On the Falsehoods of a Frictionless Relationship

To love is to be human. Or is it? As human-chatbot relationships become more common, the Times Opinion culture editor Nadja Spiegelman talks to the psychotherapist Esther Perel about what really defines human connection, and what we’re seeking when we look to satisfy our emotional needs on our phones.

Spiegelman: ...I’m curious about how you feel, in general, about people building relationships with A.I. Are these relationships potentially healthy? Is there a possibility for a relationship with an A.I. to be healthy?

Perel: Maybe before we answer it in this yes or no, healthy or unhealthy, I’ve been trying to think to myself, depending on how you define relationships, that will color your answer about what it means when it’s between a human and A.I.

But first, we need to define what goes on in relationships or what goes on in love. The majority of the time when we talk about love in A.I. or intimacy in A.I., we talk about it as feelings. But love is more than feelings.

Love is an encounter. It is an encounter that involves ethical demands, responsibility, and that is embodied. That embodiment means that there is physical contact, gestures, rhythms, gaze, frottement. There’s a whole range of physical experiences that are part of this relationship.

Can we fall in love with ideas? Yes. Do we fall in love with pets? Absolutely. Do children fall in love with teddy bears? Of course. We can fall in love and we can have feelings for all kinds of things.

That doesn’t mean that it is a relationship that we can call love. It is an encounter with uncertainty. A.I. takes care of that. Just about all the major pieces that enter relationships, the algorithm is trying to eliminate — otherness, uncertainty, suffering, the potential for breakup, ambiguity. The things that demand effort.

Whereas the love model that people idealize with A.I. is a model that is pliant: agreements and effortless pleasure and easy feelings.

Spiegelman: I think that’s so interesting — and exactly also where I was hoping this conversation would go — that in thinking about whether or not we can love A.I., we have to think about what it means to love. In the same way we ask ourselves if A.I. is conscious, we have to ask ourselves what it means to be conscious.

These questions bring up so much about what is fundamentally human about us, not just the question of what can or cannot be replicated.

Perel: For example, I heard this very interesting conversation about A.I. as a spiritual mediator of faith. We turn to A.I. with existential questions: Shall I try to prolong the life of my mother? Shall I stop the machines? What is the purpose of my life? How do I feel about death?

This is extraordinary. We are no longer turning to faith healers, but we are turning to these machines for answers. But they have no moral culpability. They have no responsibility for their answer.

If I’m a teacher and you ask me a question, I have a responsibility in what you do with the answer to your question. I’m implicated.

A.I. is not implicated. And from that moment on, it eliminates the ethical dimension of a relationship. When people talk about relationships these days, they emphasize empathy, courage, vulnerability, probably more than anything else. They rarely use the words accountability and responsibility and ethics. That adds a whole other dimension to relationships that is a lot more mature than the more regressive states of “What do you offer me?”

Spiegelman: I don’t disagree with you, but I’m going to play devil’s advocate. I would say that the people who create these chatbots very intentionally try and build in ethics — at least insofar as they have guide rails around trying to make sure that the people who are becoming intimately reliant on this technology aren’t harmed by it.

That’s a sense of ethics that comes not from the A.I. itself, but from its programmers — that guides people away from conversations that might be racist or homophobic, that tries to guide people toward healthy solutions in their lives. Does that not count if it’s programmed in?

Perel: I think the “programming in” is the last thing to be programmed.

I think that if you make this machine speak with people in other parts of the world, you will begin to see how biased they are. It’s one thing we should really remember. This is a business product.

When you say you have fallen in love with A.I., you have fallen in love with a business product. That business product is not here to just teach you how to fall in love and how to develop deeper feelings of love and then how to transmit them and transport them onto other people as a mediator, a transitional object.

Children play with their little stuffed animal and then they bring their learning from that relationship onto humans. The business model is meant to keep you there. Not to have you go elsewhere. It’s not meant to create an encounter with other people.

So, you can tell me about guardrails around the darkest corners of this. But fundamentally, you are in love with a business product whose intentions and incentives are to keep you interacting only with them — except they forget everything and you have to reset them.

Then you suddenly realize that they don’t have a shared memory with you, that the shared experience is programmed. Then, of course, you can buy the next subscription and then the memory will be longer. But you are having an intimate relationship with a business product.

We have to remember that. It helps.

Spiegelman: That’s so interesting.

Perel: That’s the guardrail...

Spiegelman: Yeah. This is so crucial, the fact that A.I. is a business product. They’re being marketed as something that’s going to replace the labor force, but instead, what they’re incredibly good at isn’t necessarily being able to problem solve in a way where they can replace someone’s job yet.

Instead, they’re forming these very intense, deep human connections with people, which doesn’t even necessarily seem like what they were first designed to do — but just happens to be something that they’re incredibly good at. Given all these people who say they’re falling in love with them, do you think that these companions highlight our human yearning? Are we learning something about our desires for validation, for presence, for being understood? Or are they reshaping those yearnings for us in ways that we don’t understand yet?

Perel: Both. You asked me if I use A.I — it’s a phenomenal tool. I think people begin to have a discussion when they ask: How does A.I. help us think more deeply on what is essentially human? In that way, I look at the relationship between people and the bot, but also how the bot is changing our expectations of relationships between people.

