© (C) 2009 Comedy Central Ike sees "dead celebrities" in SOUTH PARK - SEASON 13 - "Dead Celebrities"

Television:

TV Review: SOUTH PARK - SEASON 13 - 'Dead Celebrities' - Fall Season Premiere

The six month wait for new episodes provide plenty of hilarious fodder for Trey Parker and Matt Stone as they skewer Michael Jackson's death and bloody stool among other things

Grade: A-
Writer(s): Trey Parker
Director: Trey Parker
Release Date: October 7, 2009

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By CARL CORTEZ, Contributing Editor
Published 10/8/2009

SOUTH PARK creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have really got a great racket going. They do heavy work for four months out of the year (split into two parts), to produce fourteen episodes of their hit Comedy Central series and then get to vegetate the rest of the time. And yet, they almost always hit the ground running with some of the funniest and biting comedy around.

It’s been five months since their last batch of episodes, and now that October is here, it’s great to welcome the boys back with open arms with “Dead Celebrities.”

The conceit in simple: too many celebrities have died over the summer and Kyle’s little brother Ike has been having nightmares about it.

Well, maybe not nightmares, because as he tells a psychiatrist, “I see dead celebrities.”

So from TV pitch spokesperson Billy Mays, Farrah Fawcett and even David Carradine, Ike can’t get these ghosts to leave him alone.

This results in a short spoof of Syfy’s GHOST HUNTERS series (the hosts of that series visit the house, but the only paranormal phenomenon they uncover is the urine and poop that they leave in their pants). When Ike goes into a coma because of all this dead celebrity input, the series detours into a great POLTERGEIST parody where the Zelda Rubinstein character pops up to communicate with the dead to help save Kyle’s little brother.

From here, we understand why all these celebrities are in limbo – Michael Jackson refuses to accept he’s dead, leaving all the other celebrities stranded in an airplane-like situation where they’re on a plane on a runway and can’t take off because someone (Jackson) has too much baggage and won’t accept he’s dead.

“I’m not dead, I have a skin condition,” Jackson says from the other side, before possessing Ike’s body. The boys do their research and realize that in order to send all the other celebrity spirits to the other side, they need to let Jackson deal with his unfinished business -- namely living out his fantasy in Ike’s body – to be accepted as a white, female child.

So they enter Ike (as Jackson) into a one of those little girl beauty pageants, hoping if he/she/it wins, he’ll move on.

Parker and Stone cram in a crapload of story into this episode, and it’s the horror-esque theme is great timing for the Halloween season. The jokes are hilarious, particularly the one where Jackson once again claims he’s not dead, it’s just “rumors” that someone started.

Dead celebrity spokesperson Billy Mays is also prominent throughout, and provides some very funny moments too, especially when Ike, haunted by Mays at the beginning of the episode, begs Kyle to “make Billy Mays go away.”

Cartman is a fan of Billy Mays, because he promoted the product “ChipotliAway” on TV and saved his life. Chipotle apparently makes Cartman crap blood, and ChipotliAway makes the blood poop on his underwear disappear. So this running gag figures prominantly in the conclusion of the episode.

Sick, but very, very funny.

So far, the second half of Season 13 is off to a great start. The SOUTH PARK boys are back with a vengeance, and with some great five months in between of unused pop culture topics left skewer, it’s a safe bet that the second half of the season is going to be even funnier than the first.

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Reader Comments

wowkids38 from silver spring, MD sez....
I saw the episode and they made fun of Michael Jackson a lot. I think it's too soon for that.
11/23/2009 1:49:17 PM

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