AAre record beef shortages just not such a rich topic for South Park? The show’s 29th season had its downright mediocre first episode this week with a zigzag exit that gestured vaguely toward the performative consumption of particular foods, nodded slightly toward the development of a father-son storyline, and ended it all by repeating and amplifying a funny season-long running gag that increasingly seems to serve as a makeshift story arc.
But let’s go back to the beginning, to perhaps the episode’s most hilarious moment: Cartman in a fun rant about the impending meal of sloppy joes in the school cafeteria, to which he pays homage in the form of a sloppy joe-themed version of Gary Glitter’s Rock and Roll Part Two — a musical license reaffirming that Trey Parker and Matt Stone don’t care whether a song choice can make people amazed. (because the singer is a serial sex offender) or just bored (because this song sucks). Cartman’s infectious joy is short-lived, however, when he is informed that today’s lunch special is not a sloppy dish after all, nor anything beef-related, but cuckoo – Guinea pig on a stick.
This is a true Peruvian dish, which corresponds to the re-baptism of South Park throughout the season in South America. And thanks to his patriotic bona fides (even if it’s confusing), beef raised in the South, er, America is more in demand than ever in the rest of the country. So even though it’s a beef town, no one who lives there can actually get a reasonably priced cut of meat. This is despite the fact that frequent cutaways, usually to Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, reveal that South Park beef, no matter how rich and buttery it is, gives people who eat it literally explosive diarrhea after one bite (and yes, obviously this is shown in a lot of cartoonish detail.) This side effect doesn’t satisfy the demand for the beef; consuming it is considered a patriotic act.
This appears to be both a comment on the actual shortage of beef in the United States, as well as the MAHA-driven desire for products like beef tallow. This week’s South Park — “Guinea Pig on a Stick” is the episode title — doesn’t touch on all that, but there are certainly nuances to the way it depicts the demand for beef lard from distant elites. The steakhouse’s clientele is all drawn to look like the celebrity caricatures on the show, even though none of them exactly match a real-life character that I might recognize. It’s a metaphor for the episode as a whole, which perpetually feels like it’s satirizing something bigger and more direct, but doesn’t really come into focus.
Part of the problem is that the beef shortage dilemma fits only slightly with the episode’s hazy plot, namely that Stan’s father, Randy, still in the body of a miniaturized child after the Sephora accident of the previous episode, wants to be part of the gang. Both Kyle and Cartman seem ready to ignore him, but Stan continues to scold him. This is understandable; it’s annoying that Randy vacillates between off-trend kid obsessions (he makes fun of Italian brains) and his own references to his father’s age (he just refuses to shut up about The Goonies). But he sincerely wants to connect with Stan, and eventually everyone tells Stan that he’s a jerk. Stan softens in the face of his father’s sincerity.
The kids find a solution to the beef shortage after a violent confrontation between Ruth Chris herself (not her real name; that would be Ruth Fertel, the founder of the confusingly named chain) and the fake cowboys who run the Sizzler. Sizzler runs off with all the cows in town, even those that might have been consigned to the champagne room at the cattle farm (a funny idea that turns out to be a momentary gag), and like everyone else in the South Park universe this season, Ruth Chris says that problems like this will be massively affected by a big change planned for November.
As before, she talks about the release of Grand Theft Auto VI.
Unlike previous episodes, this joke is finally developed: Ruth Chris shows a top-secret video of GTA gameplay, opening the kids’ (and Randy’s) eyes to how much things could actually change come November. Maybe this will remain a running gag, but the way it’s brought to the forefront now, almost in lieu of a real resolution, makes it seem like it will feature in the season finale (which, after all, airs shortly after the game’s release). So, wait, is this an emotional episode? From South Park?! This seems absurd, like a recap reading an irreverent animated comedy as if it were a serious serialized series – but it feels like the end game.
In the meantime, the children discover what to do about the beef shortage. They renamed the guinea pig on a stick as a particularly patriotic delicacy; It turns out steakhouse patrons don’t care what they eat as long as it has that American brand and is doused in lots of rich butter. With the right preparation, guinea pig on a stick can cause exactly the same explosive diarrhea – and so we’re treated to the episode-closing sight of diners exploding in feces, now with an added tinge of red and blue fireworks to accompany it. Again, a pretty funny sight gag, but no more so than the first dozen times. Oddly enough, this episode of South Park also made me look forward to Grand Theft Auto VI, assuming there’s now a fun storyline brewing there.
Gn entert
