South Park Review: "Funnybot"

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I will run the risk of sounding like a broken record, but I am loving this South Park year of the fan weekly creation cycle.

Our little friends in Colorado have always been the fastest scripted show, animated or non, to poke fun at current events, but including Bin Laden references just three days after his death!?

Funnybot Picture

While I'm sure the main premise and script was written for "Funnybot" shortly after Stone and Parker begrudgingly accepted their award at The Comedy Awards last month, the Tyler Perry as Bin Laden and bringing Obama in all take to take place within the last 48 hours.

Just from a logistic standpoint alone, it's ridiculously impressive this show is able be animated and updated in such a short period. Then from a writing standpoint, either the guys lucked out and already planned on killing Perry in their script and simply needed to insert a few Obama scenes and references, or they really are that quick and impressive.

Sorry. I swear, that's hopefully my last Year of the Fan ramble. Now on to the actual content of the ridiculousness that was South Park's special ed department's 1st Annual Comedy Awards!

First off, I will say that the concept of an awards show just for comedy is a little silly, but I'm sure very few people share the hatred that Stone and Parker do.

Like most of the world, I didn't catch the ridiculous awards show, but I was told the guys compared winning an award for a show airing on the networking hosting the award show was the equivalent of winning student of the month when you're homeschooled.

Okay, maybe that wasn't an exact quote, but clearly you can see these guys had even more disdain built up.  Enough to devote an entire episode to mocking the Comedy Central's efforts and the state of comedy in general.  Imagine if they lost.

So while I prefer when the guys pick a target to satire that I share more in common with their beliefs, this episode luckily had enough on Tyler Perry and other forms of comedy that are destroying the genre, nay, humanity, to keep me entertained.

Making Token and Obama the only people to laugh at Tyler Perry?  Offensive for sure.  Hilarious?  You know it.  Even better was Token just directly handing him money. "Stop giving Tyler Perry money or he won't go away."  Please world, heed their advice so we don't ever get another Madea movie.

While I won't claim to be quick enough to pick up on every type of comedy that Funnybot was parody of, I did love the generic substitution jokes and the "Awkward!" Claiming that our dumbifcation of comedy and taking it too seriously will lead to our destruction is obviously ridiculous.  But that's how South Park's satire works.

No, it wasn't the strongest episode of the show's history, nor was it my favorite topic they've ever took on, but the episode was still loaded with plenty of South Park quotes and jokes. And those jokes sure beat anything Funnybot could write.

What did you guys think?  And was anyone else rooting for the Yupik Eskimos?  How could you say a people with scientists that wear labcoats over their lederhosen aren't hilarious!?

Funnybot Review

Editor Rating: 3.5 / 5.0
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User Rating:

Rating: 2.5 / 5.0 (86 Votes)

Eric Hochberger is the programmer of TV Fanatic, so please forgive his mediocre writing. His programming is far better. Follow him on Twitter and/or email him. Just don't request threaded comments. They're coming.

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South Park Season 15 Episode 2 Quotes

The Kathy Griffin award will be given each to the person most likely to actually show up and receive their Kathy Griffin award. The winner is Tyler Perry.

Jimmy

Dude an award show just for comedy sounds like a bad idea.

Kyle