“Why don’t you go home and cry to your stuffed animals?” – Cartman’s classmate
While many South Park episodes involve the whole gang — Kyle, Stan, Cartman, Kenny, etc. — the prior few installments eschewed the group dynamic and instead focused on a single character. The previous episode was extremely Randy-heavy and the kids were mostly off-screen, for example.
“1%” brought the attention back to the children, specifically Eric Cartman. South Park has proven time and time again that if there is one character that can carry an entire episode, it’s Cartman. “1%” is no exception.
No doubt “1%” is a funny half-hour of television, but the main Cartman story is executed in a way that gets progressively more serious and dramatic as the episode moves along. In fact, the funniest moments in “1%” are two quick, throw away jokes that have little to do with the overarching narrative. Those two moments: Butters confusing Maria Shriver with Skeletor (“Then why does its face look like that?!”), and the shot of Jabba The Hut-esque Michael Moore caricature shouting at protesters through a bull-horn.
When the plot began to materialize early in the episode, I initially assumed that Parker and Stone were simply setting up an elaborate joke about Cartman being fat. South Park Elementary receives the country’s lowest score on the Presidential Fitness test, not because the students, en masse, are overweight, but because one student in particular is so out of shape that he brought the average scores down significantly. That student, of course, is Cartman.
Instead of accepting any personal responsibility, Cartman frames the situation as a witch hunt. “You’re the 99-percent ganging up on the one-percent,” he says, adopting the language of the Occupy Wall Street movement. “People voted for Obama, and now that everything sucks they wanna blame me!” he laments.
While “1%” does feature some funny riffing on the OWS protests (the literal “class warfare” bit is great), as well as some decent fat jokes, neither topic is really what the episode is about. More than anything else, “1%” is a story about the changes people are forced to go through as they grow up.
Ostracized by his friends and classmates, Cartman retreats to the safe zone of his bedroom. His beloved stuffed animals — Rumper Tumpskin, Clyde Frog, Peter Panda and Polly Prissy Pants — provide solace and assurances that Cartman is “awesome” and “kewwllll,” not a fat-ass loser. However, one by one, Cartman’s stuffed animals are murdered. Clyde Frog is nailed to a tree, Peter Panda is burned to death, and Rumper Tumpskin is hanged.
Cartman (and the audience) assumes that vengeful fifth graders are to blame for the doll killings. But “1%” concludes with a Hitchcockian twist.
Polly Prissy Pants, acting as a conduit for Cartman’s twisted subconscious, is the real culprit. The episode ends after a creepy stand-off between Polly and Eric, with Cartman channeling Normal Bates, providing the voices for himself and the doll.
Cartman knows it’s time to grow up and put away the stuffed animals. But he isn’t a normal child, so he can’t just put his “friends” in a box and stick it in the attic. Cartman, with his flair for the dramatic, has to shoot the stuffed animals with a revolver in order to move on to a more grown-up phase of his life.
That’s just the way he is.
Some stats and info about South Park, “1%”
TV SHOW – South Park
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 15, Episode 12
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – Comedy Central
GENRE – Comedy, Animated Shows
CREATED BY – Trey Parker, Matt Stone
This review was originally published on TV Geek Army.