Okay, so it's no secret that I've been watching a lot of South Park recently; about two episodes a day, in fact, for a month now, or over 60 episodes total. And why this is particularly big news for me is that I've never actually had cable, not even once in the ten years South Park has been on the air, so each and every one of the episodes is a first-time viewing for me. And I've been learning something quickly that I never realized about South Park, either, and especially with it flaring up into the mainstream media so much these days, too - that far from the adolescent poopfest I originally thought the show was (and it definitely has a lot of this humor, don't get me wrong), it is also maybe the most angrily funny satire America's seen since Lenny Bruce. And as brilliantly executed as Lenny Bruce too, I might add, even under the guise of construction-paper-looking block animation.

Who knew? I certainly didn't realize that South Park had done a scathing satire on Mormons in the past ("Joseph Smith was a righteous man! Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb!"); or had postulated that the entire metrosexual movement was a shadowy scheme by the underground Crab People to take over the world. I didn't realize that they had portrayed Michael Jackson as a rotting, walking corpse; or that they actually showed footage of sex-change surgery (real, not animated), as a way of criticizing those who believe in such surgery. And the brilliant thing about South Park in particular is that Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the series' creators, know just how to blend the right mix of self-righteous anger and over-the-top absurdist humor, to make it about as perfect as satire gets. Because, let's face it, it's hard to remain offended for long at their accusation that all Newfoundlanders love fucking their relatives in the ass, when the entire thing's being told as an absurdist takeoff of The Wizard of Oz. ("You're off to see the New Prime Minister of Canada? If I go with you, maybe he'll give us back our sodomy rights!")

There's been some stink recently in the blogosphere, of course, about recent censorship actions against South Park - pulling one critical of the Catholic church, for example, refusing to rerun another that's highly critical of both Scientology and Tom Cruise. Watching all these old episodes for the first time myself, though, my main question keeps coming back to, "How the hell did all this stuff make it on the air in the first place?" I mean, let's face it, you have an episode where a Doug-Henning-type librarian goes around fucking chickens; oh, and the episode where eight-year-old boys go around masturbating dogs to completion (depicted on-screen, on top of everything else); well, and that entire episode about two of the fathers, who get drunk at a party and watch each other masturbate in a hot tub, who then form this really creepy relationship for the rest of the episode. Oh yeah, and then the entire depiction of a couple falling apart, after thinking they killed their child, then reconciling in order to hide the truth from the police, the entire thing played for laughs. So yeah, if you tell me that a state of the Virgin Mary squirts blood out her ass, and onto the face of the Pope, and that maybe some Catholics are calling into Comedy Central and complaining about this, I'm going to say, well, er, duh.

But then at the same time I've been thinking about all this, I also came across a blog entry recently (March 22nd there; couldn't find a permalink) by former creepy-dark-erotica novelist and now whimsical-restaurant-politics novelist Poppy Z. Brite; I guess one of her readers had asked what her opinion was of a recent airing of the show. And she declined to elaborate further, but did state that an incident in her past has now led her to consider Matt and Trey both complete dicks, a couple of cold-hearted monsters who absolutely lack the compassion necessary to care about other people. And so this is why she no longer watches South Park, because the show is tainted for her by this knowledge. And boy, if you've ever seen interviews with these guys, it's easy to accept an accusation like Brite's, because they definitely do come across like that they'd be real dicks if you ever met them.

I mean, these guys take great delight during interviews, for example, in talking about getting pissed off at Michael Moore, so packing a puppet of him full of ham in Team America and blowing him up. They're positively giddy when they talk about it, in fact, as well as all the other stories they have about people they despise getting pissed off at them. These are also the guys, after all, who have screamed at cartoon images of JonBenet Ramsey's parents, "CONFESS, YOU FUCKING LIARS! WE ALL KNOW YOU KILLED YOUR CHILD, YOU FUCKING BASTARDS, SO CONFESS ALREADY, YOU GODDAMN FUCKING LIARS!" The show can get outright sickening at times in its intensity, and they don't swing in any particular political direction either: they've done devastating attacks against the stoners who make up their core audience; and against liberals who think Starbucks is evil; and against people who want to ban guns; and against snotty goth kids; not to mention every race on the planet, both genders, all political parties and all sexual orientations. You can't watch a bunch of episodes of South Park and not come away thinking, "Wow, Matt Stone and Trey Parker really hate a huge cross-section of the population, and have no problem saying the absolutely most horrible things about them. In fact, they take sincere delight in them."