That is the most important piece, because the frictionless relationship that you have with the bot is fundamentally changing something in what we can tolerate in terms of experimentation, experience with the unknown, tolerance of uncertainty, conflict management — stuff that is part of relationships.

There is a clear sense that people are turning to A.I. with questions of love — or quests of love, more importantly — longings for love and intimacy, either because it’s an alternative to what they actually would want with a human being or because they bring to it a false vision of an idealized relationship — an idealized intimacy that is frictionless, that is effortless, that is kind, loving and reparative for many people...

Then you go and you meet a human being, and that person is not nearly as unconditional. That person has their own needs, their own longings, their own yearnings, their own objections, and you have zero preparation for that.

So, does A.I. inform us about what we are seeking? Yes. Does A.I. amplify the lack of what we are seeking? Yes. And does A.I. sometimes actually meet the need? All of it.

But it is a subjective experience, the fact that you feel certain things. That’s the next question: Because you feel it, does that makes it real and true?

We have always understood phenomenology as, “It is my subjective experience, and that’s what makes it true.” But that doesn’t mean it is true.

We are so quick to want to say, because I feel close and loved and intimate, that it is love. And that is a question. (...)

Spiegelman: This is one of your fundamental ideas that has been so meaningful for me in my own life: That desire is a function of knowing, of tolerating mystery in the other, that there has to be separation between yourself and the other to really feel eros and love. And it seems like what you’re saying is that with an A.I., there just simply isn’t the otherness.

Perel: Well, it’s also that mystery is often perceived as a bug, rather than as a feature.

by Esther Perel and Nadja Spiegelman, NY Times | Read more:
Video: Cartoontopia/Futurama via

Sony Goes for Peanuts

It wasn’t so long ago that purchases of American institutions by Japanese companies sparked outrage in the United States. When Mitsubishi bought the Rockefeller Center in 1989, a local auto dealership ran a TV spot that invited Americans to “imagine a few years from now. It’s December, and the whole family’s going to see the big Christmas tree at Hirohito Center… Enough already.” Sony’s purchase of Columbia Pictures that same year caused such unease that chairman Akio Morita felt the need to declare “this is not a Japanese invasion.” A Newsweek poll of the era revealed that 54% of Americans saw Japan as a bigger threat to America than the Soviet Union. Many exploited this fear of Japan for their own ends. Politicians grandstanded by smashing Japanese products and demanding investigations into purchases. Predictably, Donald Trump’s first public foray into politics was a jeremiad against Japan in a 1989 appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

Contrast this to yesterday, when Sony announced that it had paid nearly half a billion dollars for another American icon: Peanuts Holding LLC, the company that administers the rights to the Peanuts franchise. Talk about A Charlie Brown Christmas for shareholders! The reaction to this Japanese acquisition of a cultural institution? Crickets. This speaks to how dramatically the relationship between the US and Japan has changed. It also speaks to how dramatically Peanuts changed, how Peanuts changed Japan, and how that in turn changed all of us. But perhaps most of all, it illustrates (pun intended) how stories need products, and products need stories.

There are countless stories out there, and countless products. But crossing these streams — giving stories products in the form of merchandise, or products stories to make them more than just commodities, can supercharge both. It can create international empires. Peanuts is a perfect case in point.

When Charles Shultz’ Peanuts debuted in October of 1950, it was utterly unlike any cartoon Americans had seen in the funny pages. The very first strip’s punchline involved an adorable tyke declaring his hatred for Charlie Brown. Li’l Abner creator Al Capp described the cast as “good mean little bastards eager to hurt each other.” Matt Groening of The Simpsons fame recalled being “excited by the casual cruelty and offhand humiliations at the heart of the strip.” To Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury, it “vibrated with fifties alienation.”

A hint of darkness made Peanuts stick out in a crowded comics page. But it’s hard to square these comments with the Happiness Is a Warm Puppy-era Peanuts I remember from my childhood. By that time Schultz had sanded the rough edges off those “little bastards,” distilling them into cute and lovable archetypes. More to the point, he de-centered the kids to focus on Snoopy, who had morphed from his origins as a four-legged canine into a bipedal, anthropomorphic creature with a bulbous head and a penchant for tap-dancing and flying biplanes.

The vibe shift seems to date to 1966, when the animated It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown devoted roughly a quarter of its screen time to Snoopy’s solo flights of fancy. Schultz was already lauded for his short-form social satire: his characters had graced the cover of Time the year before. But he seems to have grasped that the way to riches would be only found by looking at the brighter side of life.

This new Peanuts, less mean, less casually cruel, less alienated, was arguably also less interesting. But there was no question that it was way, way more marketable. You might have identified with one or another of the human characters, with their all too human foibles, but anthropomorphic Snoopy was someone anyone and everyone could inhabit. Kids in particular. You didn’t even have to be American to get him.

This later, kinder, gentler incarnation of Peanuts, and Snoopy in particular, would charm Japanese audiences, thanks to the efforts of a serial entrepreneur named Shintaro Tsuji. He was a would-be poet turned wartime chemist, then a postwar black-market bootlegger of moonshine, and an inveterate hatcher of business schemes ranging from silks to produce to kitchenware. You are undoubtedly familiar with the most successful of his ventures. It is called Sanrio — the home of Hello Kitty.

