end. The plot – Cartman hides Butters in a bomb shelter and an abandoned refrigerator in hopes of stealing his place at Kyle’s birthday party at Casa Bonita, Cartman’s favorite restaurant – gives us a classic Cartman/Butters adventure as Cartman’s attempts to keep Butters hidden become increasingly dramatic, culminating with Cartman giving an Oscar-worthy performance of fighting a zombie.

The sequence where a garbage woman finds Butters and he shows her around his makeshift town (complete with a statue of Cartman, the man who saved him from the apocalypse) before pulling his pants down so that they can begin the process of repopulating the Earth, zings with comedic energy, and it slides perfectly into that magnificent final sequence, as exhilarating as anything South Park has ever done.

Good Times With Weapons (Season 8, Episode 1)

South Park Animated Series
Image Credit: South Park Studios.

The boys pretend to be orphans to buy ninja weapons they can play with and show off to the other boys in town, leading to some pitch-perfect Japanese anime-style animation of the boys as their ninja alter egos. The character design alone elicits laughs (especially for Cartman), but the song “Let’s Fighting Love” pushes it into a top-tier anime parody.

The boys determine that the only way to avoid getting in trouble is to dress up Butters like a dog and take him to the vet, which involves gluing dog hair on his body, making Butters look even more hilariously pathetic than usual. Everything culminates in a gut-busting finale when Cartman uses his “power of invisibility” to sneak past everyone… by taking off his clothes and walking across the stage during an auction. In one of the series’s most scathing bits of satire, the adults are not outraged by the violence of Butters getting a ninja star in his eye but by Cartman's clothesless appearance at the auction.

You Got F’d in the A (Season 8, Episode 4)

South Park Animated Series
Image Credit: South Park Studios.

Most people in the real world didn’t understand You Got Served at first either, so it’s only understandable that the kids in South Park would be confused when a group of Park City kids approach them out of nowhere and start dancing in their faces, telling them they just got served. The boys know nothing about dancing, so Randy teaches Kyle how to line dance to “Achy Breakey Heart,” and before Stan knows it, he has to build a crew to compete with the Park City kids. After getting Goth kid Michael (who is such a non-conformist that he “Goth serves” the others by refusing to conform with them and unexpectedly joins Stan’s crew), Raisins girl Mercedes, and an Asian teen named Yao, who has mastered the art of Dance Dance Revolution, he only needs one more person: Butters, the former state tap dance champion.

The reveal of what happened at the tap dance championships that traumatized Butters so much that he vowed never to dance again contains some of the series’s most violent imagery and the fact that it all came from Butters, the sweetest person in South Park, only adds to the scene’s gut-busting hilarity. Butters eventually dons his tap shoes again to help his friends, only for tragedy to strike again in the exact same way, ending the episode on the funniest note possible. Bonus points for the song accompanying Butters’s championship performance, the hilariously risqué “I’ve Got Something in My Front Pocket for You.”

AWESOM-O (Season 8, Episode 5)

South Park Animated Series
Image Credit: South Park Studios.

Episodes focusing on Cartman and Butters have consistently given us some of South Park’s funniest moments. “AWESOM-O,” in which Cartman dresses himself up as a Japanese robot to play a prank on Butters only to be forced to stay in character longer in the hopes of finding a tape Butters has of Cartman dressed up as Britney Spears kissing and dancing with a life-size Justin Timberlake cutout, takes the cake as the best of them. Few moments in South Park feel so sadly funny as Butters’s distraught reprise of “Let Me Tell You About My Robot Friend,” the delightful theme song he sings earlier in the episode over a perfectly judged friendship montage. Cartman’s protestations over some things that Butters asks AWESOM-O to do and the relaxed way in which Butters laughs them off are extremely funny.

Later, though, the episode bares its satirical fangs when Butters takes his robot with him on a trip to Los Angeles, where Hollywood executives offer Butters $100 for each movie idea it comes up with: Out of a thousand movie pitches in a week, eight hundred feature Adam Sandler, because of course that’s what Cartman would pitch, and no one questions it at all. Even funnier, Cartman has to watch as Butters sends all the money from his pitches to charity and, of course, gets his ultimate comeuppance when Butters inevitably finds out the truth of what’s inside his robot after Cartman farts in costume. That ending, one of the most satisfying of any South Park episode, cements this episode’s place as one of the series’s all-time best.

