Tourette in Popular Media, Entry 1: The South Park Episode
For Entry 1 of my series on Tourette in Popular Media, I decided to go with the infamous South Park episode, "La Petit Tourette". I'm going with this first because of all the things I'll be talking about in these posts, this single episode of South Park might be the one I have to personally reckon with the most, and certainly the one that I most need to come to terms with. I want to investigate not just how the average person thinks of Tourette's, but what I myself thought of it before my own diagnosis. This is a good place to start because, up until a few years ago, I truly loved South Park.
Not everyone reading this is as old as my old self, but back around 1997, when I was seventeen, South Park was the absolute bomb diggity for people (boys) of a certain age (teenagers). Here on TV, finally, at long last, were four cartoon boys as crude and vulgar as my friends and I believed ourselves to be in real life. I was not a particularly self-aware seventeen year old, and I thought that the things these kids (voiced by adults) said were absolutely hilarious. I'm talking gut-busting, belly-clenching laughter here. For the uninitiated, South Park follows the misadventures of four young boys named Stan, Kyle, Kenny, and Eric (Cartman) as they and their friends and family engage in all sorts of vulgar shenanigans. In just the first season, Cartman dresses up as Hitler, Mecha-Barbara Streisand terrorizes the small Colorado mountain town, and Stan discovers that his dog is gay. They recently wrapped up Season 23. The content has remained much the same. Like I said, I ate this show up like manna from heaven. It never occurred to me to question the decency of the people who created this show, the decency of viewers like myself who watched it, and the way the show treats members of marginalized communities. As the years went by, South Park became more and more topical, frequently tackling issues that arose in the real world just days before episodes would air due to the remarkably short amount of time it takes to write and produce any single episode.
The show's supporters would say that it treats all groups fairly, which just means it make fun of all groups equally. Detractors would say that the show cruelly plays off real world tragedies like global hunger, the AIDS epidemic, and catastrophic climate change just to get cheap laughs. This debate gets to the heart of an important question I hope to suss out over the course of these entries: who gets to write about what? As a person with Tourette, is it okay if I write something making fun of TS? After all, there are moments of genuine humor that can arise from tics. If a co-worker knows I have a middle finger tic that is worse around people I don't like and he sees me shove my hand in a box so I can do it without a disliked manager seeing it, isn't that funny? I'd be surprised if that person didn't laugh at that. But can someone without TS write that joke? I mean, it's funny no matter who writes it, right? I don't have all the answers, but I think that as long as the intent isn't specifically malicious, I'd like to give the writer the benefit of the doubt.
South Park, in its treatment of its disabled characters, both humanizes and ridicules them. The show often showcases two disabled students named Jimmy and Timmy. On one hand, Jimmy and Timmy are fully developed characters. They celebrate and thrive despite their disabilities, and they have goals and desires, both positive and negative, as would any kid in the fourth grade. On the other hand, the show frequently plays off their disabilities for laughs. Both these characters made their debuts on the show long before "La Petit Tourette", and so this episode needs to be viewed in the context of how South Park treats disabled characters on the whole.
Still with me?
Which brings us to "La Petit Tourette". The season eleven episode features series ne'er-do-well Eric Cartman pretending to have Tourette's after learning about it from a young boy named Thomas in a toy store. Thomas, who will be the main viewpoint character of a group of young Touretters, looks exhausted and fed up as he starts to experience a bout of coprolalia while shopping with his mother. The mother calmly explains to anyone who asks that Thomas has TS and that he can't control what he says. I have to say that even though stereotypical coprolalia is featured from the outset, I like the dynamic between Thomas and his mom. She is representative of millions of awesome Tourette's parents who advocate for and stand by their kids day in and day out. When Thomas says he wants to leave without making a purchase, his mom tries to convince him to stay and reminds him that he has every right to be there.