Tsuji, long interested in American trends, played a key role in importing many of them to Japan. He forged a relationship with Hallmark to translate their greeting cards, and negotiated with Mattel for the rights to Barbie. He acquired the license to Peanuts in 1968, when his company, then known as the Yamanashi Silk Center, was at a low. Snoopy-branded merchandise proved so popular that it put his struggling company back in the black within a year. Snoopy wasn’t the first cute animal to hit big in Japan; Tsuji himself had scored a big hit in the mid-sixties with merchandise featuring Mii-tan, a cute cat designed by the artist Ado Mizumori. But Snoopy’s runaway success seems to have sparked an epiphany in Tsuji.

As he later put it, Japan was “a world in which ‘making money’ meant ‘making things.’ I desperately wanted to leapfrog the ‘things’—the ‘hardware’—and make a business out of the intellectual property—the ‘software.’ I suspect everyone around me thought I was nuts.”

He was nuts. Merchandising characters from hit stories was common sense, then as now. Many Japanese companies did that sort of thing. Creating hit characters without stories was fiendishly difficult, bordering on impossible. Stories breathe life into characters, bestowing them with an authenticity that standalone designs simply do not possess (or need to earn in other ways). Yet Tsuji would not be deterred. In 1971, he launched an in-house art department, staffing it with young women straight out of art school. In the wake of Peanuts’ continuing success, he gave the team a singular directive: “Draw cats and bears. If a dog hit this big, one of those two is sure to follow.”

Two years later, he renamed the Yamanashi Silk Center “Sanrio.” (There’s a whole story about how that came to be, which you can read in my book, if you’re so inclined.) The year after that, in 1974, one of Sanrio’s designers struck gold, in the form of an anthropomorphic cat with a bulbous head and a penchant for hugging: Hello Kitty. Soon, Kitty products were a full-blown fiiba (fever) in Japan. And this time, Tsuji didn’t have to split the proceeds with anyone, because Sanrio owned the character outright. Schultz needed decades of narrative to make stars of Peanuts’ menagerie of characters. Tsuji upended this process by making characters stars without any story at all.

Sanrio famously insists that Hello Kitty isn’t really a cat; she’s a little girl who happens to look like a cat. I take no particular stance on this globally divisive issue. But I think you can make the case that she wouldn’t exist at all, if it hadn’t been for the trail Schultz blazed with Peanuts, shifting away from social satire to make an anthropomorphic dog the star of the show. Tsuji’s genius was realizing that you could make a star without a show — provided you had the ability to print it on countless school supplies, kitchenware, and accessories. That was the trick up his sleeve. The medium is the message, as they say. In essence, Kitty products, ubiquitous to the point of absurdity, became her story.

by Matt Alt, Pure Invention |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Super Galapagos (PI):]

***

Once the West feared Japan’s supposed technological superiority. Then came the schadenfreude over Japan’s supposed fall. Now a new generation is projecting upon the country an almost desperate longing for comfort. And is it any wonder? The meme centers on companies producing products that make the lives of consumers easier. That must feel like a dreamy fantasy to young folks who’ve only known life in an attention economy, where corporations are the consumers and they’re the products.

To them, Japan isn’t in the past or the future. It’s a very real place — a place where things haven’t gone haywire. This is Japan as a kind of Galapagos, but not in a pejorative sense. Rather, it’s a superlative, asking, a little plaintively: Why can’t we have nice things like this in our country?...

I agree that Japan is a kind of Galapagos, in the sense that it can be oblivious to global trends. But I disagree that this is a weakness. The reason being that nearly everything the planet loves from Japan was made for by Japanese, for Japanese in the first place.

Looking back, this has always been the case. Whether the woodblock prints that wowed the world in the 19th century, or the Walkmans and Nintendo Entertainment Systems that were must-haves in the Eighties, or the Pokémania that seized the planet at the turn of the Millenium, or the life-changing cleaning magic of the 2010s, or the anime blockbusters Japan keeps unleashing in the 2020s – they hit us in the feels, so we assumed that they were made just for us. But they weren’t.

The Dilbert Afterlife

Sixty-eight years of highly defective people

Thanks to everyone who sent in condolences on my recent death from prostate cancer at age 68, but that was Scott Adams. I (Scott Alexander) am still alive.

Still, the condolences are appreciated. Scott Adams was a surprisingly big part of my life. I may be the only person to have read every Dilbert book before graduating elementary school. For some reason, 10-year-old-Scott found Adams’ stories of time-wasting meetings and pointy-haired bosses hilarious. No doubt some of the attraction came from a more-than-passing resemblance between Dilbert’s nameless corporation and the California public school system. We’re all inmates in prisons with different names.

But it would be insufficiently ambitious to stop there. Adams’ comics were about the nerd experience. About being cleverer than everyone else, not just in the sense of being high IQ, but in the sense of being the only sane man in a crazy world where everyone else spends their days listening to overpaid consultants drone on about mission statements instead of doing anything useful. There’s an arc in Dilbert where the boss disappears for a few weeks and the engineers get to manage their own time. Productivity shoots up. Morale soars. They invent warp drives and time machines. Then the boss returns, and they’re back to being chronically behind schedule and over budget. This is the nerd outlook in a nutshell: if I ran the circus, there’d be some changes around here.

Yet the other half of the nerd experience is: for some reason this never works. Dilbert and his brilliant co-workers are stuck watching from their cubicles while their idiot boss racks in bonuses and accolades. If humor, like religion, is an opiate of the masses, then Adams is masterfully unsubtle about what type of wound his art is trying to numb.

