Oh, South Park, you had me at “queef.” Okay, not really. I’m typing this before watching the show, but I have to give credit to the title already: “Eat, Pray, Queef.” It’s such a wonderful, descriptive word, isn’t it? So playful. Oh, and the title is a parody of a hit, Oprah-approved self-help (?) book that I haven’t read. Anyway, on to the episode…
And tonight we learned precisely how to beat a simple joke to within an inch of its life, then beat it some more, then revive it for a couple more laughs, then beat it bloody until it dies. (This is not necessarily a complete criticism.) The joke, of course, was the idea of a queef, and the strange notion that men do/would find public displays of queefdom (PDQs) horribly offensive—and not realize that they’re, y’know, pretty similar to farts. (Except they come from where babies come from!)
First, of course, the boys were terribly distressed to learn that they would never find out what happened to Terrance and Phillip in Blood Rage, because the Canada Channel (“the only channel in Canada!”) had pre-empted their fartcapades and replaced them with Katie and Katherine, the Queef Sisters, whose antics are exactly like Terrance and Phillip’s, except they’re farting from their Canadian vajajays. The introduction of K&K was pretty priceless; pretty much every line in the gynecologist’s office (“I’m just going to check you for cysts!”) had me laughing (“But doctor, what if I have cancer?”) out loud (“You should’ve thought of that before you queefed in my face three times!”). Queef, queef, queef!
Which had me wondering: Has South Park ever broached the subject of queefing before? It’s like they had a list of taboos—many broken several times over—and just realized that they’d never riffed on queefing before. And then decided to make up for it by putting queefing in pretty much every scene of an entire episode.
Some of it got a little bit tired for me, especially the last couple of minutes before the first commercial (Regis & Kelly, especially), but mostly I guess I was okay with 22 minutes of queef jokes. (15 minutes would’ve been better.)
Martha Stewart decorating her cooch with sparkles and paper and then blasting it into a sparkly celebration? I’m for it. Little freckled girl blasting a little mini-queef on Butters and then Butters running home? Solid. Testimony before the local government about the dangers of queefing on children? Excellent. And holy shit, the old congresswoman queefing out lines from Road Warrior? Inspired.