South Park Returns In Fine Form, Lampoons “Sex Addiction”

There’s been no shortage of controversy in the news since South Park last aired in November, and as you might have been aware, Tiger Woods found himself at the center of much of it. It was inevitable show creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker would take on the Tiger scandal at some point, so they got right to it last night, and delivered a classic, if by-the-book, South Park episode to kick off the show’s 14th season.

The episode begins with a retelling of Tiger’s Thanksgiving incident/parody of his video game. (Conan O’Brien’s short-lived Tonight Show did a Tiger video game parody first, but since NBC furiously erased any trace of the show from the Internet as if they were wading through a nuclear meltdown in Hazmat suits, that clip is no longer available. Here’s the non-working link to the video.)

From there, the episode launches into an exploration of “sex addiction,” but what they’re really doing is, in classic South Park fashion, positing that the problem isn’t really an “addiction” to sex at all, but simply men with tons of money abusing their wealth and power. (Michael Schur, co-creator of NBC’s Parks and Recreation, made a similar point, albeit more succinctly, in this tweet.) Parker and Stone make their point largely through one of their show’s most oft-used tropes: people being idiots. From the initial cluelessness at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (a bewildered leader of a research project hilariously responds to hearing the term “sex addiction” with “sex a-woo-hoo?”) through the eventually widespread belief that sex addiction is caused by a wizard alien hiding in Independence Hall in Philadelphia, there was no shortage of buffoonery last night.

The episode utilized another favorite South Park tactic: laughably on-the-nose monologues blatantly spelling out the point of the episode (via a soldier later made to be the “alien wizard” scapegoat, and Kyle, misdiagnosed with sex addiction). Throw in weirdness like a David Letterman parody monkey talk show and an example of South Park’s notoriously fast production time (including Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger among the “sex addicts” even though he was last accused of misconduct less than two weeks ago), and you’ve got a well-done episode that, while it didn’t break new ground for the show, used familiar tactics to fine effect. If Stone and Parker can maintain this level of quality (and they’ve still got plenty of contentious issues to mine for material), they’ll produce an awfully good season of comedy – and considering that, again, the show is in its 14th year, that’s a remarkable thing.