South Park: Post Covid review: Cartman returns, 40 years in the future

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this. People were supposed to get kinder in the future,” Randy Marsh says near the end of the new special South Park, Post Covid. This is the end of a long-running joke, and it is in the year 2061.

Post CovidParamount Plus is streaming a live stream of. Every opportunity to remind the viewer that this movie, which is a 59-minute long, can be difficult to tell from a special 47-minute episode, was set in the future. Post Covid It takes place in a world with kids staring mindlessly at VR headsets, crypto is required, and doors ringing about the future. Whenever anyone announces some societal change, like insects replacing meat on menus, they make sure to announce that it’s because they are in the future, to which Stan and Kyle remark, “I know.”

Image by Paramount Plus

“We’re at where a lot of people are at, which is the future kind of sucks,” Post Covid Trey Parker, writer and director, spoke to The Hollywood Reporter in October. The idea was that everyone would become kinder. Post Covid This shows us a world that remains very similar. The technology may change, and some individual circumstances may change, but the world has gotten stuck in a pattern that just won’t unlodge.

Stan and Kyle, voiced by Parker and Matt Stone (co-creator), are the central of Post Covid, living boring, miserable adult lives. Stan’s job as an “online whiskey sampler” gets exactly one line, and has entered into a marriage of sorts with a personified Amazon Alexa (Delilah Kujala) who mainly yells at him to stop being so pathetic while also letting him know about great deals on headphones.

Kyle’s life isn’t quite as sad, but he doesn’t seem to have accomplished anything either. Cartman, Kenny and Kenny seem to have been the only ones in South Park that are able to move past their bitter childhood rivalries. Cartman, against all odds has become an Orthodox Rebbe. Kenny is a well-known scientist who has traveled the globe and helped humanity. Until, that is, in what certainly won’t be a spoiler for anyone who has watched South Park before, he dies.

Image by Paramount Plus

It’s Kenny’s death that drives the plot of Post CovidAlthough this is true, jokes can be the highlight of the site. If you don’t like one joke in Post CovidIn five seconds, another one appears. If a joke about the supposed popularity of woke comedy seems hacky, don’t worry: in a few seconds you’ll be hearing about how unvaccinated people are selfish. You might also find it funny that masks look like diaper-chins, if you don’t mind.

Stone and Parker can be tremendous maximalists and will take every situation to its conclusion. It leads to lots of. Post Covid’s stronger jokes, like every store having a “Plus” or “Max” at the end of their names, promising more and more outside while offering the exact same crap inside. It’s also quite cathartic seeing Zoom’s headquarters burned to the ground, in anticipation of the ever-just-around-the-corner final defeat of the coronavirus.

It can sometimes feel like you are throwing jokes against the wall and watching what happens. Is it possible that Cartmen converted to Judaism in order to mess with Kyle? Or did he find a great Jewish woman in Yentl, Mona Marshall? Is it possible that some combination of these two is true? And even if that’s the case, what does Kyle owe to other Jews? It’s a funny concept that isn’t explored enough beyond children named Moishe, Menorah, and for some reason, Hakim, plus some poorly pronounced Hebrew.

Cartman’s best gags, like pretending to be a robot named A.W.E.S.O.M.-O 4000, have always been elaborate to the point of absurdity. He would be willing to spend 40 years of his adult life, and the lives of his family for Kyle’s amusement. Instead of watching that play out, the audience is whisked to Randy Marsh’s old age home for Blade Runner Gags and a search for the right strain of cannabis to end the Covid epidemic.

Many of the blink-and-you-miss-them gags in Post Covid are funny, and seeing the kids’ future professions is clever. The special has many arcs, but none seem to settle. Perhaps because they are different from the first. South Park movie, Bigger, Longer, Uncut, it’s a two-parter. The second half of this special does not currently have a release date. Also Post Covid is the first of Parker and Stone’s 14-movie deal with Paramount Plus, so the duo are in no rush to offer the same narrative structure that their first movie offered.

Larger, longer and uncut It was my dream to make a film musical. Oklahoma-eqsue “Uncle Fucka” to the Music Man-like, Oscar-nominated “Blame Canada.” Post Covid feels more like a long, experimental episode. It feels more like an experimental episode. The opening scrawl is where the narrator makes fun of the indecisiveness about how to name the project. Post Covid Should be.

All that’s determined by the end is that the boys should be friends again, and that’s good enough for now. Parts of the story, regardless of format, are available in South Park This will always be a success. The ripped-from-the-headlines gags will come and go, but the shit-stirring friendship between the boys will always be what anchors the best parts of South Park.