Collection of scholarly essays on the wildly popular Comedy Central show.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s long-running Comedy Central hit cartoon South Park has been equally cheered and reviled for its edgy humor, poited satire of current events and celebrities, and all-around obnoxiousness. But is there more to Kyle, the lonely Jew, Timmy and the Crips, Cartman’s bitchiness, Chef’s inappropriate advice, and Kenny’s continued violent deaths than meets the eye? This collection of essays affirms that possibility. Individual chapters take a sometimes witty, often provocative look at “Is South Park a Libertarian Manifesto?", "That's So Gay!", and "Why Is Cartman Such an Asshole?”. The writers apply classical philosophical analysis to this two-dimensional dystopia, whether in Paul Draper’s “Why Good Things Happen to Bad People — The Problem of Evil in South Park” or Randall Auxier’s “Finding South Park on the Map: Officer Barbrady, Mayor McDaniel, and Chef in Plato’s Republic.” South Park and Philosophy presents new and thoughtful approaches to understanding this surprisingly meaningful show.

Popular Culture and the Future of Politics: Cultural Studies and the Tao of South Park argues that progressives should perceive the connections among media, policy, and culture beyond the limits of "politics" and "news". With sustained analyses of groundbreaking contemporary examples of what has become known as "convergence culture," Ted Gournelos brings together a wide range of media without sacrificing depth. His examples, such as South Park, The Simpsons, The Onion, The Daily Show, Chappelle's show and The Boondocks, are chosen for their political scope and social impact and demonstrate the ways in which what we know as "politics" is rapidly changing. The book's forays into established fields like feminist, race, and queer theory are combined with perspectives drawn from political economy and rhetoric to demonstrate the power of irony, humor, and cultural dissonance in modern approaches to dissonant cultural politics. Popular Culture and the Future of Politics approaches popular culture's treatment of events, social norms, and political shifts through three techniques by which political discourse can be reframed, negotiated, or opposed. It incorporates discussions of contemporary U.S. media policy, the structural changes incurred through the emergence of the internet, and political developments over the past decade, and suggests that contemporary popular media can combine with a self-consciously oppositional branding strategy to allow and encourage new types of activism. Book jacket.

For the better part of 30 years, liberal bias has dominated mainstream media. But author and political journalist Brian Anderson reveals in his new book that the era of liberal dominance is going the way of the dodo bird.

“Analyzes how ideas about economics and political philosophy find their way into everything from Star Trek to Malcolm in the Middle.” —Wall Street Journal Popular culture often champions freedom as the fundamentally American way of life and celebrates the virtues of independence and self-reliance. But film and television have also explored the tension between freedom and other core values, such as order and political stability. What may look like healthy, productive, and creative freedom from one point of view may look like chaos, anarchy, and a source of destructive conflict from another. Film and television continually pose the question: Can Americans deal with their problems on their own, or must they rely on political elites to manage their lives? In this groundbreaking work, Paul A. Cantor—whose previous book, Gilligan Unbound, was named one of the best nonfiction books of the year by the Los Angeles Times—explores the ways in which television shows such as Star Trek, The X-Files, South Park, and Deadwood and films such as The Aviator and Mars Attacks! have portrayed both top-down and bottom-up models of order. Drawing on the works of John Locke, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, and other proponents of freedom, Cantor contrasts the classical liberal vision of America?particularly its emphasis on the virtues of spontaneous order?with the Marxist understanding of the “culture industry” and the Hobbesian model of absolute state control. The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture concludes with a discussion of the impact of 9/11 on film and television, and the new anxieties emerging in contemporary alien-invasion narratives: the fear of a global technocracy that seeks to destroy the nuclear family, religious faith, local government, and other traditional bulwarks against the absolute state.

Critical humorists and religion are steeped in a long-standing cultural antagonism. This book recounts the dramatic skirmishes between religion--its dogma and edicts, political manifestations, and the nature of faith--and the satire, parody, jokes and hyperbole of popular wits. The writings of Twain, Vonnegut, Mencken and Hitchens are included, along with the films of Monty Python, the cartoons of Charlie Hebdo, the animated television series The Simpsons and South Park, the comedy of George Carlin and Bill Maher, the music of Randy Newman and Pussy Riot, the performance monologue of Julia Sweeney and the magic of Penn Jillette.

If you think Saddam and Satan make a kinky couple, wait till you get a load of South Park and Philosophy. Get your Big Wheels ready, because we’re going for a ride, as 22 philosophers take us down the road to understanding the big-picture issues in this small mountain town. A smart and candid look at one of television’s most subversive and controversial shows, celebrating its 10th anniversary this year Draws close parallels between the irreverent nature of South Park and the inquiring and skeptical approach of philosophy Addresses the perennial questions of the show, and the contemporary social and political issues that inspire each episode Uses familiar characters and episodes to illustrate topics such as moral relativism, freedom of expression, gay marriage, blasphemy, democracy, feminism, animal ethics, existential questions and much more makes you laugh out loud