Do you like fish sticks? Kanye West does. This caused him some trouble in the latest episode of South Park, in which his ego was slaughtered. West is known to have an ego large enough to feed several Ethiopian villages. So naturally one would think his response to being the butt of a South Park episode would be, to say the least, negative. He shocked everyone, though, through his blog, where he openly admitted to having a huge ego.
“I got a long road ahead of me to make people believe I’m not actually a huge douche . . . ” he said.
Does this make him any less of an egomaniacal rapper? Yes. At least he confessed to having a complex and is working on it.
Unfortunately for comedians, West’s new outlook limits the comedic value of his personality. No longer will we be able to hear Kanye-ego jokes. It is good, then, that South Park slammed him while they could.
West has not been the only victim at the hands of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, though.
South Park has the uncanny ability to mock current events with little retaliation. Everyone remembers the Emmy-award-winning episode “Make Love, Not Warcraft,” causing all the WoW-playing kids to crawl out from their closets and laugh. However, not every episode has received such wide spread acceptance, such as “Trapped in the Closet,” where Scientology replaced West’s ego as the joke. In fact, that episode caused so much drama, Isaac Hayes (a devout Scientologist), who played chef, a chief character (the only sane adult) left the show because he felt it had gone too far by mocking Scientology.
Fortunately, this didn’t stop South Park from unleashing its unbarred criticism.
Shows like South Park have the ability to say what everyone wants, but are unwilling to. It’s probably better that we let South Park mock everyone, to prevent the world wars that could ensue if we all said what we wanted. Our world is filled with brewing comedy that is borderline inappropriate, but in a world full of greys, creators Parker and Stone take and harness this comedy and publish it in the form of a half-hour cartoon filled with moral lessons, current events and of course those four foul-mouthed fourth graders.
West was the latest victim of South Park, but compared to those who have also fallen to the blade of comedy, West fell quite gracefully from his throne called ego. Unlike all other not-so-innocent victims of South Park, West accepted his fate. He was ridiculed, but instead of fighting it like might be expected and unlike past victims have done, he decided to embrace this turn of events. He used it to positively place him in the media spotlight and in doing so come out looking like the bigger man. Bravo to Kanye West for not looking like a huge egomanical lunatic. We can only wait and hope that in the future, his efforts at reform have triumphed over the powers of douche-ness.