Screenshot via Comedy Central
Comedy Central pulled a rerun of an episode of South Park satirizing Charlie Kirk following the Turning Point USA founder’s assassination at an event in Utah on Wednesday.
South Park has aired four episodes of its 27th season thus far ,and the fifth is set to be aired on September 17. In the show’s off weeks, reruns of new episodes are shown in chronological order. On Wednesday, episode two of the new season, titled Got a Nut, was pulled and replaced with a different episode, Arizona Republic first reported.
The episode in question features South Park character Eric Cartman imitating Kirk and launching a podcast where he debates people on college campuses. It ends with Cartman attending a ceremony for the “Charlie Kirk Award for Young Masterdebaters.” The episode is still available through streaming on Paramount+.
In a Fox News interview, Kirk called the depiction a “badge of honor” and he appeared to fully embrace the satire, saying at one point that he planned on changing his X profile picture to Cartman acting
“We as conservatives should be able to take a joke, we shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously – that’s something that the left has always done,” Kirk told Fox News ahead of the South Park episode airing.
Kirk also said, “I think it’s kind of funny and it kind of goes to show the cultural impact and the resonance that our movement has been able to achieve. So I look at this as a badge of honor.”
Not every conservative embraced South Park’s latest season as warmly as Kirk did. President Donald Trump’s White House slammed the show as irrelevant after the series depicted him with a micropenis, something they have continued to do. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem also trashed the show as “lazy” after it depicted her as having a face ready to fall off and being a puppy serial killer.