I ended up taking some time off between Seasons 5, 6 & 7 of South Park because I realized I was burning out on the show, as most readers could probably have guessed would happen with a show this long. I'll write later the stuff I watched in-between, but for now I guess I better focus on Season 6.
Season 6 was a lot of fun and delivered a lot of laughs and shook up the format once again, proving the show still had things to say. At the end of Season 5, Parker and Stone took a big risk and "really" killed Kenny. No one knew what that would mean for the show until the beginning of Season 6, when Kenny was shown to be truly dead in universe. This gave the creators a way to talk about death, and how kids might interpret death, as the first 12 episodes of the season deal on and off with the fact that Stan, Kyle and Cartman have trouble accepting that Kenny is dead and can't seem to find a replacement friend for their gang. This leads to one of my favorite characters, Butters, to get way more screen time than he has previous seasons and it's refreshing to see how his character flourishes in this world, and all the weird shit that it brings.
The season starts off with a bang with Jared Has Aides, an episode about Subway spokesman Jared Fogle coming to town to speak, and through a serious of unfortunate phrasings, makes everyone think he lost all his weight from AIDS, instead of with the help of personal trainers, or aides. While I found that plot initially funny it itself, about halfway through I just got tired of the joke because it just kept going and going. What saved it for me however was the fact that they knew it has gone to long and right towards the end of the episode have Jared beating a dead horse, aka, beating the joke into the ground. That saved it for me, knowing that they knew the joke was becoming less funny the more they said it. This same kind of 4th wall breaking logic showed up again in Season 7's Red Man's Greed, but I suppose I'll get to that when the time comes.
The rest of the season had great episodes too, like Asspen, an episode where the boys visit Aspen and invariably get sucked into an 80's romantic comedy about skiing, Fun With Veal, where the gang learns about how Veal is made and go on a hunger strike. Really the whole season is a hit, with episodes like the two parter Professor Chaos and Simpsons Already Did It being among the best. In these episodes, Butters gets kicked out of the gang and decides to become a supervillan, but he's so innocent and nice he can't do anything that bad. In the second part, Butters realizes that all of his evil plans to take over the world have already been done by The Simpsons, and the whole episode turns into a pastiche of the Simpsons, where the rest of the gang re-create a famous plot about acquiring sea people and raising their own society in a fishbowl and the characters turning into Simpsons designs in Butters' eyes. It's a set of episodes I praise highly, and not only because they're actually funny, but also as a kudos to the writers for making an episode of the show about how another show has basically taken every wacky plot they could think of. That's a level of meta-referencing Family Guy wishes they had.
Other standouts for me included Free Hat, a Raiders of the Lost Ark parody surrounding Spielberg and Lucas continuously changing their films; A Ladder To Heaven, in which the boys win a shopping spree in a candy store but realize Kenny had their winning ticket they need to redeem on him when he died, so they attempt to build a ladder to heaven to get it back from him; "The Return of the Fellowship of the Ring to the Two Towers, a Lord of the Rings parody about returning an accidentally acquired porn video back to the video store; The Death Camp of Tolerance, where the overly PC-nature of our culture is brought into question when Mr. Garrison tries to get fired for being gay, but can't no matter how many obscene or inappropriate things he does, and My Future Self n' Me, where adult versions of the some of the kids in town shown up to warn their kid selves about their bad habits. Like I said before, the whole season was pretty spectacular, I can't even really think of a low point, even the Christmas special parodying Black Hawk Down was wonderful.
One of my favorite things of the season is how they treat the character of Kenny, someone who has been their go-to punchline joke for the previous 5 seasons. They killed him at the end of last season, spend the first 12 episodes having the kids explore topics of death, grief and mourning over the loss of their friend, then have the last 4 episodes involve this wacky plot where Cartman swallows Kenny's ashes thinking their chocolate milk mix and Kenny's soul starts possessing him. Then after all that is resolved without Kenny coming back to life, the Christmas episode at the end of the season has him show up at the very end and go "Hey guys, what did I miss?" And the Stan says they'll fill him in on what happened. One of the things that works both for and against South Park is it's sitcom-y ability to forget or remember any plot points that might be relevant at any point in time, and while sometimes it gets annoying (like most religious episodes where they don't have the Jesus character) I think conviently forgetting anything that happened to Kenny just to bring him back as a main character in the next season was a funny move by Parker and Stone in similar tradition to how they used to always kill him and have him be fine the next episode.
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