South Park season 21: Less Trump, more Cartman messing with Butters

'That’s the bread and butter of South Park: kids being kids and being ridiculous and outrageous'

As season 20 of South Park rolled out, Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton were reaching the final stages of their Presidential clash.

As you likely know, the Republican won, leading to months of turbulent politics in the United States. South Park, as a result, struggled to keep up with current affairs, the show’s creators seemingly writing themselves into a corner as the election campaign progressed.

Come season 21, Trey Parker and Matt Stone are going to lay off the Trump jokes, instead concentrating on what made the show such a hit, the kids.

Speaking to the LA Times while promoting Despicable Me 3, Parker said after being asked whether they will return to ‘simple’ stories: “Yeah, and [making jokes off the latest news] has also just gotten boring. We weren’t ever really that show.

“We would do an entire season and there would be one moment that played off something that had just happened and people would go, ‘South Park is the show that does that.’ And that’s just not true. We’re not.”

Parker compared the recent season to Saturday Night Live, which featured various cast members, along with Alec Baldwin, making weekly jokes about the Trump administration.

He continued: “It was like, ‘Dude, we’re just becoming CNN now. We’re becoming: Tune in to see what we’re going to say about Trump.’ Matt and I hated it but we got stuck in it somehow.”

“This season I want to get back to Cartman dressing up like a robot and [screwing] with Butters, because to me that’s the bread and butter of South Park: kids being kids and being ridiculous and outrageous but not ‘did you see what Trump did last night?’ Because I don’t give a … anymore.

“We probably could put up billboards — ‘Look what we’re going to do to Trump next week!’ — and get crazy ratings. But I just don’t care.”

While promoting season 20, Parker and Stone joked about reality becoming satire, saying: “It's really hard to make fun of and in the last season of South Park we were really trying to make fun of what was going on but we couldn't keep up and what was actually happening was much funnier than anything we could come up with.”

As a result, the duo, who also directed 2003 film Team America: World Police, were forced to rewrite an episode of South Park to reflect Trump's victory over Clinton after expecting different results.