The apportioning of responsibility will come as a relief to devotees of the animation, who have grown accustomed to it treating nothing and nobody as sacred. "I can't go into the thinking behind it, but I can confirm it was Comedy Central that inserted the bleeps and not South Park," a spokesman for the station said. "Do you seriously think that will appease the extremists from more terrorism?" one wrote.Īs controversy raged, Comedy Central confessed that it was responsible for the cuts. In the aftermath of the show's censorship, the chatrooms on South Park's website hummed with the indignation of its fans. They also listed the New York headquarters of Comedy Central, the cable television channel that broadcasts the show, and South Park's production company, adding: "You can pay them a visit at these addresses." To underline the point, the website carried a picture of Van Gogh, the Dutch film-maker killed in 2004 after he made a documentary on the abuse of women in Muslim countries, with his throat cut and a knife in his chest. The group, through its website, had reacted to last week's episode of South Park which first depicted Muhammad dressed as a bear by saying its originators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, "will probably wind up like Theo van Gogh". The censorship followed a warning from a New York-based group of extremist Muslim converts that could be construed as a death threat. Fans and pundits alike were taken aback last night when an episode featuring the prophet Muhammad purportedly dressed in a bear costume had bleeps and "Censored" blocks slapped liberally throughout to remove all audio and visual reference to the prophet. Now the caustic animated satire appears to have reached its limits within the confines of mainstream US television. Mormons, Scientologists, Catholics, Jews, politicians and film stars have all been skewered on the razor-sharp wit of South Park. They have depicted the Queen blowing her brains out after a failed attempt by the British army to reinvade America, Saddam Hussein as Satan's gay lover, and Jesus as a trigger-happy superhero.
In fact, Muhammad appeared in 2001, too about a threat against makers of the satirical cartoon series South Park. The article below said that Islam's prophet has featured twice in the series: this year, and in 2006. But at best they were a reminder that, like Tenorman, South Park never forgets an insult.The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday 28 April 2010 “200” and “201” weren’t in the league of “Scott Tenorman,” nor could we expect them to be. Said Cartman’s now-insane tormentor, “Revenge is a dish best served-chili!” And the episode climaxed with a callback to what I would have to rank as the best South Park episode of all time, “Scott Tenorman Must Die,” in which Cartman had forced a rival to eat a bowl of chili made from the flesh of his dead parents. Like last week, however, the strongest part of the episode was that focused on Cartman and his right-hand, or actually left-hand, man, Mitch Conner, who gave us something of his own background in a pitch-perfect parody of a Vietnam-movie flashback.
The lesson of the episode: whether for religious figures or celebrities, there is no such thing as a magical immunity to ridicule or criticism, only arbitrary and needless restrictions that we impose, often inconsistently and out of fear rather than respect.Īt least I’m guessing that was the lesson, if we could have heard it. Also, the trademark “what we learned speech(es) at the end of the episode were entirely bleeped (such a long stretch of censorship that I’m guessing the writers used it deliberately for effect). In addition to hiding Muhammad’s figure (this time with a “CENSORED” bar), this episode (unlike “200”) also bleeped his name.
īut it’s not entirely clear to the viewer which censoring was the writer’s satirical work and which was actual after-the-fact network censorship. A statement at the South Park Studios website says that, after delivery of the episode, the network added additional bleeps to “201,” and that Parker and Stone do not yet have network permission to stream the uncensored version. “201” took that meta-parody further, though it’s hard to tell how much was by design and how much was forced on Trey Parker and Matt Stone. (Though the comedy depicted the prophet in 2001 without incident.) The first half, as you’ll recall, spoofed the show’s earlier run-in with a nervous network by returning the character of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, who Comedy Central refused to let the show depict out of concern over violating religious taboos. Or at least the parts we were able to see and hear were. “201,” the conclusion to South Park‘s two-part 200th-episode celebration, aired last night, and it was an improvement on an already very entertaining first half.