Critic Reviews

South Park never takes the easy route nor does it ever take it easy on anyone. For that, it’s become a voice worth hearing every year, and one we’ll be eager to engage with throughout Season 20.

As animation, it's substandard, primitive dreck; as comedy, however, it's gloriously subversive art. [12 Aug 1997]

Has as much nerve as "The Simpsons" when it burst on the scene. [11 Aug 1997]

South Park is either the funniest new show on the air or the next sign of the apocalypse. ... When it's not in gross-out mode, and often even when it is, South Park is weaving a surrealist satire of small-town America. [11 Aug 1997]

Unlike many cartoons, this one actually looks funny, and it constantly plays on its grade-school aesthetic for shock value, with great success. At its best, "South Park" is more a profane "Peanuts" than a downsized "Beavis and Butt-head." [13 Aug 1997]

If all "South Park" offered were poo-poo jokes and babes spouting profanity, the show would wear thin awfully fast. It doesn't. The reason is that Parker, Stone and their collaborators actually have done something remarkable with their primitive, construction-paper animation: They have created a wholly new, internally consistent fictional world and have peopled it with distinct, interesting characters. [13 Aug 1997]

It is at once insanely juvenile and very sophisticated, appealing to a funny bone that, as an adult, I try to hide. I feel guilty about laughing, but I laugh anyway. [13 Aug 1997]

Crude in execution, harsh by design, South Park is deliciously deranged. Don't bite unless you have a taste for the tasteless. [13 Aug 1997]

To say this was one of the sharper starts to a season would be stretching it, but one has to admire the series’ persistence.

Blatantly designed to tickle the funny bones of teenage boys and those who think like them, the show delivers plenty of lowbrow laughs, at the same time indulging in excesses seemingly calculated to shock the sensibilities of TV watchdogs. [13 Aug 1997]