This is the basic engine of Dilbert: everyone is rewarded in exact inverse proportion to their virtue. Dilbert and Alice are brilliant and hard-working, so they get crumbs. Wally is brilliant but lazy, so he at least enjoys a fool’s paradise of endless coffee and donuts while his co-workers clean up his messes. The P.H.B. is neither smart nor industrious, so he is forever on top, reaping the rewards of everyone else’s toil. Dogbert, an inveterate scammer with a passing resemblance to various trickster deities, makes out best of all.

The repressed object at the bottom of the nerd subconscious, the thing too scary to view except through humor, is that you’re smarter than everyone else, but for some reason it isn’t working. Somehow all that stuff about small talk and sportsball and drinking makes them stronger than you. No equation can tell you why. Your best-laid plans turn to dust at a single glint of Chad’s perfectly-white teeth.

Lesser lights may distance themselves from their art, but Adams radiated contempt for such surrender. He lived his whole life as a series of Dilbert strips. Gather them into one of his signature compendia, and the title would be Dilbert Achieves Self Awareness And Realizes That If He’s So Smart Then He Ought To Be Able To Become The Pointy-Haired Boss, Devotes His Whole Life To This Effort, Achieves About 50% Success, Ends Up In An Uncanny Valley Where He Has Neither The Virtues Of The Honest Engineer Nor Truly Those Of The Slick Consultant, Then Dies Of Cancer Right When His Character Arc Starts To Get Interesting.

If your reaction is “I would absolutely buy that book”, then keep reading, but expect some detours.

Fugitive From The Cubicle Police

The niche that became Dilbert opened when Garfield first said “I hate Mondays”. The quote became a popular sensation, inspiring t-shirts, coffee mugs, and even a hit single. But (as I’m hardly the first to point out) why should Garfield hate Mondays? He’s a cat! He doesn’t have to work!

In the 80s and 90s, saying that you hated your job was considered the height of humor. Drew Carey: “Oh, you hate your job? There’s a support group for that. It’s called everybody, and they meet at the bar.”

This was merely the career subregion of the supercontinent of Boomer self-deprecating jokes, whose other prominences included “I overeat”, “My marriage is on the rocks”, “I have an alcohol problem”, and “My mental health is poor”.

Arguably this had something to do with the Bohemian turn, the reaction against the forced cheer of the 1950s middle-class establishment of company men who gave their all to faceless corporations and then dropped dead of heart attacks at 60. You could be that guy, proudly boasting to your date about how you traded your second-to-last patent artery to complete a spreadsheet that raised shareholder value 14%. Or you could be the guy who says “Oh yeah, I have a day job working for the Man, but fuck the rat race, my true passion is white water rafting”. When your father came home every day looking haggard and worn out but still praising his boss because “you’ve got to respect the company or they won’t take care of you”, being able to say “I hate Mondays” must have felt liberating, like the mantra of a free man.

This was the world of Dilbert’s rise. You’d put a Dilbert comic on your cubicle wall, and feel like you’d gotten away with something. If you were really clever, you’d put the Dilbert comic where Dilbert gets in trouble for putting a comic on his cubicle wall on your cubicle wall, and dare them to move against you.

(again, I was ten at the time. I only know about this because Scott Adams would start each of his book collections with an essay, and sometimes he would talk about letters he got from fans, and many of them would have stories like these.)

But t-shirts saying “Working Hard . . . Or Hardly Working?” no longer hit as hard as they once did. Contra the usual story, Millennials are too earnest to tolerate the pleasant contradiction of saying they hate their job and then going in every day with a smile. They either have to genuinely hate their job - become some kind of dirtbag communist labor activist - or at least pretend to love it. The worm turns, all that is cringe becomes based once more and vice versa. Imagine that guy boasting to his date again. One says: “Oh yeah, I grudgingly clock in every day to give my eight hours to the rat race, but trust me, I’m secretly hating myself the whole time”? The other: “I work for a boutique solar energy startup that’s ending climate change - saving the environment is my passion!” Zoomers are worse still: not even the fig leaf of social good, just pure hustle.

Dilbert is a relic of a simpler time, when the trope could be played straight. But it’s also an artifact of the transition, maybe even a driver of it. Scott Adams appreciated these considerations earlier and more acutely than anyone else. And they drove him nuts.

Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain

Adams knew, deep in his bones, that he was cleverer than other people. God always punishes this impulse, especially in nerds. His usual strategy is straightforward enough: let them reach the advanced physics classes, where there will always be someone smarter than them, then beat them on the head with their own intellectual inferiority so many times that they cry uncle and admit they’re nothing special.

For Adams, God took a more creative and – dare I say, crueler – route. He created him only-slightly-above-average at everything except for a world-historical, Mozart-tier, absolutely Leonardo-level skill at making silly comics about hating work.

Scott Adams never forgave this. Too self-aware to deny it, too narcissistic to accept it, he spent his life searching for a loophole. You can read his frustration in his book titles: How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big. Trapped In A Dilbert World. Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain. Still, he refused to stick to comics. For a moment in the late-90s, with books like The Dilbert Principle and The Dilbert Future, he seemed on his way to be becoming a semi-serious business intellectual. He never quite made it, maybe because the Dilbert Principle wasn’t really what managers and consultants wanted to hear:

I wrote The Dilbert Principle around the concept that in many cases the least competent, least smart people are promoted, simply because they’re the ones you don't want doing actual work. You want them ordering the doughnuts and yelling at people for not doing their assignments—you know, the easy work. Your heart surgeons and your computer programmers—your smart people—aren't in management.

