It's not like we have a formula, but I think one of the reasons this show has survived is that it has a big heart at its center. Other cartoon shows have people crap on each other and make racist jokes. But I don't think people tune in for that. I just don't think a show lasts for 10 years without a heart.
You start animating it and you get to Friday and you get to Saturday and you go, 'This is not funny, like we haven't figured something out, scrap it.'
You know that everyone thinks that in order to do South Park we must be wild, crazy, rock and roll stars. But the truth is we're just wholesome middle-American guys. We enjoy soda pop, baseball and beating up old people just as much as anybody
We tried to stay true to the Thunderbirds. We don't use any computers in this movie, it's all painfully real.
We made this really dumb decision to put on the cover nothing from South Park but just a real life photo of a piece of pooh dressed up like Mr. Hankey, and a lot of people didn't, they didn't even know what it was.
We have it, we're lucky enough that we've created a show where it's not about... a family, or a kid, it's about a town.
We ended up adding all these dimensions to Butters that I think were really great, ... He's always the kid that's worried his parents are going to ground him, but on the other hand he's got this other persona where he thinks he's this evil superhero, but even in that he does the most mundane things.
To me, every episode is like a song, and every season is like an album. There's that part of the day when you first get the idea and you say, "This could be really funny." And you sit down and you write it. There's just something that happens there that doesn't happen when you really give it a lot of time beforehand.
It's this simple law, which every writer knows, of taking two opposites and putting them in a room together. I love anything with Cartman and Butters at the same time, it's great.
A lot of people don't realize this, but probably the one person that gets made fun of in 'South Park' more than anybody is my dad. Stan's father, Randy - my dad's name is Randy - that's my drawing of my dad; that's me doing my dad's voice. That is just my dad. Even Stan's last name, Marsh, was my dad's stepfather's name.
It's funny because I think a lot of it is simply... We've never considered ourselves satirists, but because we're on Comedy Central and because we're South Park on Comedy Central, we can do any topic we want.
It's been a fascinating thing because we didn't really know how to write when we started South Park at all. It's been like, we've just sort of grown up a bit and it's amazing to just see how, if you take Butters and Cartman and put them in any scene, it works.
It was exactly the same on the South Park movie really too. There's lots of violence in that too, but it always came down to anything sexual... They don't care about anything else.
If somebody actually came to me and said, 'O.K., this is it: write your last 'South Park' episodes,' I'd be like, 'No, no, no.'
I've started confiding in people, other artists mostly, that I hate making 'South Park,' and I always have. It's super stressful. I'm always miserable.
I would let my kids watch this stuff way before I'd let them watch something like 'Full House' that I think would make them stupid.
I was like, 'We're going to get nominated for an Academy Award for this.' I really was, ... I even told him.
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