10 Best Heartwarming Lessons South Park Ever Taught Us
You know what you guys, I learned something today...
Since its debut back in the late 1990's, South Park was garnered as an offensive, grotesque comedy that served to bully or disgust audiences more than entertain. No celebrity or current event was safe from the slapstick potty humor of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and if you're content to believe it is nothing but gross-out comedy, that's fine.
But Trey Parker and Matt Stone's satirical brains also carried with them a sensible, thought-provoking side and for the last twenty years we've seen the show evolve into something far more profound and insightful. A majority of the characters on the show might still trigger, upset or antagonize a viewer, but it's always been in the service of a greater message.
The moral tales South Park spins for its audience' were so subtle you could cut them with a knife. Between Eric Cartman's psychopathy and Randy Marsh's buffoonery, lies great values and lessons even adults could learn from.
South Park is not just gut-punching humor, but a device for having unbiased and insightful opinions that could arguably be better than other TV shows.
Who would have thought that after over twenty years, we'd learn a thing or two from South Park that could make us better people? And here is a list of ten humble things South Park taught us.
10. Be Patient And Respect Your Elders
South Park has never minced words with what it perceives the older generations to be, but on occasions we've seen a deliberate contrast in which the vulnerable elderly have been pushed around by the young.
In the season seven episode "Grey Dawn", after a spree of car fatalities at the hands of elderly drivers, residents in South Park over the age of seventy have their drivers licenses taken away from them. In a strange turn of events, the elderly residents rally together and take the town by siege and it's up to the children to stop them.
When the siege ends, Stan's father begins to scold his dad once again, only this time to be lectured by Stan about treating his own father like a child.
This message is reinforced later in the series in the episode "Cash For Gold" in which Stan watches the exploitation the elderly are susceptible to with daytime shopping channels.
They're profound statements that reminds us that just because we think we might know more than our grandparents nowadays, doesn't mean we have to dismiss and even condescend to them. We're alive today because of them. Sometimes it's nice to be reminded of that.