South Park Understands the Assignment
Slate Culture Feed
Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 12 August 2025
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After using a Trump-stand-in during his first administration, South Park has come back from hiatus as vulgar and confrontational as ever, with its aiming firmly fixed on MAGA. Contrary to government sources, the show’s enjoying a renewed cultural relevance in its 27th season.
Guest: David Mack, contributing writer to Slate.
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Podcast production by Ethan Oberman, Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey Jack, I'm seeing your business everywhere. Have you got a new marketing person or something? |
| 0:04.8 | You could say I've got a new secret weapon for print. Print? Oh, Vista print, right? That's not a secret. |
| 0:10.8 | How did you know? Come on. Custom posters, branded mugs, stylish flyers. Only one place prints all that. Vista print. |
| 0:17.7 | Yeah, I got business cards, stickers, t-shirts, booklets, signage, even photo books from my last holiday. |
| 0:23.2 | Print everything for your business with VistaPrint. |
| 0:25.9 | If you need it, we print it at vistoprint.co.uk. |
| 0:29.8 | Hey everyone, a quick heads up at the top. |
| 0:32.6 | This episode is about South Park, so it needs a content warning. |
| 0:36.6 | Consider yourself warned. |
| 0:43.3 | It's hard to describe just how popular South Park was in my school when it first aired in 1997. |
| 0:50.0 | I was in seventh grade. New episodes came out every Wednesday night at 10 p.m. on Comedy Central. |
| 0:55.8 | And then the next day, everybody in my class would spend the entire week whispering lines from the show over and over again, totally out of context and making sure that the teachers couldn't hear us. |
| 1:18.6 | Yeah. hear us. I've been watching since I was way too young. I was probably not allowed to be watching the show when it was first on air in the late |
| 1:24.1 | 90s. |
| 1:25.5 | I was just a grade schooler in Australia, |
| 1:28.3 | and I don't think the show was meant for me, |
| 1:31.5 | but I was watching. |
| 1:33.2 | That's Slate, contributing writer David Mack. |
| 1:36.6 | I'm one of three boys, and this was the sort of epitome |
| 1:41.1 | of my older brother's humor, |
| 1:42.5 | and it very quickly became the epitome of our humor, too, right? |
| 1:50.6 | The series, created by Matt Stone and Trey Parker, follows four young boys in a rural Colorado town. |
... |
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