Best Kenny Deaths On South Park

Of course we need to start this list at ground zero. In this inaugural episode of South Park, Kenny meets his maker for the first time. But at the time we didn’t know that this would be a recurring gag, or if Kenny just wasn’t going to be a character moving forward.

Knowing now what we didn’t know then, it’s safe to say that Kenny’s first death was the start of something beautiful, and it brings a tear to our eyes just thinking about it.

The death in question is particularly gruesome, and in a way shows us how resilient Kenny is. In this episode, Cartman is visited by aliens, and they wreak havoc on the community of South Park.

Kenny is first shot with a UFO blaster, but the fatal blow comes in the form of Officer Barbrady accidentally running him over with his police cruiser.

Cartman is at first skeptical that Kenny actually died, so Stan whacks his corpse with a stick, and Kyle pulls his head off before a swarm of rats arrive on scene to feast on his dead body.

“Spontaneous Combustion” is one of our favorite classic examples of toilet humor in South Park, and it’s made all the better with a patented Kenny death.

But Kenny isn’t the only character to die in this episode, as many other townsfolk also spontaneously combust; a crisis that prompts Mayor McDaniels to put Randy Marsh (a geologist) in charge of figuring out why so many people are perishing.

It’s revealed that the residents of South Park are spontaneously combusting because they’re holding in their flatulence in front of their partners to be polite, which makes sense because Kenny was trying to be a somewhat decent human being around his new girlfriend, Kelly, before becoming engulfed in a plume of explosive methane gas.

Always ones to poke fun at mainstream culture, Matt Stone and Trey Parker have the Sundance Film Festival take place in South Park, Colorado in “Chef’s Chocolate Salty Balls.”

The small mountain town becomes overridden with Hollywood types looking for the next big breakout film, but they cause more harm to the community than good through their excessive celebration of commercialism.

Kenny meets his untimely demise after getting trampled by a crowd leaving a movie theater, and it’s sad to say that this death isn’t as epic as other iterations found on this list.

But still, it’s worth mentioning, because it’s not the unceremonious death that elicits laughter, but rather the reaction to it. Immediately after Kenny gets stampeded into the sidewalk, one of the moviegoers finds a shiny penny on the ground, and happily proclaims, “Oh my god, I found a penny!” This joyous proclamation is met with the now iconic response of “You bastard!”

We’re going to circle back to some tried and true South Park toilet humor, and talk about “the brown note” for a second. When Mr. Garrison’s third-grade class is summoned to participate in the televised World Wide Recorder Concert in Oklahoma City (led by Yoko Ono and Kenny G), the boys are quick to get in a feud with some third graders from New York City.

They learn about the brown note, a musical note that resonates at such a low frequency that it makes anybody who hears it make a movement that’s a little more pungent than the version of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” that they’re tasked with performing at the event.

Kyle, Kenny, Cartman, and Stan swap out the sheet music with their version of the song, and tack it to the New York student’s door. The concert organizer thinks that this sudden change in music is meant for everybody, and prints out a million copies of the patriotic song to distribute to every student participating.

The brown note is so overpowering that many people soil themselves to death, and of course, Kenny is one of the victims.

When Cartman buys his own theme park, he fails to stay on top of the maintenance and upkeep. His original intention was to keep the theme park all to himself, but he slowly has to let more and more people in to pay his overhead and keep the park open.

Despite his intentions to hire custodial staff, snack vendors, and a maintenance crew, the now bustling South Park-based amusement park slowly falls apart throughout the episode, and Kenny gets impaled with a hanging metal pipe while riding on a roller coaster.

When Cartman is served with a lawsuit for Kenny’s death, he casually acknowledges that “Kenny dies all the time,” before reluctantly giving up his money to settle out of court.

In this South Park episode that says the word “shit” 162 times, the boys learn that swear words are referred to as “curse words” because their overuse can potentially cause plagues.

Though the boys learn a very important lesson about swearing in moderation to keep the plagues at bay, it’s already too late for Kenny, who has been slowly rotting away since midway through the first act. In the third act, after the main conflict has been resolved, Kenny finally succumbs to his illness, and vomits out his intestines before the end credits.

Kenny almost made it out alive in “It Hits the Fan,” but in the typical South Park fashion, he only dies after it was mentioned that he hadn’t yet been killed.

By South Park’s fifth season, it started to become clear that Matt Stone and Trey Parker were growing tired of finding new ways to kill Kenny in every single episode.

In “Kenny Dies,” he succumbs to a more realistic death in the form of muscular dystrophy, and for the first time in the series, residents of South Park properly mourn the death of Kenny McCormick.

Believe it or not, this episode is actually a tear-jerker, and we truly feel for sorry for the boys as they mourn the loss of their best friend while somber piano music plays in the background.

Upon this episode’s release, we had reason to believe that this was the last time that we’d see Kenny in South Park, but he does eventually come back to life during the season 6 finale like nothing happened.

After confusing Kenny’s ashes for an urn of chocolate milk powder, Cartman learns that Kenny’s spirit is sharing his body after he drank his remains. The boys take a trip to Scotland to visit Chef’s parents, who have performed exorcisms in the past.

But things go terribly wrong when the boys didn’t bring a host body with them to capture Kenny’s soul and bring him back to South Park.

What does happen, however, is that his soul ends up in a pot roast that eventually gets eaten by Rob Schneider. Throughout the boy’s travels, they see a number of movie trailers involving Schneider transforming into a stapler and a carrot. And on their way back home from Scotland, they see a trailer in which the SNL alum eats the possessed pot roast, transforming him into Kenny.

Though this is technically a Kenny death by proxy, Schneider’s Kenny gets impaled by a flagpole, which is a brilliant callback to a first-season episode of South Park, entitled “Weight Gain 4000.”