Gross And Grosser

By JAMES COLLINS

To understand South Park, it is necessary to understand Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo; and to understand Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo, it is necessary to understand his origins as recently described by Trey Parker, one of the show's creators. Now, it may not be immediately obvious why anyone would want to understand a series that features a stool specimen wearing a sailor hat and speaking with the voice of a castrato ventriloquist. But South Park, a cartoon about four profane third-graders, is the latest giant asteroid to slam into American pop culture, and so it requires our attention. Fortunately, it is also very funny, and Parker, 28, and his partner Matt Stone, 26, are the most genial purveyors of poo imaginable.

"One day, I think I was three or four," Parker recalled, speaking at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo., two weeks ago, "I guess I had a problem with flushing the toilet. Like I would go poo and then wouldn't flush it. And my mother would yell at me and yell at me. And so my dad--the geologist on South Park is my dad--my dad said, 'Well, Trey, you need to flush the toilet because if you don't, Mr. Hankey is going to come out and kill you.' And I'm like, 'What do you mean?' And he goes, 'Well, it just sits there, and you flush it. But if you don't, he'll come to life, and he sings a little song, and he kills you.'"

So Parker and Stone's most shocking invention is actually autobiographical. That is very revealing and confirms what one suspects while watching the show: that its creators are not simply out to offend people but are exploring the surreal terrors of childhood. The show would not be so funny, and its outrageous humor would not be shaded by such fear and poignancy, if it weren't an imaginative re-creation of authentic experience. Speaking to the Aspen audience, Stone said, "Face it, fart jokes are funny." This is profoundly true, and no one would want to take these jokes away from South Park. But, yes, it offers still more.

The show concerns four friends--Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny--who live in the small town of South Park, Colo. Obsessed by bodily functions, sometimes cruel but with a core of innocence, Kyle and Stan are modeled on Parker and Stone, while Cartman, the greedy fat kid, is a deranged fantasy figure and Kenny, who talks in meaningless muffled squeaks, dies violently in each episode (except the Christmas one). Kyle's exclamation, "Oh, my God, they've killed Kenny!," has become a catchphrase. The only sympathetic adult is Chef, the cook at the school, who drifts into a racy R.-and-B. number whenever he tries to give the boys a wholesome lesson in song (Isaac Hayes does the voice). As for the plots, in one episode aliens send a huge anal probe into Cartman; in another, "Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride," Stan follows his dog to a sort of amusement park for homosexual pets. "Stan's dog's a homo!" is a typical line from that show. While the series is now created on a computer, Parker and Stone first used construction paper in their animation, which retains a flat, crude look with leaps into the fantastic. Altogether, the effect is Peanuts by way of Tim Burton.

South Park mania began almost as soon as the show debuted on Comedy Central last summer (it is shown on Wednesdays at 10 p.m. E.T.), and it has become the top-rated series on cable, seen by some 5 million people every week. While that is less than a third of the audience for the other animated adult hits, The Simpsons and King of the Hill, it is an impressive number, since Comedy Central is available in only about half the nation's homes. Not surprisingly, South Park is particularly strong among the 18-to-24-year-olds so coveted by advertisers. Viewing parties are the rage on many college campuses, where activities grind to a halt at showtime. Five percent of the audience is under 11 years old. It is the only regular series on TV to carry a Mature or MA rating, the harshest, and it can be blocked by the V chip. The best-selling T shirt last year was based on South Park; a movie deal is all but set; a sound-track album is being produced--can a theme-park ride be far behind?

Parker is from a small town in Colorado, and Stone grew up in a Denver suburb; they met when they attended film school at the state university in Boulder. In 1994 Brian Graden, who was an executive at Fox, saw their live-action film Cannibal: The Musical, and the connection that led to South Park was made. Graden says he couldn't get anyone interested in Cannibal, South Park or other ideas he tried to develop with Parker and Stone, among them a TV series about two apes who hang upside down and sing. To help his proteges pay the rent, Graden hired Parker and Stone to make a video Christmas card for him.

The result was The Spirit of Christmas, a 5-min. animated short in which Jesus and Santa Claus fight and curse each other over who has the bigger claim to the holiday. "I was supposed to send it to 500 people on my executive kiss-a__ list," says Graden, who has since moved to MTV. "And I saw it and thought, O.K., this is the funniest thing I've ever seen, but I can't send it to studio heads. So I sent it to about 40 friends, most of them not even in the business." Nevertheless, the tape was copied and passed around, and became an insider sensation.

Now everybody wants a piece of Parker and Stone. All the networks are interested in whatever they do for their next TV show, as are various production companies ranging from DreamWorks to Warner Bros. to Fox to Paramount. But Comedy Central isn't about to let them go. The network is renegotiating their contract upwards, and will make the change retroactive to South Park's debut. It is also seeking a long-term commitment from the pair.

Meanwhile, October Films will bring out Orgazmo, a feature-film porn parody written, directed and starred in by Parker, and produced and acted in by Stone. They are writing the screenplay of the prequel to Dumb and Dumber for New Line Cinema, and they are acting in BASEketball, a film by David Zucker, part of the team that made the Airplane! movies, which Stone and Parker greatly admire. BASEketball is shooting now, and Zucker says of his stars, "They're up all hours. They work all day on this movie, then they go and write South Park. They have people on the set constantly coming up to them with plotlines and other things that demand their direction."

Graden says Parker and Stone are two of the sweetest people he has ever met, and others use the same words about them. They seem to be easygoing and unpretentious. Despite their irreverence, they aren't a pair of would-be Lenny Bruces living on comedy's dangerous edge. Whatever one's view of South Park, it's hard to dislike two filmmakers whose greatest heroes are the members of Monty Python and who talk about them with such enthusiasm. "To this day, when our heads are getting a little big," Stone says, "if we go and put on an old Flying Circus or something, you just watch that and you're like, 'What the hell are we doing?'" The two take an appealingly humorous view of their success. In Hollywood, executives sometimes actually pay to be the first to hear a hot writer's ideas, and Parker and Stone joke that they're going to charge $40,000 and then just go in and improvise.

All in all, then, the South Park phenomenon is a benign one. Nevertheless, there is a problem: while the show has many virtues, it should be smarter and more surprising. It's a pretty stale idea now to think that Streisand and David Hasselhoff and MacGyver are instant punch lines, and in general Parker and Stone express too much fascination with cheesy pop culture, a subject whose interest has been exhausted. As for their "satire," is it really so very clever to give Jesus a public-access show? Were not stoned sophomores dreaming up this sort of thing 20 years ago? Most troubling is that the series already seems to be running low on imagination, which even the most maniacally contrived sequences cannot hide.

Still, South Park can be inspired, and not only on account of its vibrant vulgarity. It has subtle touches too, like the traffic sign that looms above the boys as they wait for the school bus at the beginning of most episodes. The sign, one of those iconic warnings to drivers that children are at play, shows a little girl and boy running hand in hand. This is the kind of vernacular image that Parker and Stone, like so many visual artists, love to use, and here it quietly sounds the notes of childhood and danger, two subjects at the heart of South Park. Just ask Kenny.

--Reported by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles