I grew up with the religion of 'Star Wars,' frankly. That's when I realized there is something bigger out there... and it's called The Force.
— Trey Parker
You know that everyone thinks that in order to do South Park we must be wild, crazy, rock and roll stars. But the truth is we're just wholesome middle-American guys. We enjoy soda pop, baseball and beating up old people just as much as anybody.
The problem is we moved to LA... The only way to be punk rock in L.A. is to be a Republican.
We're the guys who, if someone says you really shouldn't do an episode making fun of Scientologists, we say, 'Whatever.' Someone says, 'They might come try to burn your house down,' we say, 'We'll just get another one.'
We created a brand for ourselves, so that now people can't get mad at what we do, because then they're just making of themselves.
Jerry Bruckheimer creates comedy, he just doesn't realize because he's a turd.
You know, and it really doesn't have a lot to do with the movie. That's the trick to doing a good musical is that, if you take that music number out, there's less to the movie there. You would miss it.
Sean Penn's really the only one stupid enough to put anything down on paper.
It's this simple law, which every writer knows, of taking two opposites and putting them in a room together. I love anything with Cartman and Butters at the same time, it's great.
It was exactly the same on the South Park movie really too. There's lots of violence in that too, but it always came down to anything sexual... They don't care about anything else.
Careful?! Was my mother careful when she stabbed me in the heart with a coat hanger while I was still in womb?
When I was in sixth grade there was a talent show, and I wrote my first sketch, 'The Dentist.' I played the dentist, and I had my friend play a patient. It was sort of what can go wrong at the dentist, and I just remember I had lots of fake blood and everything.
We find just as many things to rip on the left as we do on the right. People on the far-left and the far-right are the same exact person to us.
Me and Matt love to argue, but in general our sense of humor is pretty much alike.
It's not like we have a formula, but I think one of the reasons this show has survived is that it has a big heart at its center. Other cartoon shows have people crap on each other and make racist jokes. But I don't think people tune in for that. I just don't think a show lasts for 10 years without a heart.
Hollywood views regular people as children, and they think they're the smart ones who need to tell the idiots out there how to be.
Saying goodbye doesn't mean anything. It's the time we spent together that matters, not how we left it.
We made this really dumb decision to put on the cover nothing from South Park but just a real life photo of a piece of pooh dressed up like Mr. Hankey, and a lot of people didn't, they didn't even know what it was.
No, writing musicals is the hardest thing in the world. And it was really funny, because I remember when the South Park movie came out, there were some critics that said, 'Well it's obvious that in order to get it to be 90 minutes they filled some time with music.'
It's funny because I think a lot of it is simply... We've never considered ourselves satirists, but because we're on Comedy Central and because we're South Park on Comedy Central, we can do any topic we want.
In terms of the creative side of it, it's really been a thing where you come up with the funny stuff is usually at a bar or out talking to people or whatever.
I would let my kids watch this stuff way before I'd let them watch something like 'Full House' that I think would make them stupid.
We have it, we're lucky enough that we've created a show where it's not about... a family, or a kid, it's about a town.
What we're always looking for is weird social issues and weird connections to make. Luckily for them, there's no shortage of material.
So we're considering doing a new Christmas album, because there's been Christmas episodes since then, and maybe finally do the version of 'The Most Offensive Song Ever' with lyrics intact.
I spend shockingly little time thinking about real-world stuff.
Sometimes what's right isn't as important as what's profitable.
There is nothing we can't do. So it's just the fact that we're doing topics like that that other people, especially network TV, won't touch, that we're satirists.
My favorite musical? I don't. It changes all the time. I'm just a diehard, I'm totally old school, like I'll sit and watch, if they are re-doing Oklahoma in New York, I will be the first one there.
It's been a fascinating thing because we didn't really know how to write when we started South Park at all. It's been like, we've just sort of grown up a bit and it's amazing to just see how, if you take Butters and Cartman and put them in any scene, it works.
If we have a great idea, we'll go, 'Oh, this could be a cool movie.' Or really for us, it's more like, 'Oh, this is a really bad idea. Let's do this. This seems really stupid.'
