Reason Mag interviews South Park creators

Reason Magazine has an extensive interview with Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park. There’s a lot of great wisdom in there. Some extracts:

In the United States, we’ve seen continuing and ramped-up attempts to extend government regulation of speech to cable and satellite TV and radio and to increase restrictions on unambiguously political speech via campaign finance “reform.” In Europe, we’ve witnessed the rise not only of laws designed to spare the feelings of certain groups by shutting down “offensive” speech but death threats and actual murders of people who refuse to be silenced.

Stone: Our point was that if you’re going to pull this off for offending somebody, you don’t have any episodes of South Park left. Somebody will complain about every single episode.

Reason: When it looked like Comedy Central wasn’t going to rerun the Mary episode, people were still able to download it illegally online. Did you see that as a victory for free speech, or did you think, “My God, these people are stealing our intellectual property”?
Stone: We’re always in favor of people downloading. Always.

Reason: Why?

Stone: It’s how a lot of people see the show. And it’s never hurt us. We’ve done nothing but been successful with the show. How could you ever get mad about somebody who wants to see your stuff?

Reason: In the climactic scene of the episode, Kyle lectures the president of Fox that he has to stand up in favor of free speech. Is it true that the dialogue was taken directly from the conversations you had with Comedy Central about showing Muhammad?

Parker: Yes, the dialogue is almost exactly the same. We even had Kyle call him Doug, right?

Stone: Doug Herzog is the head guy over at Comedy Central.

Parker: It was very personal.

Stone: At some point I think we knew we were going to lose. We weren’t going to get Muhammad on, so we were just going to make them feel really bad about it. I mean, we’ve been at an ACLU meeting where we gave Doug an award for freedom of speech, and once you get an award for freedom of speech, you’ve got to step up to the plate.

Reason: What was the response to the Mel Gibson episode you did in 2004? In “The Passion of the Jew,” two of the boys feel cheated after paying to see The Passion of the Christ, visit Gibson in his Malibu mansion, and demand a refund. You portray Gibson as generally paranoid, raving, and insane.

Parker: It was way ahead of its time, I’ll tell you that. Years ago we had Mel Gibson drunk, getting arrested by a cop, and smearing shit on stuff. That totally came true.

Parker: It’s really what Team America is as well: taking an extremist on this side and an extremist on that side. Michael Moore being an extremist is just as bad, you know, as Donald Rumsfeld. It’s like they’re the same person. It takes a fourth-grade kid to go, “You both remind me of each other.” The show is saying that there is a middle ground, that most of us actually live in this middle ground, and that all you extremists are the ones who have the microphones because you’re the most interesting to listen to, but actually this group isn’t evil, that group isn’t evil, and there’s something to be worked out here.

Except when it comes to Scientologists. They’re all fucked up.

Hat Tip: Section 14