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Trey Parker and Matt Stone had only intended for one episode of South Park to focus on the show’s depiction of President Donald Trump, but the high-profile pushback led them to double down throughout the rest of the year.
The co-creators of the Comedy Central program sat down with Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group co-chair and CEO Mike De Luca for a conversation during the South Park Emmy Official FYC event in Los Angeles on Tuesday. A self-proclaimed South Park super fan, De Luca chatted with the pair about last year’s seasons 27 and 28, which marked record ratings and made national headlines for the show as it took aim at President Donald Trump and his cohorts.
“We were just going to do that first show with the Trump stuff,” Parker said. “We laid into him so hard, and the thing became: ‘Well, who’s the bully now?’ It became this just totally juvenile joke of like, ‘We’re not gonna stop. We’re going to do it every single week.’ Even when everyone’s like, ‘OK, guys, move on,’ [we’re] like, ‘Nope, we’re not moving on. We’re going to keep going, going, going.'” As the audience broke into applause, he added, “That became the joke.”
After a two-year hiatus, South Park aired its first season 27 episode in July and debuted its version of Trump, who was in bed with Satan when the show featured a deepfake version of the commander in chief with an exposed penis. In a statement the next day, the White House publicly voiced disapproval in declaring that the show “is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention.”
