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On Oct. 15, 2004, comedian Jon Stewart visited the CNN debate show Crossfire. Then hosted by conservative Tucker Carlson and liberal Paul Begala, Crossfire purported to examine issues from two opposing perspectives, giving viewers a more objective look at complex concerns and offering middle ground. But Stewart wasn’t interested in playing the show’s usual game.
“I’m here to ask you to stop… stop hurting America,” he said with just a little of his trademark sarcasm under his plea. “And come work for America.” When the hosts tried to play off his comment by joking and asking about the pay, Stewart retorted, “The pay isn’t good, but you can sleep at night.”
Stewart’s visit befuddled the hosts not just because he criticized former Clinton advisor Begala as much as he did Carlson, who hadn’t yet reached the far-right position he holds today, but also because he wasn’t just there to make jokes. He wanted something done.
It’s easy to understand why Crossfire expected toothless laughs from Stewart. After all, on that very same day in 2004, Stewart’s colleagues from Comedy Central, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, debuted their new movie. Thus entered Team America: World Police into the pop culture landscape.
A Michael Bay parody performed entirely by marionette puppets, Team America: World Police has the trappings of a ripped-from-the-headlines style satire. The movie’s G.I. Joe–style counterterrorist team doesn’t just fight random Islamic terrorists in a post-9/11 America; they also ultimately face off against North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and the Film Actors Guild (the real-world Screen Actors Guild, renamed to accommodate a slur/pun).
Make no mistake, Team America is funny, even 20 years later. But decades on, when George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove have given way to Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and Steve Bannon, Parker and Stone’s sense of humor has come to crystallize the apathetic humor that still invites people to laugh while the world burns—and then mock anyone who tries to change it.
Laughing at Nothing
“See, there’s three kinds of people,” says a drunk guy at the end of Team America: World Police’s second act. What follows is a profane rant about genitals and their respective sexual possibilities, put in the bluntest, must explicit terms possible.
Those types of speeches are common to the work of Parker and Stone, who made Team America with co-writer and frequent collaborator Pam Brady. South Park became a hit with its cursing children, it’s defiantly non-PC characterizations, and, of course, Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo. However, Parker and Stone have always leaned more toward predecessor The Simpsons than follower Family Guy, using blue humor to make a point behind the laugh.
Team America makes its point at the climax when hero Gary Johnston (Parker) repeats the drunk guy’s rant. A successful Broadway actor, Gary is recruited to the hyper-military Team America to use his skills to infiltrate an Islamic terrorist cell. Although, like most actors, he opposes Team America’s violent ways, he joins up and learns about a great threat from Kim Jong Il.
At the end of the movie, Gary repeats the drunk guy’s terms to explain the lesson he learned.
“We’re dicks! We’re reckless, arrogant, stupid dicks,” he declares. “And the Film Actors Guild are pussies. And Kim Jong Il is an asshole.” He continues the analogy to justify Team America’s actions via various forms of sexual penetration. “I don’t know much in this crazy, crazy world, but I do know that if you don’t let us fuck this asshole, we are going to have our dicks and our pussies all covered in shit.”
To be clear, it’s very funny to hear this profane speech delivered with such sincerity, especially within the context of a self-serious Michael Bay style story. The fact that it’s a puppet getting misty-eyed to sweeping orchestral music makes it only more hilarious. It is not, however, a convincing political analysis. Even though Gary acknowledges that the Film Actors Guild have laudable goals and Team America deserves some criticism, it’s still better to let them do what they want. It’s still better to let America attack its enemies.
Or, to put it in a less profane, and less charitable, way: America is going to do whatever it wants, so let’s just laugh about it instead of worrying about the consequences.
Giving Up and Laughing it Off
Team America’s ethos of resignation fits right alongside South Park’s humor.
A year before Team America, South Park celebrated its 100th episode with “I’m a Little Bit Country” in which the kids take advantage of a protest against the Iraq War to get out of school. When the media points out that the kids know nothing about American history, they’re assigned a huge test about the Revolution. But every time the kids try to study (well, except for Cartman, who nearly kills himself to get a flashback to 1776 and avoid book learning), they’re interrupted by adults who want to yell at each other about the founding fathers.
