![]() ![]() This time around, Parker and Stone take an inspired, show-don’t-tell approach: The episodes vibrantly illustrate the idea-fascinating both in its political and philosophical implications-that a U-Haul van, a bear suit, and a “CENSORED” bar can themselves come to represent precisely the thing they were meant to obscure.Īnd Parker and Stone do this in a way that thumbs a nose at censorship itself, demonstrating that Comedy Central’s skittishness actually made South Park’s representation of Mohammed more “offensive”: In 2001’s “Super Best Friends,” Mohammed was a hero. The last time South Park took on the depiction-of-Mohammed issue, in 2006, it did so with a far heavier hand: In one subplot, Americans afraid of violent al-Qaida reprisals for a cartoon of the prophet literally buried their heads in sand, and the script featured several speeches about the slippery slope of censorship. ![]() In “200,” they are at the top of their game. In the wake of the “200” controversy, Comedy Central has tried to scrub the old episode, “ Super Best Friends,” from the Internet, but you can find a streaming version easily enough. Or perhaps it’s simply because the episode aired way back in July of 2001, in a very different world. Perhaps this is because South Park’s depiction of Mohammed wasn’t negative: The theme of the episode-different religions have different things to recommend them, unless the religion is Scientology-was hardly provocative. What’s funny, of course, is that when South Park first featured a cartoon depiction of Mohammed back in its fifth season, not a whisper of scandal ensued. If there is one absolute here, it is the precedent of violence both real and intimated-the 2004 murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, to which Revolution Muslim alluded in its original post the deaths of more than a hundred people protesting the Danish cartoons throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa and the threats that sent several of these cartoonists into hiding. ![]() Which is all to say, the “200” scandal rests atop a mountain of contingencies. ![]()
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