I’m not poor and stupid enough to do NASCAR and I never will be. – Cartman
When Talladega Nights came out in 2006, poking fun at NASCAR and its accompanying culture already seemed a bit stale. Four years later, South Park hasn’t done anything to freshen that idea up.
Was “Poor and Stupid” making fun of NASCAR itself or was it more focused on laughing at the people who refuse to call it a sport? I honestly couldn’t tell you because the ultimate target was pretty unclear.
As for my opinion, NASCAR is definitely a sport, it’s just an exceedingly boring one as a spectator or fan. I once had a friend try to defend it by saying that contrary to a common notion, being able to drive a stock car at speeds an excess of 100 miles per hour for 500 miles is extremely difficult. I don’t disagree with this. But you know what else is difficult? Solving really long, Good Will Hunting-style math problems. Doesn’t mean I want to spend my afternoon watching it.
The one thing I was sure South Park was making fun of tonight was Cartman. When he is given an essay assignment with the topic, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, Cartman becomes upset because his dream is to drive in NASCAR, but he doesn’t think he is poor and stupid enough to succeed. Stan and Kyle (who only appear briefly in the opening scene) convince him that he actually is poor and (especially) stupid enough.
Cartman then recruits Butters (who is vastly underused in this episode) to help him get even stupider by eating various concoctions of Vagisil feminine hygiene products (because a commercial says it can cause short-term memory loss). Efficiently moronic, Cartman sneaks into a stock car pre-race (by having Butters convince the driver his wife had been raped… yikes) and immediately crashes into everything in sight.
You’d think his ambitions would be satisfied, but alas, they are vast. The president and inventor of Vagisil shows up because the company has been getting a lot attention after the incident at the track. To keep that gravy train rollin’, he buys Eric his own Vagisil-sponsored car and somehow gets him back on the circuit. I have to imagine in the real world that trespassing, grand theft auto, false rape allegations, and thousands of dollars of destruction would get you banned from professional auto racing competition, but this is South Park.
Preparing for the next race, Cartman acts even dumber because he’s concerned that the intelligent-sounding NASCAR drivers like Jimmy Johnson and Danica Patrick are actually really stupid. An Obama-bashing podcast follows and then thankfully it’s race day and we can get this episode over with.
Kenny, meanwhile, is concerned that Cartman’s behavior is giving real NASCAR fans like him a bad name. So he attends the event and after Cartman begins the race in the most disastrous way possibly, he jumps on the hood in an attempt to stop the destruction (of both the track and NASCAR’s reputation). Eventually, though, all of the other cars are destroyed and Cartman is about to be named winner (again, throw logic out the window on this one, kids) when the Vagisil president’s wife jumps into Jimmy Johnson’s car and wins the race for some godforsaken reason.
In the end, Cartman realizes he just wasn’t poor and stupid enough and that’s why he couldn’t succeed in the sport. Of course, the clumsy ultimate joke is that Cartman is too stupid for NASCAR, and he’s just too ignorant to realize it.
Here’s a few more things about “Poor and Stupid”:
- I did kind of like the weird colonial beard that the Vagisil president had. I also enjoyed how he called his wife his “muse” and his “flame.” Actually I loved everything about the Vagisil guy except for the fact that driving a joke about Vagisil into the ground just isn’t very funny.
- The Two and a Half Men bit was pretty funny but seemed like a missed opportunity to make fun of that terrible excuse for a sitcom more.
- “I wasn’t born with a plastic spoon in my mouth.” – Cartman
- “He also appears to be developing three small vaginas in his stomach, but they are all sparkling clean.” – Doctor
Some stats and info about South Park, “Poor and Stupid”
TV SHOW – South Park
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 14, Episode 8
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – Comedy Central
GENRE – Comedy, Animated Shows
CREATED BY – Trey Parker, Matt Stone
This review was originally published on TV Geek Army.