Hacker News Reader

Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

This is the funniest thing Matt and Trey have done in years. I don't know if they still write the show, but it hasn't been funny to me in a couple years. This clip had me rolling. This feels inspired and I hope it creates more awareness in the general public.

View on HN

Trey Parker had a similar reaction [0]:

“But when Parker got to see himself digitally altered to look like Al Gore, he said, “It was the first time I had laughed at myself in a long time.”

Parker added: “I always hate watching myself. Even with ‘South Park,’ I have a perfect image of what it’s going to look like in my head all the time. But on this, there were moments where we felt like kids in our basement again.”

To Parker and Stone, the experience also reminded them of “The Spirit of Christmas,” their 1995 homemade short film that became a viral sensation in a more primitive age of the internet and paved the way for “South Park.””

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/29/arts/television/sassy-jus...

I couldn’t agree more. It managed to feel like good old fashioned low budget internet fun from YouTube yesteryear. Putting aside Matt and Trey, it’s one of the few things that’s made me genuinely burst out laughing in years, period.

It’s made me stop and think about why that is, and the best I can come up with is that very little is surprising anymore. When you get past 30, everything feels like something you’ve seen done before. Deep fake comedy is so cutting edge, that it couldn’t help but be fresh.

Or maybe I’m just a boring old man. The last thing that made me laugh this hard was this Reddit submission, and again, it succeeds because I didn’t see it coming: https://i.reddit.com/r/ContagiousLaughter/comments/gzdja1/on...

Trey Parker is credited as the writer for the vast majority of episodes of South Park, especially since Season 4. Most of their episodes are topical these days, I recommend checking out the recent Pandemic Special.

Matt, Trey and a guy named Robert Lopez wrote the theatre production Book of Mormon, which was well received and won Tony awards (Trey studied Musical Theatre in College, which explains why the South Park Movie was a musical).

Trey's daughter was cast as Jared Kushner in Sassy Justice, which was hilarious, and the lead in Sassy Justice is played by Peter Serafinowicz [0], who is a British comedian!

I hope they make more of these, not just because I'm a fan, but because it massively disseminates the power of deepfakes!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-7NDP8V-6A

That Robert Lopez also wrote the awesome Avenue Q musical, and co-wrote the Frozen songs with his wife. He is also the youngest person to achieve an EGOT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_have_won_Ac...).

I saw the pandemic special and, I don't know, it just didn't seem funny to me. I still watch Mr. Hankey's Christmas Classics every year when I decorate the tree, and I still love what they did up until around season 12. After that it gets hit-or-miss and after a few more seasons just didn't seem worth watching anymore. I'd chalk it up to getting older and not smoking pot anymore, but I still love their old stuff.

The older episodes are my favourite as well. Ding dong m'kay!

Until very recently, I thought they wrote all the episodes without outside involvement, but then I recently came across this clip where Bill Hader talks about being part of a "South Park retreat" where they bring people to brainstorm episodes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdZnGz9CWpU

Bill Hader was on the writing team, he worked in the office during the seasons. There is a documentary that shows what its like there, 6 Days To Air. The writers room is hilarious.

Others have probably mentioned this, but my first thought is how this will bring deep fakes to people's attention, and make them realize that nothing they see on the internet is necessarily real.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com