Blame Canada!: South Park And
Popular Culture by Toni Johnson-
Woods
It's About Time!
Now running into its tenth season, South Park has still not jumped the
shark. Satirically edgier than The Simpsons, South Park responds
immediately to cultural controversies: four days after Saddam Husseins
capture an episode lampooned it, and the show has no fear in tackling
subjects like Terri Schiavo, The Passion of The Christ, and Michael
Jackson, while co-opting disparate elements such as Kill Bill and Janet
Jacksons nipple into one episode. Its mixture of iconoclasm, cultural
referents, and intertextuality makes it the perfect lens through which to
examine contemporary popular culture in America - and televisions role in
the creation of that culture. Blame Canada! is a smart, readable book
that will appeal to the shows many fans as much as to scholars and
researchers of contemporary television.

Personal Review: Blame Canada!: South Park And Popular
Culture by Toni Johnson-Woods
Just when I began to despair about finding a real fan resource for South
Park, along comes "Blame Canada". The various edited volumes about
South Park and philosophy (Arp and Hanley) seem to be collections of
scholarly opinions that I am sure are important to some obscure university
lecture series on philosophy, and Anderson's "South Park Conservatives"
is really only of interest to militant Log Cabin Republicans. "Blame
Canada" is well constructed, well written and thought provoking. As a fan,
I find it a fascinating resource, more so because the author is clearly NOT
a fan herself. Neither a sycophantic piece nor a knee-jerk condemnation,
"Blame Canada" is accurate and dispassionate.
My favourite chapter in "Blame Canada" is the chapter on South Park and
the internet. It documents a period of internet history that had nearly been
lost, in which South Park featured uniquely as a pop culture window into
the infancy of the internet. I myself, who came late to the South Park
phenomenon, had been unable to track down the grass roots fan
information that should have been available on the internet for any pop
culture icon as important as South Park. Now I know that it is a result of
the engulf-and-devour policy of Comedy Central towards "unauthorized"
South Park content on the web, which is somewhat ironic considering the
libertarian content of the show. I am left to wonder how much more of
internet history is being lost forever as technology changes, web pages are
updated without being archived, and corporate America exerts more and
more control over internet content.
The most interesting aspect of "Blame Canada", however, is the theoretical
framework in which Johnson-woods places the show. South Park is
nothing if not carnivalesque, so it is an apt analysis. But more than that,
through the Baktine analysis South Park fandom becomes legitimized, and
South Park becomes as much (and as normal) a pop culture influence in
its time as Star Wars or I Love Lucy were in theirs. It is refreshing to know
that fan attraction to fart jokes is as old as fandom itself, and not some new
aberrant form of entertainment that is a result of (or even responsible for)
the moral decay of our society.
I thoroughly enjoyed "Blame Canada", and I am happy to recommend it
highly to any South Park fan. It is a worthy read.
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