WRTC 330 Final

Ben Corrigan's final project for a rhetorical criticism class involves analyzing two episodes of South Park. The show uses crude humor and satire to critique societal issues. The first episode, "Time to Get Cereal," uses the metaphor of Man-Bear-Pig to symbolize society's response to climate change. The episode highlights the hypocrisy of denying a problem even when evidence is clear. The second episode, "No One Got Cereal," explores the middle ground of climate change, where people's neutrality contributes to the problem. It also addresses the resentment younger generations feel towards the older generation for leaving them to deal with the consequences. Both episodes use literary devices and play on words to convey their message effectively. The episodes serve to entertain and raise awareness about how society handles climate change. The context of climate change discourse in society is crucial for understanding the hidden meanings in the episodes. What's going on? My name is Ben Corrigan and this is my final project for our rhetorical criticism class. So I'm going to be taking a look at two episodes of South Park and analyzing the content of the episodes while also looking at them through close sexual analysis. So for the people listening that aren't that familiar with South Park, it's an animated adult show made up about these four fourth graders who live in South Park, Colorado and they're always in some sort of messed up situation that reflects something that's going on in the world at the current moment that the show is being made. All the characters really serve as just sort of like vessels for the creators to make fun of something, often in a pretty crude way. The show is also pretty satirical. It points out the hypocrisy of humans and the things wrong with our society and the communities within our society. So the two episodes that I chose are called Time to Get Cereal and No One Got Cereal. And so they sort of go hand in hand as the second one is just a continuation of the last one and they're both basically just one big metaphor. So the basic plot of the first episode is that there is a return of a monster-like thing called Man-Bear-Pig, which appeared in a previous episode in which it was going around the town of South Park and just ripping people to shreds and murdering the community, basically. And so it's doing that again in this episode, but the police in South Park are just blaming school shootings for all the problems in the community instead of owning up to the fact that there's a serious problem that needs to be fixed, which is obviously Man-Bear-Pig. And then because the police aren't doing anything, the boys of South Park go to Al Gore, who was in the previous episode of Man-Bear-Pig, where he was warning them about the consequences of it if they don't deal with it soon. So when the boys go to him, he continually makes them admit he was right and that they should have listened to him and he just annoys the boys to an extreme extent. And as Man-Bear-Pig continues to terrorize the town and the police continue to blame it on school shootings, we see probably the most obvious metaphor in the episode in which a man is in a restaurant with his wife denying that Man-Bear-Pig is real, even though scientists have proved that he is real, and he is literally murdering people right behind him. And then as soon as the man turns around and sees Man-Bear-Pig, he's like, Oh, well, we can't do anything about it anyways, because other people aren't going to help, you know. And so we, we kind of understand where this is going now. And then we go back to Al Gore, who, in order to help the boys summon Satan from hell, he asks, he asks Satan why Man-Bear-Pig is terrorizing the town. And Satan sort of guides them to the answer, which we find out at the end of this episode is one of the boys' grandfathers. And that's sort of the cliffhanger for this episode. And so this text is pretty clearly symbolizes how our society is dealing with climate change. If you didn't get that, that's what Man-Bear-Pig is. And it critiques how we react to the information about climate change when given it. Its purpose is to entertain the audience, but also make them aware of how our society is acting about this problem and the fact that that is not okay, and we have to do something about it. The story is an allegory for the problem of climate change. And my favorite part is how they use the play on words for Al Gore, who is a well known climate activist, and make his story in the episode an allegory for the real world. I just love that play. And I think that the format is perfect for the content of the story, because anyone who watches South Park knows that the creators are making fun of something, but also getting a point across. So if they wanted to urge people to take action about climate change, or just entertain them, this is the best way to do it. They have a pretty huge platform on the show, and definitely a lot of people listening to them, so I don't see why they'd do it in any other way or form. For the text-informing context, we can only understand the hidden meanings in the episode if we have the context of how climate change is treated and talked about in our own society. For example, if we weren't familiar with any sort of discourse about climate change, we wouldn't understand that the man talking to his wife about ManBearPig not being real was a jab at climate change deniers who don't believe in it when scientists have already proved its existence and it's currently hurting our world in front of our eyes. Then we get to artistic density of the episode, which we see a load of literary devices in the episode being used, such as the Al Gore allegory, the ManBearPig metaphor for climate change, and the repeated blaming of school shootings for everything that is wrong in the community. And so now we're going to take a look at the second episode, which is called No One Got Serial, and we can sort of see why the titles of these episodes are what they are because the first episode was all about the