“Woke is dead,” declared Eric Cartman, in the much-anticipated return of South Park on Wednesday. The popular cartoon show is back on television following a two-year hiatus beset by contractual negotiations with the series’ parent company, Paramount. Having finally secured a sizable $1.5 billion deal with the media conglomerate, firebrand comedians Matt Stone and Trey Parker began season 27 with an episode entitled “Sermon on the Mount.” No punches were pulled. The writers sardonically skewered Paramount, openly daring them to cancel the show. We should expect no less from our favorite satirists.
Some important context: In July 2025, Paramount Global (owner of CBS and Paramount+) agreed to pay President Donald Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit over a deceptively edited 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Days later, CBS canceled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert —a program that had long abandoned comedy in favor of running public relations for Democrats and was reportedly bleeding $40 million a year— just after Colbert mocked the settlement on air. The timing sparked (delusional) conspiratorial claims of political appeasement, as Paramount sought regulatory approval for a prospective merger.
Parker and Stone thus devised the most garish and unapologetically blunt salvo against Trump imaginable. Mr. Garrison, who had previously served as a very thinly veiled Trump surrogate in earlier seasons, returns to his usual flamboyant self. The role of president, meanwhile, is reassigned to Trump directly, rendered in a tone and aesthetic that deliberately harkens back to South Park’s second season (1998), when Saddam Hussein was portrayed as Satan’s emotionally abusive boyfriend.
Every time you think these writers have peaked in their Olympic-tier detachment from norms and institutional pressure — whether it’s depicting the Prophet Muhammad despite terrorist threats, mocking Scientology and Tom Cruise in defiance of their network, or lampooning Hollywood’s genuflection to Communist China — they find a way to outdo themselves. This time, it’s Trump as Saddam Hussein, with Satan revived as his deranged, codependent lover. In one scene, Satan grumbles, “You remind me more and more of this other guy I used to date,” a reference to the late Iraqi dictator.
The broad premise is that Parker and Stone can get away with the most outlandish mockery imaginable— there are gratuitous depictions of a miniature presidential penis, for example. These comedians do not care, and they want to emphasize that they do not care.
Still, the show’s trademark reference to extraordinarily timely news is also back. Throughout the first episode, Cartman is shown to be dejected as he laments Republican cuts to NPR (in the episode, Trump has dissolved NPR altogether), which he describes as his favorite show, “where liberals bitch and whine about stuff — that was the funniest s*** ever.” The erosion of widespread wokeness now abounds. Feeling lost and without purpose, Cartman saunters gloomily through school hallways, staring wistfully at “women only” bathroom signs, mourning the days when he was a solitary agitator against a hypersensitive culture. “Now, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” he confesses to Butters, “now that everyone hates the Jews and it’s totally fine.”
Meanwhile, PC Principal, the former avatar of hyper-wokeis, returns as a Bible-thumping Christian. “There is only one thing that can bring some normality resurrecting back to these corrupt times: Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” he proclaims, rebranding himself as a Power Christian — PC for short —before introducing Jesus Christ (another callback from Super Best Friends) at a school assembly.
Randy Marsh, still a libertarian marijuana farmer, is skeptical of Jesus’s literal presence in Stan’s public school. Seeking guidance, he turns to a higher power: ChatGPT. One of the episode’s sharpest gags finds Randy in bed, carrying on this heartfelt conversation about church and state with the chatbot, thanking it for its wisdom and wishing it goodnight — as the camera pans out to reveal his visibly flustered, ignored wife sitting next to him.
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Eventually, we learn that Trump is (predictably) behind it all. Before long, the piqued townsfolk gather in protest. “You saw what happened to Colbert. All of you shut up or else South Park is over,” mutters Jesus, hoping to stave off cancellation by presidential decree.
Colbert wasn’t canceled because he was a loud critic of Trump. He was canceled because his show was burning an eight-figure hole in his employer’s books, and worse, because it was dull. Stone and Parker, on the other hand, 27 seasons deep into South Park, still manage to subvert expectations — too outrageous, too offensive, and, most importantly, too funny to fail.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds an MBA from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.