FCC Chair Brendan Carr has seemingly become the latest target of Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s (Team America: World Police, The Book of Mormon) ire on Wednesday night’s recent South Park episode, as first reported by Variety’s Jack Dunn. The episode, entitled “Conflict of Interest”, marks a return after last week’s installment of the long-running adult animated series was abruptly delayed just hours ahead of its planned release.
“Apparently when you do everything at the last minute sometimes you don’t get it done,” Parker and Stone said in a joint statement obtained by Entertainment Weekly. “This one’s on us. We didn’t get it done in time. Thanks to Comedy Central and South Park fans for being so understanding. Tune in next week!”
“Conflict of Interest” bespeaks Parker and Stone’s attempt to make up for lost time, satirizing numerous recent events while maintaining what is quickly becoming the throughline of Season 27 — the abusive relationship between Satan and the current President of the United States. After the previous episode “Wok Is Dead” ended with the Prince of Darkness announcing an unwanted pregnancy, “Conflict” sees South Park’s controversial caricature of Trump employ a series of increasingly ridiculous means to terminate the child against his lover’s wishes. None of these schemes succeed, but they do have the unintended consequence of subjecting FCC chair Brendan Carr to increasingly nonsensical injuries and tortures.
“His bones are healing, so he may regain full range of motion,” a physician tells JD Vance after an abortive attempt by Trump to infect Satan with toxoplasmosis instead lands Carr in the hospital (per Variety). But if the toxoplasmosis parasite gets to his brain, I’m afraid he may lose his freedom of speech.”
The entire skit, of course, is a reference to Carr’s purported role in getting late-night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live! temporarily suspended in response to comments made by Kimmel about the assassination of right-wing media figure Charlie Kirk. Considering Parker and Stone have previously made point of opposing censorship on television (such as when they dedicated South Park’s two-hundredth episode, aptly titled “200”, to protesting Comedy Central’s decision to censor their depictions of the prophet Muhammad), it’s perhaps unsurprising that Carr’s continued promises to sue networks like ABC and NBC (via AP News) touched a particular nerve with the show’s creators.
Other topics of conversation in “Conflict of Interest” included prediction market betting app Polymarket and Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu. Noticeably (and predictably) absent from the newest episode was the character of Eric Cartman, who had previously adopted a habit of debating liberal college students in the style of the aforementioned Charlie Kirk. Following accusations of inciting violence, “Got A Nut”, the episode which most prominently featured the gag, has been removed from rotation by Comedy Central in spite of protests from Kirk’s associates (via Variety) — but fans can still stream the episode along with the rest of the season on Paramount+.