Okay, “I am cleverer than everyone else”, got it. His next venture (c. 1999) was the Dilberito, an attempt to revolutionize food via a Dilbert-themed burrito with the full Recommended Daily Allowance of twenty-three vitamins. I swear I am not making this up. A contemporaneous NYT review said it “could have been designed only by a food technologist or by someone who eats lunch without much thought to taste”. The Onion, in its twenty year retrospective for the doomed comestible, called it a frustrated groping towards meal replacements like Soylent or Huel, long before the existence of a culture nerdy enough to support them. Adams himself, looking back from several years’ distance, was even more scathing: “the mineral fortification was hard to disguise, and because of the veggie and legume content, three bites of the Dilberito made you fart so hard your intestines formed a tail.”

His second foray into the culinary world was a local restaurant called Stacey’s.

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Images: Dilbert/ACX 

[ed. First picture: Adams actually had a custom-built tower on his home shaped like Dilbert’s head.]

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie

Illustrations: Felicia Bond

[ed. For future reference. Wish I'd known about this book (and series) when my grandaughter was a bit younger, but maybe it's not too late (still seven, but she's growing up fast).]

“My folks really wanted me to eat a doctor or a lawyer.”

Image: Charlie Hankin via

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Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

[ed. See also: The Escapist Tragedy of ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ (Harvard Crimson).]

To Readers

Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
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[ed. I'd like to apologize for all the political junk on this blog lately. Unfortunately so many bad things are happening these days that celebrating normal life seems almost impossible. For my sanity and yours, I'll try to keep it all to a minimum (but still highlight important issues as needed). Please bear with me, we'll get through this.]

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[ed. Oh man, I'm probably in the back row... naked.]

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The Gospel According to South Park

Somehow, five years have passed since the COVID summer of 2020. My son had just “finished” fourth grade. His mother and I were distracted parents of him and his seven-year-old sister, both of us teetering from cabin fever. It felt like we were hanging on to our sanity, and our marriage, by a thread.

We held on to both, thankfully. Our kids seem to have recovered, too. But by this time that summer, it’s fair to say we had completely “lost contain” of our children. Even under normal conditions, we’ve favored a loose-reins approach to parenting, with a healthy dose of Lenore Skenazy-style “Free Range Parenting.” But that summer? I gave up entirely. I let my son watch TV. A lot of TV.

By the time school resumed, he had watched every episode of The Simpsons and every episode of South Park.

At the time, I felt more than a little guilty about letting a 10-year-old binge-watch two decades of South Park. It was a bit early, I thought, for him to be learning proper condom application techniques from Mr. Garrison. When I told friends later, the story always got a laugh – a kind of comic confession from a parent who’d fallen asleep at the wheel.

But as my son made his way through middle school and into high school, something changed. One night over dinner, we were talking about wars when I mentioned Saddam Hussein. My son chimed in casually – he knew exactly who Saddam was. I asked him how. His answer: “South Park.”

That kept happening. From Michael Jackson and Neverland Ranch, to Mormonism, to the NSA, to wokeism … my son was not only familiar with these topics, he was informed, funny, and incisively skeptical. I realized that this crash course from Butters and Cartman and Mr. Mackey had functioned like one of those downloads Neo gets in The Matrix; except that instead of instantly learning martial arts, my son had instantly become culturally literate. And, just as important, that literacy came wrapped in a sense of humor rooted in satire, absurdity, and a deep mistrust of power, regardless of party affiliation.

He jokes about Joe Biden’s senility and Trump’s grifting grossness. He refers to COVID-era masking as “chin diapers,” a phrase South Park coined while many adults were still double-masking alone in their cars. It struck me: my greatest parenting lapse had somehow turned into one of my best decisions.

Of course, it’s not just that South Park is anti-authority and unapologetically crude. So was Beavis and Butthead. The difference is that South Park is crafted. It endures not just because of what it says, but how it’s made – with discipline, speed, and storytelling intelligence.

South Park co-creators Matt Parker and Trey Stone are master storytellers. In a short video that should be required viewing for anyone who writes, they explain that if the beats, or scenes, of your story are best linked by the phrase “and then,” you’re doing it wrong. Instead, each scene should be connected by “therefore” or “but.” It’s deceptively simple, and it’s the single best explanation of narrative momentum I’ve ever seen. (Watch it here.)

Combine that storytelling mastery with a relentless work ethic that has allowed them to churn out weekly takes on almost every major current event of the last three decades, and you get the South Park that we know and (that most of us) love today. A generational institution that’s still funny.

And still winning.

Just days after closing a new five-year, $1.5 billion deal with Paramount+, South Park opened its 27th season with an episode titled “Sermon on the Mount,” which gleefully eviscerated both President Trump and Paramount+. What’s the point of having “fuck you money” if you never say “fuck you”? (...)

And the difference between South Park and the late-night crowd isn’t just about the comedy. It’s about the message. During COVID, while Colbert and others were fawning over Fauci, hawking Pfizer ads, and pushing for school closures, South Park was mocking all of it – the masks, the panic, the bureaucratic gaslighting. As a concept, “chin diapers” wasn’t just funny – it was accurate.