The show similarly weighed in on the 2004 election with season 8’s “Douche and Turd,” in which the titular objects vie to become the next mascot for the school. By the time the two figures stand on a stage and hold a debate, it’s clear that the show considers the race between Bush and Democratic candidate John Kerry to be little more than a choice between a Giant Douche and a Turd Sandwich.
While Kyle and Cartman argue vigorously for their chosen candidates, Stan spends much of that episode refusing to participate, insisting a single vote doesn’t matter. However, “Douche and Turd” seems to end with a bit of civic optimism, as Stan’s parents assure him that it’s always important to vote, even if your candidate loses. But then the episode actually ends with the school’s original cow mascot reinstated, and Stan’s dad Randy pointing out that his vote didn’t actually matter.
As “Douche and Turd” shows, South Park often has a sense of resignation about the world as it is, which matches the creators’ own Libertarian politics. Systems will do what they will do, and there’s little we can do about it, the show seems to suggest. It’s only what individuals do that matters, so don’t get caught up in extreme positions.
Of course there are some outliers. In 2018, South Park launched its 22nd season with “Dead Kids,” in which the school shooting epidemic invades the town. Stan’s mom Sharon has the rational and moral response to children getting murdered in school. She screams and demands that something change, but everyone else treats her as odd for caring. The kids, meanwhile, resent the shootings as if they were common interruptions to their day. Cartman cares more that Token claims to have not seen Black Panther, and Stan’s dad Randy dismisses Sharon’s outrage as her being on her period.
At points, “Dead Kids” represents South Park at its best. Randy goes to increasingly absurd lengths to learn about his wife’s condition and reaffirm his love for her, mirrored by the B-plot with Cartman channeling an action detective to investigate Token. And Sharon’s feelings of anger and frustration mirrors the way most of us feel about living in a country that is apparently okay with school shootings happening on a regular basis.
That is, until the closing title card of the episode, in which a “#cancelsouthpark” watermark appears over Parker and Stone’s names. Even at the end of an episode that feels immediate and funny, Parker and Stone have to end on a self-satisfied joke, pleased not only with how much they may have just offended you, but that you can do nothing about it.
Whatever catharsis the episode’s humor may have invoked, it ended with the equivalent of a Reddit poster asking, “U mad bro?”
Just Joking
Like “Dead Kids,” Team America often reaches points of enduring hilarity. Parker and Stone parody 2000s and ‘90s action movies with Mel Brooks-level accuracy. The combination of (really impressive) puppets and apparently high-tech equipment gets a chuckle every time. Gags about Gary remembering his brother’s death by gorilla or the signal for Gary’s blown cover (wave your arms and look scared) still work today. And the extended, X-rated sex scene, played completely straight but with puppets, retains its subversive power.
That subversion does not extend to the movie’s politics. Instead the absurdity and boundary-pushing of the jokes serve to reinforce the status quo. The film equates caring about any sort of larger injustice with the smug absurdity of an expensive Broadway musical about poor people gleefully refusing to pay their rent and being stepped over while dying of a plague in the streets. Instead of pushing for extremes, the humor goes for a banal idea of common sense, the assumption that both sides of an issue are wrong and the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Gary’s speech, however, shows the limitations of that response. While Gary concedes that the actors do have a point and that Team America can sometimes go too far, he ultimately says that Team America is a greater good. It’s important to listen to the actors who have good looks and cameras, but Team America should stay intact with its guns and right to kill indiscriminately.
Whether Parker and Stone intended it or not, Team America is in retrospect a forerunner to far right meme culture, Pepe the Frog and Chad images that have spread from 4Chan to the rest of the internet. It’s not just that Team America points out the absurdity of America thinking of itself as righteous, or that rich and self-involved celebrities claim to speak for the people. It’s that it treats it all with a shrug, mocking those upset about the world more than those who created it, because what can we do about those who created it, anyway?
Unlike far right memes, Team America is often actually funny, and obviously has far more care in its construction than just the laziest bit of offensive observation. However, its satire is exactly the sort of ineffective, easily dismissible humor that major networks and politicians depend upon. It is, at best, “partisan hackery,” to use Jon Stewart’s charge against Crossfire. At worst, Team America’s reduction of political discourse to smug dick jokes is exactly the type of apathetic irony that undermines empathy.
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