Hey all, here we are at another South Park rap session, and one that’s coming off a couple of episodes that most of you kinda shrugged your shoulders at. I actually thought “Butters’ Bottom Bitch” was pretty damn funny, but I’m predisposed to Butters in general as well as the wide world of pimping. I’ll say one more thing about last week before moving on: I’m so glad they didn’t make Cartman the pimp. It must’ve taken all their strength not to.
So on to “W.T.F.,” in which the boys explore the world of professional wrestling, a subject near and dear to my heart when I was approximately the age of the South Park boys. I thought the premise was funny, but this was definitely one of those episodes with a pretty low JPM—jokes per minute—rate. The three overriding jokes—that professional wrestling is like silly musical theater, that rednecks don’t understand that it’s not real, and that Greco-Roman wrestling is something altogether different (and gay)—have been told a million times before. They’re not really jokes at this point.
That said, the true-to-life way in which the kids approached starting their own professional wrestling (not “real wrassling!”) organization was pretty great: Their instincts to imitate were right on—I could actually see real-life kids coming up with their own story lines; after all, the WWE stories aren’t much more ridiculous than the ones Cartman (sorry, the Rad Russian) could think up.
The stuff about “real wrassling” rang a little stale for me, though. Obviously they had to get the coach in there to move the “they killed Kenny” plot forward, and it was pretty funny when Butters said, “I have a mind to report you to the police, sir!” but there weren’t a ton of one-liners or even sight gags to go with this guy. (Okay, him posing in the mirror a couple of times was fairly funny, too.)
But overall, this for me was one of those too-common SP episodes that could’ve been cut in half. The WTF storylines had me giggling—especially Cartman’s addiction to abortions, and El Pollo Kenny’s insistence on fighting an aborted fetus—but I wish they would’ve just tightened everything up into half the running time. Spend half of that on wrestling stories, half on the rednecks in the crowd, and the rest of the show on a whole different plot, maybe.
It’s a small complaint, of course. This was a decent episode—the third in a row. Just not one for the history books. They can’t all be.
Stray observations:
— “Do you know what it’s like to have an abortion at 7-years-old? Do you?! I’m in love with abortion, don’t you understand?”
— “Mister, there’s a little girl out there who’s had 14 abortions, and she ain’t even 10 yet.”
— A little Fame, a little Waiting For Guffman, a little American Idol. What references am I missing?
— Is just the idea of going to Sizzler funny? No.
— Nonsense from the wine-sipping rednecks was good, particularly “Derp a der!”