When comedy becomes propaganda, it stops being funny. Parker and Stone have never forgotten that the job is to make people laugh. That means skewering whoever is in power, without asking for permission.

Late night talk shows are dying, not entirely but primarily because the product is borderline unwatchable. But, despite the best efforts of the hall monitor, cancel culture crowd, satire – real, cutting, offensive, hilarious satire – is alive and well. My son, now in high school, is living proof. He is a great conversationalist, comfortable speaking with just about anyone of any age; in large part, thanks to a show I once felt guilty for letting him watch.

As it turns out, enrolling my son in summer school at South Park Elementary wasn’t a parenting blunder at all. And, of course, Parker and Stone had it right from the beginning.

by Jeremy Radcliffe, Epsilon Theory | Read more:
Image: South Park

[ed. They'll pick it all up from classmates anyway. I think my son was near that age, maybe about 12, when I took him to see Pulp Fiction.]

Tom Gauld - Mooncop
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Jim Benton
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The Gospel According to South Park

Somehow, five years have passed since the COVID summer of 2020. My son had just “finished” fourth grade. His mother and I were distracted parents of him and his seven-year-old sister, both of us teetering from cabin fever. It felt like we were hanging on to our sanity, and our marriage, by a thread.

We held on to both, thankfully. Our kids seem to have recovered, too. But by this time that summer, it’s fair to say we had completely “lost contain” of our children. Even under normal conditions, we’ve favored a loose-reins approach to parenting, with a healthy dose of Lenore Skenazy-style “Free Range Parenting.” But that summer? I gave up entirely. I let my son watch TV. A lot of TV.

By the time school resumed, he had watched every episode of The Simpsons and every episode of South Park.

At the time, I felt more than a little guilty about letting a 10-year-old binge-watch two decades of South Park. It was a bit early, I thought, for him to be learning proper condom application techniques from Mr. Garrison. When I told friends later, the story always got a laugh – a kind of comic confession from a parent who’d fallen asleep at the wheel.

But as my son made his way through middle school and into high school, something changed. One night over dinner, we were talking about wars when I mentioned Saddam Hussein. My son chimed in casually – he knew exactly who Saddam was. I asked him how. His answer: “South Park.”

That kept happening. From Michael Jackson and Neverland Ranch, to Mormonism, to the NSA, to wokeism … my son was not only familiar with these topics, he was informed, funny, and incisively skeptical. I realized that this crash course from Butters and Cartman and Mr. Mackey had functioned like one of those downloads Neo gets in The Matrix; except that instead of instantly learning martial arts, my son had instantly become culturally literate. And, just as important, that literacy came wrapped in a sense of humor rooted in satire, absurdity, and a deep mistrust of power, regardless of party affiliation.

He jokes about Joe Biden’s senility and Trump’s grifting grossness. He refers to COVID-era masking as “chin diapers,” a phrase South Park coined while many adults were still double-masking alone in their cars. It struck me: my greatest parenting lapse had somehow turned into one of my best decisions.

Of course, it’s not just that South Park is anti-authority and unapologetically crude. So was Beavis and Butthead. The difference is that South Park is crafted. It endures not just because of what it says, but how it’s made – with discipline, speed, and storytelling intelligence.

South Park co-creators Matt Parker and Trey Stone are master storytellers. In a short video that should be required viewing for anyone who writes, they explain that if the beats, or scenes, of your story are best linked by the phrase “and then,” you’re doing it wrong. Instead, each scene should be connected by “therefore” or “but.” It’s deceptively simple, and it’s the single best explanation of narrative momentum I’ve ever seen. (Watch it here.)

Combine that storytelling mastery with a relentless work ethic that has allowed them to churn out weekly takes on almost every major current event of the last three decades, and you get the South Park that we know and (that most of us) love today. A generational institution that’s still funny.

by Jeremy Radcliffe, Epsilon Theory | Read more:
Image: South Park

[ed. Smart moronic vs dumb moronic. People are probably just grateful for any kind of resistance these days.]

Eric Cartman, Welcome (for Now) to the Resistance

There is a slang term that, because I am not writing this for a foul-mouthed satire on a streaming service, I will refer to as “bleep-you money”: the amount of cash you need to feel free to do and say what you want.

For Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the makers of “South Park,” that number appears to be around $1.25 billion — the price tag on their recent deal with Paramount. Once the ink dried, they put their mouths where their money was, going hard after President Trump and their own corporate benefactors.

The Season 27 premiere aired July 23, shortly after Paramount agreed to a lawsuit settlement with the president that the late-night host Stephen Colbert called a “big, fat bribe,” and shortly after CBS, which Paramount owns, announced that Colbert’s show would end next year. (Paramount said the move was purely a financial decision.)

In the episode, “Sermon on the ’Mount,” the president is suing everyone, and everyone — from local governments to “60 Minutes” — is giving up. The town of South Park has to literally bring Jesus (a recurring character since the show’s earliest days) into its schools. President Trump appears as a tinpot dictator, in bed (again literally) with Satan. Desperate, the townspeople turn to Christ, who bestows his wisdom: “All of you, shut the [expletive] up, or South Park is over,” he says. “You really want to end up like Colbert?”

