Trey Parker Gets Candid About The Difficulties Of Creating South Park After All These Years
For Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the 25th anniversary of "South Park" — which was celebrated in August 2022 at Colorado's iconic Red Rocks Park and Amphitheatre — marked a pivotal time in their lives and comedic careers, with it coming on the heels of the duo's massive Paramount+ deal. But don't think for a second that things have gotten easier for the showrunners.
According to Parker, being inside of the "South Park" writers room and coming up with new material can still be very difficult at times, just like it's always been. As a result, it's supposedly harder than ever to create an original and hilarious South Park episode.
"We got to a place where we're sitting there in the writer's room going, 'Oh here's a good idea,' and someone would go, 'The Simpsons did that,'" Parker remembered in a 2016 video interview, which was posted on YouTube.
Paramount's "South Park" deal is currently set to give longtime fans and TV viewers a number of spinoff films and new seasons, with it reportedly costing ViacomCBS an astounding $900 million for six years of content. Parker and Stone will be looking to evolve and adapt to society as the years go on, with one main goal on their minds.
'We don't ever want to do the same joke'
According to Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the biggest difficulty with creating "South Park" content after all these years is trying to stay both funny and original.
"We don't ever want to do the same joke," Parker explained in 2016. "It was always, 'The Simpsons did it, The Simpsons did it,'" he said. "And now, the funny thing is we'll sit in there [and] be like, 'What if someone like this, someone like that,' and we're like this sounds familiar. 'Yea, we did it ten years ago.'"
Parker and Stone's 25th anniversary show for "South Park" at Red Rocks wound up being a huge event for the pair, with it being the most expensive concert ever held at the historic Colorado venue. Season 26 of the animated classic is expected to come out sometime in 2023, and as Parker said earlier, it'll be chock full of fresh laughs.
"We never want to repeat ourselves," he told the Los Angeles Times in an August 2022 interview. "There's definitely tropes, but for it to be funny, it's got to be new. Just going, 'Cartman is fat, and he likes cheesy poofs' is not going to make us laugh."
Parker added, "It's easier to be fresh about something topical because it's new."