One of my favourite legal disclaimers of all time. It reads like Bukowskian legalese.
That’s it? You just need to say “you know this actor character we call Tom Cruise in our show, and does the same stuff as the real actor Tom cruise in real life, it’s actually a fictional character unrelated to the real Tom Cruise in real life” and you Gucci?
Keep in mind that a celebrity can send you and me, regular joes, a C&D and we’d likely comply simply because we lack the resources to sustain a challenge in court.
What stops celebrities and organizations from suing South Park creators is likely the opposite: they have money and a legal team.
The same thing happened with John Oliver when he talked shit about some coal mine owner that was notorious for suing people. The mine owner served them from a court that had friendly laws but they were ready. And they had insurance to pay for it.
Pretty much, satire is protected
Tom Cruise’s sexuality and religion are objective satire
Is Kanye West a gay fish?
That whole joke doesn’t quite hit the same way, now that we know he’s actually a mentally unwell self-hating man.
In the United States, parody is protected by the First Amendment as a form of expression.
Yuuuup, and a lot of times the people that get parodied love it. It’s like fuck me! We made it to the point where South Park makes fun of us. Only person I know of that got pissed was Kanye but fuck that guy anyways
The best thing is he apparently actually didn’t get the fish sticks joke which, if true, makes Parker and Stone the best satirists of all time on merits.
what was the joke meaning, i don’t watch south park
Say it out loud.
“Do you like fish sticks?”
'Yeah
“Then you’re a gay fish.”
Kanye in the show didn’t get it and thought people were calling him a gay fish. So if real Kanye didn’t get the joke, and got mad because he thought South Park was calling him a gay fish… that’s just incredible.
I still don’t get it
Are you by chance kanye west? In all seriousness it’s because fish sticks sounds like fish dicks
Isn’t that still a roundabout way of calling him a gay fish?
Parody is protected under US law.
People can (and do) sue, but they lose every time because it’s easy for their well resourced corporate legal team to prove the show is (obviously) parody and thus, protected free speech.
Also public figures have to prove “actual malice” in a defamation or libel case. Actual malice is an incredibly hard thing to prove.
Simple answer is they are careful about what they say and have good lawyers that review it.
A few examples.
Calling Tom Cruise a fudge packer in the context of him being in a bathhouse could eaisly open them up to liability for calling him gay. But doing it in a fudge factory while showing him putting fudge in a box gives them a clear defense that they meant it literally.
Simmaraly telling him to come out of the closet while he is actually in a closet provides cover.
Making things so absurd that a reasonable person wouldn’t believe it and know it’s a joke also works. So having Barbara Streisand aquire an artifact that makes her into a giant robot monster works but something plausible wouldn’t.
Having Kanye open up and admit he is a gay fish is absurd enough to provide protection. However they probably couldn’t get away with him simply coming out as gay.
Of course the genius of south park is they use these legal protections in ways that make the story funnier and not just for cover.
Southpark isn’t sued as far as I know, but they have received massive criticism and even death threats from terrorists organizations.
They must be doing something right then
Hijacking this, but, do people actually watch south park? My friend showed me a couple episodes, one was about cartman having a kanye on his shoulder that made him antisemitic, and the whole episode was pretty stupid. Also showed me a… parody? Of multiverse stuff, maybe? Had some sort of willy wonka figure and imaginationland and a bunch of off brand characters, and then they all died in a big war, that one was pretty stupid. Also showed me a one about the being evil and killing jesus on christmas, or something like that, which was also pretty stupid. Other friend showed me a dog the bounty hunter parody, also struck me as pretty stupid. They were all just really dumb, there was nothing really insightful about any of this subject matter in particular, it was just like I was watching whatever they were making satire of, but if it was decroded by like a couple IQ medians.
I dunno, most other adult-oriented animated comedies are also pretty bad and hacky, and also feel the need, a lot of the time, and especially in their “cultural commentary” episodes, to have something at the end which ties everything into a takeaway for the viewer, totally unironically. Like a children’s book that needs to have a moral or message. In south park, it’s always an extremely writer’s-POV here’s your takeaway “I am talking directly to the audience”, kind of way, which I find, just straight up pretty bad most of the time. I dunno, I really don’t understand how people watch this shit. It’s like a show that would come on inside of some other show as a shorthand that the people watching it are really dumb.
Yes people watch south park, and have their entire lives.
Is the show always good? No, some of the more recent stuff has been pretty downright terrible actually. Will I keep watching it? Yes. Crack Baby Basketball was probably the best commentary ever on why players at the college level can’t be paid. Do I always agree with them? Nope. I don’t know how you didn’t like the Kanye episode though, Cupid Ye was hilarious, and they were pretty much just straight making fun of him and immortalizing his breakdown.
They were blatantly wrong about climate change, which they addressed with the return of ManBearPig and Al Gore. They did trans issues almost a decade before anyone else did with Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina.
South Park has always been about fighting censorship, without them, it’s fair to say that we would not have had a ton of TV moments, largely because they cleared the way for others.
It’s fair if you didn’t like them, not everyone is into watching Santa do coke with Jesus and Randy. The whole show is basically about offending people and there have even been episodes I can’t get behind because it’s my turn. But to me, South Park will always be entertaining because sometimes they’re just plain silly, and sometimes there’s a deeper context.
The BP oil spill episodes, Crack Baby Basketball, Nascar is for Poor People, and episode 200 and 201 are all excellent commentaries on different issues. For just random hilarity, Die Hippie Die, Scott Tennorman Must Die, and the most recent Christmas Special are just silly episodes.
And if you don’t like it, that’s fine, not everything is for everyone.