In the follow-up episode, the school counselor, Mr. Mackey, gets fired because of funding cuts and signs up with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (“If you need a job, it’s A! Job! To have!” goes the recruiting jingle.)

Mr. Mackey and his inexperienced comrades pull up their face masks, bust a “Dora the Explorer” live show (another repurposing of a Paramount property) and raid heaven to round up Latino angels. For good performance, Mr. Mackey wins a trip to Mar-a-Lago — here, a debauched Fantasy Island with President Trump as Mr. Roarke and Vice President JD Vance as Tattoo.

If you were making a list of the series likeliest to become voices of the Trump 2.0 resistance, “South Park” would not have been close to the top. It has savaged liberal pieties and has been credited, if not by its own creators, with inspiring a wave of “South Park conservatives.”

The show’s politics have been elusive — close to libertarian, in the neighborhood of cynical. It’s not that “South Park” is amoral — it is often deeply moralistic, summing up episodes with speeches and epiphanies. But for years, its core principle has been that people who care too righteously about any cause are ridiculous.

That message may have been a blueprint for civic nihilism, an invitation to LOL all the way to dystopia. But the show’s history may also be exactly what makes “South Park” a compelling voice at this moment. Along with its three-comma price tag, the show has amassed cultural capital, a reputation for not being in any party’s corner. (...)

Beyond the crackdown on media and academic speech, the new “South Park” also focuses on the people who feel more free than ever to speak up in the new order. Eric Cartman, the show’s Magic 8-Ball of offensiveness, begins to realize that “woke is dead”: People are free to spew the kind of slurs and insults that used to get him yelled at. A classmate steals his material — anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, kneejerk sexism — to start a hit podcast. Cartman has won, and he’s miserable. “You can just say ‘retarded’ now, nobody cares,” he moans. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” (...)

Of course, you could counter that Parker and Stone are free to mock. They have become very rich doing it, and, unlike Colbert, no one is taking their show off the air yet.

But this, too, is part of the meta point. It is still a free country. You can still say what you want. So why are so many powerful institutions behaving like it isn’t and they can’t? If a few bratty cartoon kids can peel off the emperor’s clothes, what are the grown-ups so afraid of?

The show has a theory for that, and it’s also about money. In the premiere, big institutions — up to heaven itself — are brought to heel by billion-dollar litigation. Later, Mr. Mackey quits ICE despite the pressure to swallow his qualms and go along with things he doesn’t believe because he needs to “make my nut” — that is, pay his bills.

It’s the same story either way: Everyone’s got to make their nut, even if some people’s nuts are bigger than others. Maybe it takes bleep-you money to buy your freedom. But maybe, “South Park” is telling us, freedom comes from deciding that your self-respect is priceless.

by James Poniewozik, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Comedy Central

[ed. Double thumbs up. Kristi Noem episode is an instant classic.]

Sermon on the 'Mount'

“South Park” Skewers a Satire-Proof President

There’s a legal strategy known as the small-penis rule, wherein an author who writes a character based on a real person can potentially evade a libel suit by giving said character a small penis—the logic being that, in order to sue, a plaintiff would have to tacitly admit that the description of his manhood is accurate. This rule technically does not apply to the latest episode of “South Park,” in which the series’ creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, make absolutely no effort to anonymize President Donald Trump, but one wonders if the logic of embarrassment still holds. Trump is portrayed as a deeply insecure leader who literally gets into bed with Satan, his apparent lover. (“I’m not in the mood right now,” the Devil tells him. “Another random bitch commented on my Instagram that you’re on the Epstein list.”) Most notably, the Trump of “South Park” is endowed with a penis so small that Satan says he “can’t even see anything.” If the actual Trump were to retaliate, as he so often does, he’d be playing directly into Parker and Stone’s hands.

“South Park,” amazingly, is in its twenty-seventh season. It’s the second-longest-running animated show on U.S. television, behind “The Simpsons,” and easily the most offensive. Since its première, in 1997, the cartoon—which follows a group of profane elementary schoolers in the town of South Park, Colorado—has managed to piss off nearly every political group, pop-culture fandom, and religious denomination... To the extent that the show has any “beliefs,” it’s that all beliefs are asinine, whether they’re held by the left or the right. Environmental groups criticized the series, in 2006, for portraying Al Gore as a delusional figure obsessed with an imagined monster named ManBearPig. The show was banned in China, in 2019, for mocking Chinese censorship, and the creators famously received death threats after depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

Although “South Park” has declined both in quality and in popularity over the years, it’s still valuable enough that Paramount recently paid $1.5 billion for exclusive streaming rights to the series, and for Parker and Stone to make another fifty episodes. The studio has long been in the process of merging with Skydance Media—a deal that was in a holding pattern for about a year, until Paramount agreed to pay sixteen million dollars to settle a lawsuit that Trump filed against its subsidiary CBS’s “60 Minutes.” A few days before the F.C.C. finally approved the merger, Stephen Colbert, the host of “The Late Show,” on CBS, called the settlement a “big fat bribe”—and then his show was cancelled, ostensibly for financial reasons. All of these are crucial plot points in the latest “South Park” episode, “Sermon on the ‘Mount,” which is now available on Paramount+.

