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.This engagement with the question about the effectiveness of languageto reveal or conceal meaning is centered most specifically on the adults inSouth Park.In this respect, Parker and Stone employ the children as voicesof social critique: Stan, Kyle, Eric, and Kenny stand in contrast to the adultworld, which provides no authority worthy of their respect.Their teacher,Mr.Garrison, is especially ineffective as an educator, chastising a studentfor being a  complete retard for offering the wrong answer to a question.Furthermore, the parental figures demonstrate their virulent intolerancewhen they prepare to wage war on Terrance and Phillip for teaching theirsons dangerous toilet humor.Clearly, Parker and Stone condemn the self-censorship that the Mothers Against Canada endorse through the latter s32 Alison Halsalldecision to implant the V chip, a little microchip that sends a small jolt ofelectricity through a child each time he or she swears, in their children.Ineffect, the V chip represents the policing of language.In this instance,  Vstands for vulgarity and violence, two of the elements that the ComicsCode and the Mothers Against Canada condemn.However,  V also standsfor vacant, vague, and vapid.The sanitized language that the MothersAgainst Canada encourage is abstracted of all vitality.The parents preju-dice is made hyperbolic when they identify Terrance and Phillip s foul lan-guage and lowbrow humor as  crimes against humanity, and encourage theescalation of full-scale warfare between the United States and Canada toeradicate the supposed threat that these two cartoon figures represent toproper language.Not only do Parker and Stone ridicule the intolerance,which fuels the mothers activism when Kyle s mom generalizes aboutCanadians as being  all the same with beady little eyes and square heads,but they also satirize scapegoating in general through the ease with whichthe mothers latch arbitrarily onto an enemy (in this instance, an entirecountry) on which to focus their hate.Undoubtedly, the compulsive focusthat the South Park film gives to oaths helps the viewer delight in this unof-ficial and offensive language, and ironically generates an important critiqueof linguistic sanitation.Through the vigorous use of profanity, Parker andStone rob contemporary political-speak of its abstract wordiness by bring-ing everything down to the level of the body.Language can also impose a false sense of closure on a particular subject,as can be seen most obviously in the moralistic messages that conclude manychildren s animated programs.South Park arguably resists all forms of didacti-cism and dogmatism.If it does use moralistic statements, it is to highlight theinanity of the candy-coated endings of family-oriented sitcoms on Americantelevision.Usually a 30 minute episode of South Park ends with Stan or Kyleturning abruptly to the camera to say,  You guys, I ve learned somethingtoday, and then delivering a trite statement about the importance of accep-tance or having confidence in oneself.In such scenes, the robotic unnatural-ness of the character s movements mimics the corny moral that is devoid ofany true meaning.The black-and-white introductions Parker and Stonemake at the beginning of individual South Park episodes on the DVD versionsalso satirize the false sentiment of such statements and the supercilious moral-istic messages in children s programs.In the introduction to the  Mr.Hankey,the Christmas Poo episode, for example, Parker and Stone clarify the moral : Everyone should celebrate Christmas, they claim, not because of itsendorsement of family values, but because of its commercialism.Again,Parker and Stone blur the sacred and the profane, in this instance, to gut hol-idays of their traditional meanings.Fundamentally, what South Park trains its audience to do through thissatire of corny morals is to rebuff sentiment and empathy.Emotional Bigger Longer & Uncut 33FIGURE 2Mr.Hankey waves hello.involvement is not encouraged on South Park: Not a single character inSouth Park elicits a complicated emotional reaction from the viewer.Indeed, through the portrayal of repeated violent acts, the viewerbecomes immune to the  reality of this violence and is discouraged fromregistering any emotional reaction.What is produced instead is a sort offree-floating, intense enjoyment of socially unacceptable behavior.Forexample, Kyle and his little brother, Ike, enjoy playing a game called kick the baby in which Ike is kicked through a window or off the screen.As we watch, we never feel sorry for Ike; instead, the way he sails throughthe air is what is most funny about the scene.Moreover, one of the con-ventions of the episodes and the film is to kill Kenny in spectacularlybloody ways.His death is always followed by the cheerful refrain,  Oh myGod, they ve killed Kenny.You bastards! The repeated murder of Kennyand the response expected and elicited from the kids on the show (andthe audience watching) desensitize the viewer to the murder.In effect,the phrase,  Oh my God, they ve killed Kenny, becomes a cliché, a hack-neyed, empty phrase, and discourages any emotional reaction from theviewer.The humor lies, of course, in the children s refusal to act in asocially appropriate fashion.34 Alison HalsallTalking Turds: Scatology in South ParkOne principal method through which carnivalesque popular culture man-ages to evade the constraints of social discipline is by focusing on bodilypleasures, by lowering pleasure to the level of the body.In his work onRabelais, Bakhtin outlines the  concept of grotesque realism (18) typical offolk humor, a concept that relies primarily on this bodily principle [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]