South Park’s Most Ruthless Celebrity Parodies

It might be hard for audiences today to remember that back at the turn of the century, Russell Crowe was seemingly always in the news for getting into fights. South Park decided to lampoon the star with Russell Crowe Fightin’ Around The World, a mock travel show in which the Gladiator star fights people around the world.

It’s basically a one-note joke, but it keeps going….and going….going from funny to annoying, and then funny again once Russell Crowe starts singing despite the protests of his tugboat. On any other show, this would be the most brutal of parodies, especially once Crowe is in New York, but it’s South Park, which makes this tame in comparison.

Back in 2002, South Park went after Steven Spielberg for making their movies more politically correct, targeting Speilberg’s real-life changes to the guns in E.T., before taking aim at George Lucas for going back and changing Star Wars. The boys accuse the directors on national television of making changes just for the money, then mistakenly give them the idea to change Raiders of the Lost Ark.

“Free Hat” gives voice to the very real criticism that was raging 20 years ago, and thankfully, everything that was parodied in this episode has been solved and will never be a problem again. As for the South Park parody, finding Lucas has “Wedding Video” and “Wedding Video Digitally Enhanced” on his shelf says everything.

When Cartman creates a hand puppet named Jennifer Lopez that becomes an overnight sensation, the real J-Lo travels to South Park to confront her replacement. Problems arise when Ben Affleck falls wildly in love with Cartman’s hand, which makes as much sense reading the sentence as it does in the episode.

Jennifer Lopez is loud, violent, and mean-spirited, while Ben is a doofus clinger-on, turning their early-aughts tabloid personas up to 11. It’s a straightforward parody, but “Bennifer” was everywhere in 2003, and watching them get taken down 20 years later is still cathartic.

“Sexual Healing” exemplifies the best of South Park parodies, taking a scandal from the headlines and then skewering not only Tiger Woods but the tone-deaf media response to the scandal in the first place. The episode opens up with the famous Thanksgiving Day fight between Woods and his then-wife, Elin Nordegren, as part of EA’s latest Tiger Woods video game.

As usual, South Park doesn’t stop there, throwing in hits at Tiger Woods use of pain pills and then going after sex addiction as being a problem only with “rich male celebrities.” Yet Woods gets hit the hardest with a second video game scene including the “loss of endorsements” and a “prenup power-up.

In an episode all about poop, South Park makes sure to put up an “Emmy Award Winning Series” disclaimer whenever a character struggles to poop. Somehow, an episode about Stan’s dad Randy eating nothing but P.F. Chang’s for three days and producing the world’s largest crap works in Bono.

The U2 frontman is famous for coming as egotistical and out of touch, which is what South Park uses to power a brutal parody. Angry over the loss of his record for the world’s biggest crap, Bono produces a photo of his own poop, exclaiming he can’t feel whole unless he’s number one. There’s a reason given for Bono hating the feeling of being number two, and it’s one of the most brutal celebrity takedowns of all time.

In 2009, making fun of Kanye West was a national pastime, and South Park got in on the joke with “Fishsticks.” West is unable to understand a joke created by Jimmy, proclaiming he’s “a genius” and “the voice of a generation,” getting progressively angry, even getting a doctor to declare he can’t be a fish as he has no gills.

Targeting Kanye West’s inability to admit he’s wrong and immense ego is like shooting fish in a barrel, but South Park does it so well that Carlos Mencia ends up catching strays in the process. The highlight is a parody of “Heartless,” all about how West is a gay fish.

It makes sense in context.

Parodying the controversy Oprah Winfrey found herself in when A Million Little Pieces by James Frey turned out to be fraudulent, South Park’s strangest recurring character, Towelie, writes a memoir. Oprah promotes the book after Towelie gets it published by pretending to be a human, and that’s where it starts to get weird.

Oprah ends up demanding the audience lynch Towelie, and then shoots herself in the rear when her butt gets frustrated over the lack of attention and revolts, holding the audience hostage. It’s insane and barely makes sense in context, but it all adds up to a parody of Oprah that mocks her pretentious way of offering advice and cult-like control over her audience.

When Cartman looks up to someone, it usually means that something is horrible wrong, and that’s the case with Mel Gibson. Following the release of Passion of the Christ, Stan, and Kenny try to get their money back from Mel Gibson, portrayed as a crazy masochist that wants to be tortured. During the escape, Gibson launches into a song and dance number and puts on Braveheart make-up before chasing them with a sword.

Mel Gibson’s unhinged behavior includes a truck accident, farting, and going “absolutely coo-coo.” Released during the time Gibson was getting in trouble on almost a weekly basis, “Passion of the Jew” takes down a celebrity, their movie, and the entire cultural firestorm that surrounded the controversial release.

The latest season of South Park is one of the most brutal parodies in the show’s history, as “The Worldwide Privacy Tour” takes aim at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Insisting they want privacy while walking around with large signs and hanging banners on their home, the royal couple is lambasted for complaining over a life of being rich and famous.

When Kyle ignores the couple, they get offended and try to get his attention, driving the elementary school student crazy. At the end of the episode, Prince Harry realizes they could have the quiet life that they want, to the complete disinterest of Meghan Markle. It’s brutal, hits on multiple levels, and pulls no punches, making it the second-best celebrity parody in South Park history.

Not just a parody of Tom Cruise while he was at the height of his public meltdown, “Trapped in the Closet” was a culture-shifting episode that went after Scientology in a way nothing else did before. The award-winning episode of South Park was the first time the public heard the words “thetans” and “Xenu” during a sequence that’s marked “This is what Scientologists actually believe.”

The constant use of “Tom Cruise refuses to come out of the closet” goes after the persistent rumors at the time about his sexuality, which have since faded away, while he’s stopped publicly discussing Scientology with the same fervor. Still, few episodes of television can say they changed the world, but South Park taking down Scientology was the first crack in a dam that broke completely with the glut of documentaries and lawsuits from ex-members in recent years.