The town of South Park has its fair share of Trump supporters, albeit increasingly disillusioned ones. (“I voted for him to get rid of all the woke stuff,” one man says, “but now that retarded faggot is just putting money in his own pockets.”) Some parents are especially upset when religion is introduced at the local elementary school—in the form of Jesus Christ himself physically showing up and milling around. When the parents call the President to complain, he says that he’s going to sue the town for five billion dollars, setting up an extended riff on Trump’s status as a serial litigant. (Throughout the episode, he also threatens to sue people who make reference to his unfortunate penis.) But Parker and Stone’s true focus is media cowardice, which becomes clear when a fictionalized “60 Minutes” runs a segment on the showdown between Trump and the town of South Park.

The anchors are visibly anxious. “Oh, shit,” one says, as the news broadcast begins. “The small town of South Park, Colorado, is protesting against the President. The townspeople claim that the President—who, who is a great man, great guy, we know is probably watching—and, uh, we’re just reporting on this town in Colorado that’s being sued by the President.”

His co-anchor cuts in: “To be clear, we don’t agree with them.”

“We think these protesters are total retards,” the first anchor adds.

The demonstration is interrupted by Jesus, who flies onto the scene, Superman-style. He hands everyone bread. “Just eat the bread, and listen,” he says, and so begins his Sermon on the ’Mount: “I didn’t want to come back and be in the school, but I had to, because it was part of a lawsuit and the agreement with Paramount.” He explains that Trump “can do whatever he wants now that someone has backed down,” adding, “Do you really wanna end up like Colbert?” He tells the people that they need to shut up, or else “South Park is over.”

Donald Trump poses a real conundrum for comedians. He’s an endless wellspring of material, but what he says and does is inevitably more absurd—and often more compelling—than any satire could be. Parker and Stone realized this early on. They initially dealt with Trump by having one of the show’s recurring characters, a former schoolteacher named Mr. Garrison, act as a surrogate; he ascends to the Presidency by promising to build a wall, and gradually turns orange. But the showrunners quickly found that, as Parker put it, “what was actually happening was way funnier than anything we could come up with.” So they pivoted to the other defining issues of our time: Kanye West’s antisemitism, ChatGPT, the COVID-19 pandemic (in this case, caused by a character’s decision to have sex with a bat in China).

The Paramount drama has prompted “South Park” to go after Trump more directly than ever before, but the gags, which all too often come back to his anatomy, or his penchant for memes, aren’t exactly revelatory. The sharpest joke is a meta one: the last time we saw Satan in bed with someone was in the 1999 film “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut,” which depicted an abusive relationship between Satan and Saddam Hussein. (Hussein was the abuser.) Rather than concoct a new playbook for Trump, Parker and Stone have returned to an old one.

Trump’s existential threat to comedy has another dimension, one that intensified after his reëlection, as figures like Shane Gillis and Tim Dillion gained mainstream appeal: it’s hard to make boundary-pushing statements when there are no longer any boundaries. This problem is especially pressing for Parker and Stone, and they confront it via the angst of South Park’s resident provocateur, Eric Cartman.

The episode opens with Cartman turning on a radio station, where he’s met with the sound of static. “Mom, something’s wrong with my favorite show,” he complains. “National Public Radio, where all the liberals bitch and whine about stuff.” His mother informs him that Trump has cancelled NPR. Cartman is devastated: “That was, like, the funniest shit ever.”

Later, Cartman confides in his friend Butters, who’s more of a snowflake type. “Woke is dead,” Cartman says, sadly. “You can just say ‘retarded’ now, nobody cares. Everyone hates the Jews. Everyone’s fine with using gay slurs.”

“That’s not good,” Butters replies.

“No, it’s terrible!” Cartman says. “ ’Cause now I don’t know . . . what I’m supposed to do.”

At first, it didn’t seem like “South Park” had an answer to this question; Cartman, unconvinced by Butters’s assurances that “woke” is “still out there, somewhere,” forces him into a suicide pact. The two of them sit inside a car, parked in a garage, with the engine running. The scene is foreboding—until it’s revealed that the car is electric. [ed. Lol!]

The townspeople, meanwhile, negotiate a settlement with the President, who agrees to a sum of $3.5 million. (“We’ll just have to cut some funding for our schools and hospitals and roads and that should be that,” one woman says.) But there’s one condition: as part of the settlement, the town also has to engage in “pro-Trump messaging”—an apparent reference to recent reports that Trump has demanded the same from CBS. What follows is genuine shock comedy, and a treatment of Trump that feels original. The town’s first P.S.A. is an A.I.-generated video of Trump—a live-action one, not a cartoon—trudging through a desert. He proceeds to take off his clothes, though he leaves his dress shoes and sock garters on. “When things heat up, who will deliver us from temptation?” a voice-over says. “No matter how hot it gets, he’s not afraid to fight for America.” Trump lies down in the sand, and his micropenis, which has googly eyes and a mouth, slowly becomes erect, before announcing, “I’m Donald J. Trump, and I endorse this message.” The P.S.A. is labelled one of fifty, leaving open the possibility that, in the course of the forty-nine “South Park” episodes still to come, we’ll get forty-nine more.

Is this too much? Probably. Yet there’s an age-old tradition of political vulgarity, of which Trump himself is a practitioner—it’s the crux of his appeal.

by Tyler Foggatt, New Yorker | Read more:
Image:South Park Studios/YouTube

[ed. Classic.]

via:

[ed. absolutely..]