Woodland Critter Christmas (Season 8, Episode 14)

South Park Animated Series
Image Credit: South Park Studios.

“It’s almost time when the time is here, the time that’s only once a year! We can hardly wait ‘cause it’s so near: A Woodland Critter Christmas!” The delight of a rhyming Christmas special meets the violence of the film Event Horizon in the show’s most demented Christmas episode. The episode begins as a cheery, cheeky spoof of old-timey Christmas television specials, with some typical South Park humor in how Stan fights the conventions of the genre.

The events get more and more twisted, however, until the episode descends into chaos at the halfway point when the adorable woodland critters (Beary the Bear, Rabbity the Rabbit, etc.) reveal to the shocked Stan that they worship Satan, who has impregnated Porcupiney the Porcupine with the Antichrist, and start a blood o-gy to celebrate. The events grow more and more ludicrous until the side-splitting final reveal that this has all been a story that Cartman wrote for a school assignment, with Kyle willingly serving as a vessel for the Antichrist until a group of lion cubs give him an abortion through his posterior. Only Parker and Stone could come up with a Christmas episode this blasphemously heartwarming and turn it into one of the funniest South Park episodes. 

The Losing Edge (Season 9, Episode 5)

South Park Animated Series
Image Credit: South Park Studios.

One of the most reliably hilarious forms of humor on South Park comes from the adults acting just as childish as the boys. No episode exemplifies this more than “The Losing Edge,” in which nobody notices nor cares that the kids don’t want to play on a Little League team but force them to anyway for their own enjoyment. And then there’s Randy, who makes each game about himself defending his town’s honor against whatever dad from the other team takes his bait. This leads to one of Randy’s most-memed moments, drunkenly telling the cops arresting him: “I’m sorry, I thought this was America!”

The inversion of sports tropes from all the Little League teams trying to lose instead of win leads to some hilarious bits, but the episode plays around with genre most in Randy’s storyline, especially once South Park makes it to the playoffs. There, he meets “Bat Dad,” a Denver parent who’s bigger and crazier than Randy, who then starts believing he’s not good enough to go to the playoffs. The episode’s use of Joe Esposito’s “You’re The Best” from The Karate Kid makes everything funnier, underscoring a hilarious montage of baseball games and Randy’s fights as well as the giggle-inducing freeze-frame finish.

Trapped in the Closet (Season 9, Episode 12)

South Park Animated Series
Image Credit: South Park Studios.

It may be an obvious joke, but nobody can make brilliance out of the obvious quite like Parker and Stone. When Stan takes a Church of Scientology “personality test,” they discover thetan levels so high that they determine he can only be the second coming of L. Ron Hubbard. Naturally, Tom Cruise shows up at Stan’s house wanting to be blessed by the prophet, but when Stan refuses, Cruise locks himself in Stan’s closet and refuses to come out, at one point hilariously denying the fact that he’s even in the closet at all. John Travolta even ends up in there with him after being unable to convince him to come out.

It’s an obvious joke, but R. Kelly showing up narrating the whole experience in the style of his massive hit story song “Trapped in the Closet” takes the episode to breathless heights of laughter. The legendary “This is What Scientologists Actually Believe” segment also tickles the funny bone, but the stinger of an ending, in which the Scientologists reject Stan as the second coming because he doesn’t believe the Church should charge people money, ends up getting the biggest laughs of all. 

Tsst (Season 10, Episode 7)

South Park Animated Series
Image Credit: South Park Studios.

Problem child Cartman has finally become too much for his mother, so Lianne calls in the only authority that might be able to help: Reality shows Nanny 911 and Supernanny. Neither of them is any match for Eric, but then Lianne calls in Cesar Milan, the dog whisperer, and he cracks the code by treating Eric like a dog. Eric even starts acting like a dog in increasingly funny ways, like jumping up and down begging for a piece of KFC, and hanging his head in shame when he’s finally broken. It works almost too well, resulting in Cartman vomiting bile and transforming into a well-mannered young man who eats grapefruit for breakfast while finishing his schoolwork. The difference in his behavior grows too much for Lianne, and in the final moments of the episode, she bribes him to go on an outing with her after Milan turns her down, offering him anything he wants.

