[Via TV Squad] found a Penn (of Penn and Teller) interview Trey Parker (of South Park), which got me thinking about the show, which I love. It made me think of the most obnoxious unfunny episode of the year -- the one I found personally offensive -- the hybrid car episode which portrayed all hybrid car owners as smug self-righteous weenies. I don't have a hybrid car (I don't have any car, but when/if the point comes that I need one, I definitely would buy one).
I think Matt and Trey (who are the only media writer creators I feel such affection for that I can't think of them in any other way than by their first names) were way off base, completely manufacturing a smugness on the part of hybrid owners that I've never noticed. Maybe the situation is different in their L.A. and celebrity sphere. But I thought, so what?
How often is it that someone who's work I enjoy produces something a dislike so much. Not often enough, I've decided. South Park is very raw, not only in its sensibility but even in its production values (shows that air on Wednesday are sometimes not even started work on until Saturday or later). And that rawness, a small creative group putting their own vision out into the public space virtually unfiltered, is a rare and beautiful thing. Penn and Trey in the interview remark that neither feel that free speech in not as endangered today as some like to insist.
I think they are right. But what really endangers free thought today is self-censorship.
The I-can't-do-that-people-will-hate-I'll-never-work-again concerns. So
called political-correctness always the bugbear of the political right,
it not the issue either. That is another straw-man. We can say what we
want, we don't have the right to be loved for it. Too often this is
what Bill O'Reilly and Michael Moore, to pick two names from across the
spectrum, are really whining about - people have the audacity to object
to them.
Also, found out in the interview the Showtime would not let Penn & Teller do a Scientology episode of their muckraking TV show entitled Bullshit.
Comments