Presentation Reflection

                           

I have always been a fan of South Park, so I was really excited that I would get an opportunity to do a presentation on the show. I seriously never thought I would get that chance. It turned out to be a little harder than I thought. To me, South Park is Pop culture. It is able to cover every kind of subject known to humanity and develop critiques and comments on every world event or scandal that it wants. I knew this would be a challenge because one could pretty much teach a whole semester on South Park. I was worried about narrowing down what topics we could bring up for the presentation and avoid it being too packed or long-winded. It helped significantly to simply read Chapter 10 in the Barker textbook and the Moodle handout and figure out what aspects of South Park could be in tune with what the texts highlighted. This allowed us to form a somewhat organized path to follow and stick to the goal of incorporating the themes we discuss in class into the show.

I came up with the idea to cover the postmodern aspect of South Park where the creators deal with issues in people’s everyday lives. Everyone deals with race, immigration, capitalism, media, and religion one way or another in their lives. South Park loves to comment on those issues in ways that parody them and possibly show another, more humorous side to them. We would tell the class to think of a question while watching a clip from an episode that covered any one of the topics, and then discuss what the creators were trying to say or do with their representation. This allows the class to get involved in the discussion and possibly bring up ideas that we never thought ourselves. We also tried to stick with theories of pop culture and the theorists who thought of them. When you look closely at something that you simply took for granted or mindlessly absorbed, it is easy to remain uninformed about the conscious or unconscious actions that the creators perform in their own medium. We discovered that while South Park tries to remain unbiased and on a higher level of social screw ups than others, they too fall victim to unconscious patriarchal codes, such as focusing on the male over the female and having the women exist only in relation to the men. It shows that even people who may seem morally superior and without faults can still be fooled by societal norms.

In doing this project, I learned a lot about working with other people and sacrificing your own time in order to get together and discuss. I thought I knew a lot about South Park, but I ended up discovering deeper codes that the creators unknowingly perpetuate in their show. I learned that they follow ideologies like everyone else, but are able to make fun of themselves as much as other people. I had a lot of fun doing this project and I hope we are able to teach the class what we have learned in the process.