Boondocks and South Park
We are accustomed to thinking of cartoons -- whether illustrated or animated -- as being a form of children's entertainment. Yet it is worth recalling that for almost nine decades, the Pulitzer Prize committee has annually given a prize for editorial cartooning, highlighting the effectiveness of the medium in delivering intelligent commentary. Moreover, the Pulitzer has sometimes gone to daily "strip" cartoonists rather than those who draw single-frame editorial cartoons for the Op-Ed pages of daily newspapers, most notably Garry Trudeau for Doonesbury in 1975 and Berke Breathed for Bloom County in 1987. It is within this context that Aaron McGruder began drawing The Boondocks in 1999. In an interview with Ted Rall (himself a 1996 finalist for the Pulitzer) McGruder claimed these as particular influences in writing the original daily newspaper version of The Boondocks.:
…this is a hard job, and my goal was just to make deadlines every week. Gatting more and more political helped me get that done. The deadlines are everything in this job, as you know. Sure it would be nice to be Garry Trudeau ("Doonesbury") or Berke Breathed ("Bloom County") and tell these wonderful little stories that weave in politics and social commentary, and I still try to do that on occasion, when I can. But primarily it's just about getting seven strips done a week, however it has to be done….I knew we were developing "The Boondocks" for TV and film, so it occurred to me that the narrative storytelling should just be left to those mediums, while the strip would become a way for me to comment about what was going on in the world. (Rall 48).
In other words, McGruder saw the transition to the easier storytelling medium of television as the simplest way to make The Boondocks more like those comic strips whose authors would eventually receive a Pulitzer in political commentary. But does the television series of The Boondocks actually represent an intelligent satire? I propose that through a comparison with South Park, a series that is often mistaken for intelligent satire, we may see the real virtues of The Boondocks in sharper relief.
Comparing The Boondocks to South Park is particularly illustrative because of the elements that the shows have in common: both are animated half-hour series (i.e., 22 minutes per episode) on basic cable. Both center on child protagonists who often clearly give voice to their creators' sentiments and opinions. And both shows use the adult characters to present a broad array of satiricial targets. The chief difference is, of course, political. South Park co-creator Matt Stone has gone on the record as saying "I hate conservatives, but I really fucking hate liberals." (quoted in Anderson, 2005). As Anderson goes on to note:
South Park has also satirized the 1960s counterculture; sex-ed in school; hate-crime legislation; the divorce culture; and many other products of liberal policies and values. Conservatives do not escape the show's satirical sword - phony patriots and Mel Gibson have been among those slashed. But the deepest thrust of the program's politics is pretty clear. Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone have made their show the most hostile to liberalism in television history. (Anderson, 2005)
English immigrant and Iraq War shill Andrew Sullivan has done his best to promote Parker and Stone's particular brand of conservatism, largely out of a shared opposition to what they perceieve as the "liberal" excesses of 1990s "identity politics" and "political correctness" -- it is worth noting here that Sullivan, who coined the term "South Park Republican," is probably the only high-profile gay journalist in America who opposed the hate crime legislation supported by Matthew Shepard's parents and ultimately passed by Congress. What Sullivan fails to notice about South Park is that its interest in politics is extraordinarily shallow. The best example may be the high profile 2010 episode of South Park in which they announced that they would be depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad, capitalizing on the media attention given to issues of free speech in cartooning when riots and killings occurred...
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