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.
The whole Terrance and Phillip/Katie and Katherine affair seemed a bit like space-filler to me, with the exception of seeing T&P's tiny Canadian wangs. And of course Mrs. Marsh’s big speech about women being second-class citizens was a little tired—don’t try and feed some real-world consequence into an episode whose message of social consciousness is predicated on something nobody actually believes. (Women, I think I speak for all men when I say: Queef and fart when you feel the need, and when it’s appropriate.)
But any excuse for a big, uplifting song featuring the words “You’re woman now, and you are free to queef” is fine by me.
Grade: B
Stray observations:
— Randy: “A girl at school… She queefed on one of Stan’s friends today.”
— “Jam those up there…” Do you think Martha Stewart watches this stuff and just fumes?
— “It stopped being funny the second the air came out of her vagina!”
— The sneezing unicorn.