So it leads to an intriguing question - is this all-consuming contempt of humanity necessary for a satirist to be a great one? Because seriously, how many of you who don't hate the world as much as Matt and Trey would've ever put in the time necessary to make South Park what it is? It takes some serious dedication, plus some serious balls, to publicly make such withering, sometimes completely unfair attacks against such a broad cross-section of humanity, week after week after never-ending week. Maybe the only people who have the energy to do it, in fact, are the legitimate dicks of society? It's an intriguing hypothesis, to be sure. I mean, let's face it, it's well-documented that Lenny Bruce was a real dick; so were most of the greatest satirical comedians of the '60s and '70s, in fact. And you can keep stretching that back, too - Mark Twain was definitely known as a real churlish little son of a bitch most of the time too. And so was Oscar Wilde. And so was George Bernard Shaw. In fact, if the documentation existed to do so, I bet you could go all the way back to Jonathan Swift himself, and find a bunch of people around him always saying, "Heartless little asshole."

Such a personality test can't be seriously asked of all artistic pursuits, of course - that's like asking, "Are all poets inherently suicidal?" In this case, though, it's maybe appropriate, because great satire (I mean, really, really great satire) requires such an extra amount of effort, such an extra amount of piss and vinegar to keep one motivated through it all. When Brite complains about Matt Stone and Trey Parker being cold, heartless dicks, is she maybe missing the point a little? Don't they by definition have to be cold, heartless dicks, in order to make a show like South Park in the first place? And do we accept this about certain artists, that they have to have sometimes unpleasant personalities in order to produce the type of work they do? Or do we reject these artists when their personality defects get too much in the way of their finished work? ("Why, hello there, Woody Allen! I haven't heard from you in awhile!") It's an age-old question in the arts, but still an intriguing one I think, simply because people have so many different ways of thinking about it.

Anyway, let's not let this overshadow my main point today - that I believe South Park worthy of being mentioned in the same sentence as Lenny Bruce, Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift and others. Why has this been a secret from me for so long? Why did I think the show was mostly about poop jokes for so many years, and didn't contain political content at all? I'm telling you, the world amazes me in small ways every day.

Oh, and speaking of being amazed in small ways every day, I came across this today because of a link at the ubercool BoingBoing.net. And at first I just marked it at as an item of small interest at my del.icio.us account; but then I ended up getting rather sucked into it, so thought I'd share it in a little more detail with all of you here as well.

There's this artist and musician around my age named Gilles Trehin, see, who's currently living in the southeast of France, and who is either autistic or has Asperger's Syndrome, experts disagree. And like that fellow Henry Darger who used to live in Chicago, Trehin has spent decades now, obsessively documenting a mammoth and ongoing fictional saga going on entirely in his head. Unlike Darger's saga, though, Realms of the Unreal, which featured (among other disturbing things) an army of naked little girls who all have penises, Trehin's project is much more down-to-earth: it's a fictional city called Urville, which is supposed to exist in our real world (in France, of course) and be influenced by real historical events. And in fact, Trehin is quite aware that Urville is fictional; he sees it ultimately as a fun project, in fact, a way to make his real studies come to life, much like how JRR Tolkien saw the Lord of the Rings universe.

And so you have the best of both worlds with Urville, really; all the breathtaking illustrations and detailed history that comes with an obsessive savant, but with all the real-world architectural theory, history, sociology and geology lessons of a traditional education. That's what makes the project so fascinating, really; that its fantastical elements are so well-based on reality, it lets you almost imagine that it actually is real. He's done over 300 illustrations now; maybe around 30 or so are up for free at his website, with all of them (and all the text) found in a paper-book edition as well. Oh, and for those who want a fascinating look at what Gilles' actual condition is like, his father wrote up a great report as well for the Wisconsin Medical Society. For any of you with an extra hour or two to spare in the next day or so, I highly recommend letting yourself get lost in it all for awhile.

Oh, and don't forget that I'm trying to get into a new fictional megacity myself - Second Life, in fact, mostly because I found out that I have a chance to make real money there, by owning clubs that sponsor either artistic events or sexual ones, where people pay an admission fee to attend. The problem, of course, is that my older G4 at home just doesn't quite have enough processing power to render the gaming software correctly; but the good news is that $600 is all that it takes for me to get an Intel Mini, which is fast enough, and which can plug into the monitor and keyboard I already own. And even better news, I already have $400 of this money gathered; I only have $200 to go.

I've been asking my readers if they might think about tossing in 5, 10, 20 dollars (or euros, or pounds, or whatever), just whatever you can easily afford, towards me getting this Mini; that way I can actually start making regular money again here in Chicago, get to go out to a lot more fun things, actually have fun and interesting things to talk about here at the journal, instead of yet another entry about cartoons and penises. I'm asking people to think of it as a small investment, towards getting to read more and more funny things here about more and more funny experiences. Anyway, here's the Paypal link below:

I really appreciate any amount that you have to offer!