South Park: Kenny’s 12 Greatest Deaths

By the show’s third season, South Park’s longest running joke was starting to become a struggle. Trey Parker and Matt Stone have discussed how they ran out of ideas for novel ways to murder Kenny, and the third run of episodes is about where you start to see this clearly.

Here, though, it’s a different story. Season Three’s second episode Spontaneous Combustion is one of the first episodes to make Kenny’s death the catalyst for the entire story. The people of South Park are, as the title suggests, spontaneously combusting, as a result of retaining too much gas.

The first one to go, naturally, is Kenny, leading to a disaster movie spoofing episode in which Stan’s dad (in one of his first spotlights) attempts to find the source. While we were used to Kenny dying at this point, the suddenness of his explosion works well for the apocalyptic theme.

Kenny was somewhat lacking in the depth he’d later receive at this stage, but his deaths were still being put to good use. There was better stuff to come as the show became increasingly ambitious, but even here they were looking to do more than just a quick gag.