Just like that, Cartman snaps back to his old self, with the episode ending on a perfect parody of the ending of the 70s horror classic The Omen. The nanny show parodies have spot-on graphics and narration, and Eric’s psychoanalysis of Nanny Stella is one of his most ruthless, jaw-droppingly hilarious moments. The scene of Lianne walking Eric like a dog, complete with a leash attached to a harness, has not gotten any less funny even after all of his antics in the subsequent seasons. 

Make Love, Not Warcraft (Season 10, Episode 8)

South Park Animated Series
Image Credit: South Park Studios.

Perfectly satirizing the hero’s journey narrative at the heart of so many D&D-like games, Randy must get a special piece of code on a USB stick to Stan in the MMORPG World of Warcraft to stop a high-level player who would rather kill other player characters than play the game. The boys have been prepping and fighting him for days without stopping, allowing the animators to come up with hilariously grotesque, sedentary teenage versions of our core four. Cartman calling his mom with the single word “BATHROOM!” leads to one of the most disgustingly hilarious scatological jokes in one of the funniest South Park episodes ever.

The state-of-the-art graphics of the in-game scenes (created with the help of WOW creators Blizzard Entertainment) make this one of the most unique episodes of the series, and the show takes the opportunity for some different forms of visual humor. Once again, though, Randy steals the show, hilariously overplaying his WOW character’s death scene with the shameless abandon of a born LARP-er.

Butters’ Bottom B—- (Season 13, Episode 9)

South Park Animated Series
Image Credit: South Park Studios.

If any character on any TV show would ever become an ethical pimp, it would be Leopold “Butters” Stotch. After receiving his first kiss from Sally Darson at recess for $5, Butters feels the weight of being a man pressing down on him and decides to make some money by bringing Sally more customers for a cut of her profits. Unsurprisingly, this leads to Butters becoming the head of a prostitution ring. The premise alone assures laughter, and it becomes even funnier in action as Butters applies real-life business knowledge to Sally’s kissing and gets some advice on human relations from actual pimps and their hoes at the 36th Annual Playa’s Ball.

The ridiculousness of having elementary school students excitedly building a kissing company like it was a lemonade stand, not realizing what they’re doing, actually makes some salient points about street walking by putting it in a different light. The B-story, in which Detective Yates goes undercover to catch the men hiring prostitutes from the new ring that’s popped up in town, offers some incredibly raunchy gags to support Butters’s storyline. Still, there’s nothing funnier than Butters adopting the pimp slang, whether in class asking Wendy if she wants to “make some motherf—ing money” or trying to get a loan in a ludicrous parody of the ACORN undercover video controversy.

Medicinal Fried Chicken (Season 14, Episode 3)

South Park Animated Series
Image Credit: South Park Studios.

When done well, juvenile humor can tickle the funny bone in a way few other things can. Anyone looking for peak juvenile humor, just put on “Medicinal Fried Chicken,” in which the adult men of South Park give themselves testicular cancer by microwaving them so many times that they become large enough to sit on. Why would they do such a thing? To get a license for medical marijuana, obviously! And when they get high, how else would they get around other than by bouncing along on their testicles?

The image of Randy, Jimbo, Ned, Nelson, and the rest bouncing up and down on their comically enlarged ballsacks like they were pogo sticks will bring even the most dour person to tears with laughter, especially with the absurd musical backing track. The B-story, involving Cartman getting into the business of black market KFC and falling afoul of Colonel Sanders, may feel more rote, but the scene of Randy struggling to get his oversized testicles through the dispensary door? Peak animated physical comedy. On top of all that, the episode offers pointed, timely social commentary on Colorado laws around medical marijuana and restricting fast food eateries.

HUMANCENTiPAD (Season 15, Episode 1)

South Park Animated Series
Image Credit: South Park Studios.

Forever immortalized in the documentary 6 Days to Air, “HumancentiPad” memorably combines the new (at the time) Apple iPad and the horror sensation The Human Centipede to satirize the cult around Apple, from the “Genius” Apple Store workers to the blind signing of the new User Agreements that accompany their frequent software updates. After Kyle gets abducted by Apple because the iTunes User Agreement allows them to experiment on anyone who signs it, he becomes part of their newest product, the titular HumancentiPad: Three people sewn together so that they have one gastrointestinal tract going through them, with a touchscreen on either end.

