“Gnomes” (season 2, episode 17; originally aired 12/16/1998)
This episode introduces Tweek, a nervous, jittery lad with a strangled voice (“I can’t take this kind of pressure. Sweet Jesus, no!”) His behavior, despite what one might guess at from his name, is connected to his family’s business; his father, Mr. Tweak, runs the local coffee shop that he inherited from his father, and the Tweaks are so devoted to coffee as a way of life that they keep the poor kid in a state of over-caffienated sleep deprivation. When Mr. Garrison lumps Tweek in with the fab four on a group project for a report on current events, Tweek proposes that they write about the underpants gnomes who scamper around stealing people’s boxers and briefs. Thanks to his wide-awake state, he’s the only person who can see these magical beings, or at least the only person who notices them. The boys suspect Tweek is nuts but are unable to think of anything better, and agree to a sleepover at his house, so they can stay up late and see if the underpants gnomes make their regular appearance.
Mr. Tweak has other ideas. He has been visited at his store by a representative for the massive coffee chain Harbucks, which is offering to buy him out, to the tune of $500,000. Mr. Tweak, whose mellow-roasted voice signals the depths of his insanity, refuses, because he has it in his head that, as a small businessman who has roots in the community and confers that personal touch on his customers, he is morally superior to faceless corporate behemoths. Harbucks finally throws up its hands and, wearying of its doomed attempts to make him rich, decides to put one of its shops in South Park anyway, which will have the effect of running the little guy out of business. Mr. Tweak persuades the boys to accept a paper he has written about the evils of corporations and present it as their own work, figuring that his views will seem harder to resist when they come from the mouths of adorable moppets.
The plan goes off without a hitch, and the whole town gets behind the Mayor’s proposition that Harbucks be voted out of existence. Unfortunately, the boys have been pressed into service to write yet another paper denouncing corporations, since everyone enjoyed the first one so much. Since they have no actual ideas of their own on the subject, they do the obvious, logical thing and go directly to Mr. Tweak and ask him to write another paper for them, and he is of course only too happy to comply. Wait, no, sorry, that was a dream I had. Instead, the boys seek out the underpants gnomes, who first explain that stealing underpants is the basis of their underground economy, and that it works swimmingly because, well, trust us, it just does.
Then the gnomes, boasting of their supreme understanding of the nature of corporations, offer to write the boys a paper, which the boys present to the people of South Park. This time, they present the argument that corporations are always great, the bigger the better, because the only way that an outfit like Harbucks gets big in the first place is if it has a superior product to peddle. Once the people of South Park recover from their shock, they agree that, although they used to believe that corporations were bad because they heard a bunch of cute kids say so, they now believe the opposite because, in addition to a bunch of cute kids saying so, the pro-corporation argument is obviously wisdom incarnate. Even Mr. Tweak is forced to agree, and is rewarded with the offer of a job running the South Park branch of Harbucks.
“Gnomes” used to be Exhibit A in arguments that South Park is a single-minded Libertarian-conservative tract passing for a TV cartoon. Leaving aside the fact that no rational person could watch any three episodes of this series and come away with the feeling that it’s single-minded about anything, the episode feels less like an argument for unfettered free markets than an attack on sentimentality about small businesses. It’s driven more by sheer, ornery contrarianism than any belief system that draws on coherent thought or actual observation of the world we live in. In its simplest form, the episode seems to make a case that, in a free country, it’s wrong to try to outlaw successful businesses. I’m not sure who would argue otherwise, assuming we’re not dealing with the kind of knuckleheads who think that any kind of government regulations or anti-trust and anti-monopoly legislation amounts to outlawing successful businesses.
Parker and Stone must have sensed that this wouldn’t be enough to stack the deck in the favor of corporations, so they go that extra mile and also insist that corporations must be successful not be because they can spend untold millions on advertising or stamp out smaller competitors—something that they have been known to do without even offering these schmoes half a million dollars first—but because they make a superior product. Doesn’t it just follow that, in a free market where people can choose what to buy, any company’s success would match up perfectly with the quality of what it’s selling? This argument is presented literally, with a straight face—everyone agrees that Harbucks’ coffee is delicious, whereas Mr. Tweak’s tastes like “raw, bland sewage”—and there is literally no possibility that Parker and Stone believe it. I’d go so far as to imagine they’d regard it as slanderous if someone came out and said that they have it on good authority that Trey Parker and Matt Stone thinks that McDonald’s makes the best hamburgers in America, certainly better than anything in any small-kitchen diner. But that’s the argument. Keep in mind that these guys once made a movie, which grossed some $50 million, which included a song entirely devoted to expressing the opinion that Michael Bay movies are shit. It is not an opinion that I disagree with, but intellectual consistency demands acknowledging that Pearl Harbor, which is the very definition of a movie as a corporate product, made a hell of a lot more than $50 million.
If the people who made this episode don’t really believe three-quarters of what it presents as common sense, what do they believe? I think they believe that the kind of hokey nostalgia and self-glorification of the little guy that Mr. Tweak goes for is rank horseshit. And it gets up their nose, in a way that flimfammery and open corruption by big corporations doesn’t. It’s a deeply felt episode but not one that seems thought out. (Is it a joke that the wisdom regarding corporations comes from the gnomes, who have devoted their lives to a nonsensical business plan they can’t even fake-explain?) You can see that most clearly in the token scene that establishes a level of moral equivalency between Harbucks and Mr. Tweak. Because adults have been too cowed to buy coffee from Harbucks, the local dealer tries selling the stuff to kids, using a Joe Camel-like cartoon character. This gets him bawled out by a woman passerby. By any standard what the guy is doing is wrong, but in the context of this episode, it’s hard not to feel that you’re meant to feel sorry for the man on the receiving end of a self-righteous, “What about the children!?” diatribe.