South Park: Tonsil Trouble
Season 12 - Episode 01
Photo courtesy of southparkstudios.com
March 14th, 2008 - When I first heard the news that new South Parks were coming, I was giddy. Even though their half-seasons start around roughly the same time each year, it’s not peak premiere or even mid-season time, so those promos always sort of creep up on me. The last few years of South Park have been incredibly strong; Matt and Trey have certainly been raising the bar for the show with Seasons 10 and 11, but unfortunately the premiere for Season 12 left me wanting more.
I should mention right away that I have no hyper-sensitivity to AIDS jokes, and clearly neither do Matt and Trey. In fact, AIDS has been a recurring theme in the show, starting with a brilliant episode with Jared the Subway guy admitting he lost his weight with the help of his aides, misunderstood throughout town as AIDS. But more recently, Cartman has wished death by AIDS on his “friend” Kyle numerous times, so the set-up for this episode made perfect sense: Cartman, through a horrible mistake during a routine tonsillectomy, contracts HIV, Kyle finds the situation ironic and funny, so Cartman infects Kyle with the virus as well.
This is dangerous territory for the show here, and they know it. Playing for laughs a young boy who has accidentally contracted a deadly disease would be totally off-limits for 99% of TV shows out there, which makes it prime fodder for South Park. Of course, the critics will cry foul for the show making light of the deadly disease, when that wasn’t the point at all. Instead, they point out that the disease has gone out of fashion, and now the greater “chic” disease du jour for Americans is cancer. This joke is executed very well with Cartman’s concert benefit and his troubles at the airport.
Still, the episode falls apart for me in the final act, when Kyle and Cartman cure AIDS with Magic Johnson’s copious amounts of money. It needed just one more South Park-esque joke. I kept waiting for it. Would it be that Cartman knew all along that money would cure AIDS, and this was all an elaborate scheme to get himself rich? Would the cash injected into Kyle’s blood give him some superhuman powers because he’s Jewish? Nope and nope. Would the fact that the cure requires over $100,000 mean that most of the people who have AIDS, poor African villagers, would still be left to suffer with the disease? Well, sort of. This joke was set-up brilliantly, but the pay-off of the man pulling up to the African villagers and telling them to inject themselves with whatever money they could find fell flat. There was no oomph in the delivery, which is surprising, since subtlety is not something the show is known for.
In the end, Tonsil Trouble is a decent enough episode, but the lack of a final solid joke left me unsatisfied. It’s a shame, too, because the Jimmy Buffett songs, the blasé reactions of kids getting AIDS, and the “I’m not just sure, I’m HIV positive,” running gags were very funny. And I loved when Butters gave Cartman a kiss, in spite of all of the torture he has lived through at Cartman’s hands. But despite this episode falling a little short of the admittedly high expectations set by the seasons that preceded it, I’m eager to see how the show plays out the rest of the year.
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