Thus, we get the classic South Park gross-out gag of watching the Japanese man at the front of the HumancentiPad eat something disgusting and immediately defecate it directly into Kyle’s mouth, who then defecates that directly into the mouth of the poor woman at the end of the device. The funniest part of the episode, though, comes from Cartman’s storyline, which involves him wanting a new iPad so desperately that every obstacle his mom throws in his way prompts a response about how she’s f—ing him. Cartman’s outburst in Best Buy when his mom suggests they buy the cheaper Toshiba HandiBook instead is South Park at its gleefully profane best.

A Nightmare on FaceTime (Season 16, Episode 12)

South Park Animated Series
Image Credit: South Park Studios.

Of course, Randy Marsh would think buying a Blockbuster in 2012 was a good idea. When nobody comes, primarily due to RedBox machines and Netflix being more convenient, he slowly goes insane in the style of Jack Torrance in The Shining. This spot-on parody has a lot of fun with references to the movie, no more so than in the episode’s final scene, in which Randy – frozen like Jack Nicholson in the film – ekes out tiny, pathetic-sounding answers to Sharon’s patronizing questions about returning their lives to normal.

The boys rig up an iPad with Stan on a FaceTime call so that they can try to win a costume contest, only for everyone to mistake a green-painted Cartman for Bruce Vilanch and Honey Boo Boo, which makes for some good laughs with the boys, especially when the storylines collide and Randy ends up on the FaceTime call instead, as a Gangnam Style-Frankenstein mashup.

The Black Friday/A Song of A– and Fire trilogy (Season 17, Episodes 7-9)

South Park Animated Series
Image Credit: South Park Studios.

The funniest trilogy the series has done to date, this Game of Thrones parody set in the run-up to a Black Friday sale at the South Park mall stands as one of the most ambitious things Parker and Stone have ever done. Littered with classic moments – the Princess Kenny anime theme song, the “Weiner” chorus, the guy yelling at Cartman to stop betraying people in his garden – Parker and Stone left no comedic stone unturned when writing these episodes.

The “Garden of Betrayal” scenes perfectly parody Thrones’s political machinations, and the initial reveal of Cartman’s trespassing only gets funnier in each repetition because the stakes get raised each time. Aside from the Game of Thrones stuff, the Xbox vs. Playstation storyline has only gotten funnier with time, playing up the tiniest differences between the two systems as life-or-death choices.

You’re Not Yelping (Season 19, Episode 4)

South Park Animated Series
Image Credit: South Park Studios.

After getting a Whole Foods in town, more restaurants arrive, bringing along an influx of Yelp reviewers. Everyone on Yelp treats themselves like a professional food critic, adopting hoity-toity attitudes and using their status to get tables at busy restaurants, free food, and an atmosphere more to their liking. When Kyle’s dad Gerald dons a fashion scarf and smokes a pipe while writing an over-written ode to Applebee’s that ends with a dig at the parking and a 2.5-star rating, you have to laugh at the overbaked pompousness. The hilarity only increases once Cartman calls a meeting of all the town Yelpers after the restaurants fight back against their demands and stop serving them.

Everyone believes they are the number one Yelper in South Park, the only person who can lead the group as the town’s foremost food critic. The razor-sharp skewering of internet reviews hits home, but the pointed and playful look at human nature lands the biggest laughs, culminating in the ridiculous, ridiculously catchy song “Boogers & C–,” named after the bodily fluids that restaurant workers will add to whatever the Yelpers order in South Park’s restaurants from now on – the perfect cherry on top of this sundae of an episode.

Author: Dan Bayer

Expertise: Film, Theater, Dance

Bio:

Daniel Bayer is a New York-based film and theater reviewer and awards pundit. Dan has been in love with movies all his life, in love with the theater since he could sit still, and in love with tap dance since seeing Singin' in the Rain at nine years old. A nationally-ranked dancer in his teens, his theater credits are many and varied, both behind and on the stage. After getting his degree in Theater Studies from Emory University, he worked for an Off Broadway theater company for five years. Dan began writing about film in 2012 for The Film Experience, and joined the team at Next Best Picture in 2017. Since then he has covered major international film festivals such as the Berlinale, the New York Film Festival, SXSW, and the Toronto International Film Festival. A proud member of GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics, Dan is a fixture on the AwardsWatch and Next Best Picture podcasts, breaking down the Oscar race year-round.