people of South Park trying to get serious about ManBearPig, and so we can now assume that they did not accomplish their goal for the next episode. And also as a side note, just a little fun fact, they say serial in the title instead of serious because that's what Al Gore says in the episode as his catchphrase, I'm super serial, and that's based on a real interview that he does with Oprah in which he discusses his favorite serial. So I just thought that was a funny little quip. So in the second episode, we see the residents of South Park all gathered at like a little town hall to watch a presentation that discusses when they should start to worry about ManBearPig. So we've seen them being like absolutely ripping the entire town to shreds, but we're not sure when to start worrying about it. And a man in the town hall says that he's pretty sure a wife and or his wife and children were eaten by ManBearPig. So he asks whether he should be worried or not. But another guy speaks up and says that there's absolutely no correlation between ManBearPig and the death. And then the presenter of the presentation keeps a neutral tone and is basically still just unsure, you know. And this is a metaphor for the people in the middle ground of climate change basically saying that they're committing just as much, if not more harm to the stopping of climate change by giving any sort of legitimacy to the climate change deniers. A man's wife and kids were literally mauled to death, but we aren't sure if we should worry yet. So after that, we then go back to sort of the cliffhanger that we left off with last episode, and we see one of the boys confront their grandpa, who we learn actually made a deal with Satan along with the other people of the community of kind of like older people in that older generation. And they say that, or the older people said they didn't think that they'd be around long enough to see the consequences of the deal they made with ManBearPig and that they had a right to be happy back when they made the deal. And, you know, Satan and ManBearPig were going to take away all of their cars, among other things, unless they let ManBearPig come back. And obviously, the boys are unhappy for this, or unhappy about this, as it means that their generation has been made to suffer the consequences of ManBearPig, even though their grandparents were the one who made the deal with it to have it here now. So the boys go looking for ways to stop the deal with ManBearPig as it continues to destroy South Park while cops are still attributing it to school shootings. And they finally convince people that ManBearPig exists so that they can officially make a deal with it like their grandparents did, but they're hoping to make a better deal with it so that they can stop it from killing everyone. And we end with a great scene of ManBearPig and his lawyer in like a little conference room with the boys where they say that they're going to stop all this as long as everyone just gives up their cars and the things, like, sort of like the material things that they love, just like they gave that option to older people. And so the boys yell out to the town, they're like, are we okay with doing this? And the town is like, I don't really want to take that deal. So instead, the boys take a deal where ManBearPig has, you know, just all the rights to the children of third world countries, and they have to ignore ManBearPig until he comes back five years later, and the carnage will be 100 times worse. And that's how it ends. So just like the last episode, we see the metaphor for our world and how it deals with climate change and the problematic responses that have been given. The text intends to pretty much do the same thing as, as sort of the last episode, but just more specifically points out the hypocrisy of our generation who is trying to do something, but it's sort of falling into the same trap that our grandparents did. And this text is also a symbol of the resentment younger people have towards the older generation as a whole, who as a whole left the world in pieces for younger people to pick up. And I would say that, you know, the form is how it should be still, because if the creators did any form, or any other sort of form in their regular sort of satirical episodes, I think people would be confused as to why they did that. And you know, why, why fix something that's broken? It's continued to work in this way. And it's, yeah. So and then we see the context inform us of the text in the same way the last episode, except this time, it's just different context. So for example, the older people making a deal with ManBearPig is a metaphor for them not thinking about the effects of climate change and what it would do to their grandkids. But we could only know this because we've had conversations with, you know, grumpy grandparents who don't believe that they did anything wrong, and they were just having fun like we do. And lastly, we see plenty of metaphors used, like the grandparents dealing with ManBearPig being the way they actually deal with climate change, and ManBearPig's lawyer in the negotiations being representative of heartless lawyers who deny climate change for their, you know, huge corporate clients in order to, for them to gain more power for their, for their clients and disregard the dangers of climate change. And it still uses the same themes from the last episode, like Al Gore allegory and blaming school students for everything. So clearly, these episodes are full of meaning, and I would recommend South Park to anyone who wants a critique of society, but in a funny way, although it might be a little bit much for some people. And I hope that you got something out of this, whether that be, you know, why this episode was cohesive and what worked about the text and sort of the way that the texts were created, or even just more thinking about climate change and keeping it in the news, because it is definitely still a problem. I hope you all enjoyed the close textual analysis of South Park, and thank you guys so much for listening.