Compassionate start, right? It goes south from there. Cartman, who is the show's bluntest comic instrument, immediately decides he wants to pretend to have Tourette's so he can pretend to have coprolalia and say whatever he wants. After faking a symptoms at the doctor's office to be diagnosed, the episode picks up the next day at school where, Cartman, in all his glory, curses left and right. Importantly, classmate Craig says, "If I could say f--- in school, I would be so happy." The moment isn't played for laughs, and it's hard to decide what the writers are shooting for. Are we meant to sympathize with Craig and think "yeah, that'd be great!" or are we meant to think "Oh no Craig, that would be awful and I can't believe you'd say that!" A less thoughtful viewer would probably default to the former instead of the latter if I had to guess.
Also importantly, when Cartman's friend/nemesis Kyle confronts him with his suspicions that he is faking his symptoms, Cartman calls Tourette's "a mental condition", which is a throwaway line that could easily stick with a viewer. Tourette as a mental condition is one of the big misconceptions that TS patients struggle against. How an outsider classifies us and how we classify ourselves can have a profound effect on our lives. There's an extraordinary and extraordinarily inappropriate stigma still attached to mental illness, so it's an unfortunate truth that we need people to understand that TS is a neurodevelopmental disorder and not a mental illness. This episode of South Park does not help meet that important need.
Cartman proceeds to make fun of a transgender teacher in one of the episode's most unneccessary segments, and Kyle gets angry at Cartman. The teacher and school principal chastise Kyle for making fun of Cartman's condition, and they bring in a counselor with TS from the Tourette's Tolerance and Understanding Foundation. The counselor angrily volunteers to bring Kyle to a therapy session for kids with TS, which of course he goes to because the episode demands it. Here we return to a more compassionate portrayal of people with Tourette's. One kid described ticcing as "like a cough or a sneeze" and says that "it's not contagious. A young girl with a chirping tic tells Kyle, "I've learned I shouldn't be mad at myself" while Thomas, the boy from the beginning of the episode, says he hates "going to public places knowing you're going to make a fool out of yourself." This is a sentiment a lot of Touretters can understand, and I appreciated its thoughtful inclusion. Speaking of thoughtful inclusions, while comorbids are not specifically mentioned in the episode, the classroom in which the therapy session takes place features a Venn diagram of Tourette's, ADHD, and OCD. This makes me think that at least a little bit of thoughtful research went into the creation of the episode.
"La Petit Tourette" goes on for about fifteen minutes or so after this scene, but those remaining minutes aren't really relevant to our discussion here. The young boy Thomas proves to be instrumental in resolving the episode's B plot, showing him to be a thoughtful, capable young man despite his TS. It's worth mentioning that none of the TS kids featured in this episode has ever made a return to the series. It would have been nice to make at least Thomas a recurring character to see how he's dealing with his condition. Despite the aforementioned coprolalia, he is a truly sympathetic character and I would have liked to spend more time with him.
My personal history with this episode is a complicated one because I know I laughed hard the first time I saw it, probably in 2008 or so. I laughed at the coprolalia and at Cartman's antics and at Kyle's outrage, thought I do remember feeling an un-South Park-like sense of earnestness in the way they portrayed the TS kids. Fast forward to just a few weeks ago (THAT'S how I decided to write these blogs!) when the episode was on again. I couldn't make it past the first few minutes. I think it was due to a mixture of shame at my having liked it pre-diagnosis and anger at seeing coprolalia played for such cheap laughs. Like I said early on, I still have to come to terms with this.
So do the creators of South Park have the right to tell this story? Are we the arbiters of that? Should Top Gun have been written only by fighter pilots, and Indepenence Day by fighter pilots who fight aliens with computer viruses? Do they have the right to write it only if they make their portrayal of TS, or any disability, or any member of any marginalized group, a positive one? Would that be honest? Is it okay if my outrage, lukewarm though it is, is only applied to the one episode that singles out people like me? I don't have the answers yet, but I hope that by the end of this series, I'll at least be a little closer.
Not everyone reading this is as old as my old self, but back around 1997, when I was seventeen, South Park was the absolute bomb diggity for people (boys) of a certain age (teenagers). Here on TV, finally, at long last, were four cartoon boys as crude and vulgar as my friends and I believed ourselves to be in real life. I was not a particularly self-aware seventeen year old, and I thought that the things these kids (voiced by adults) said were absolutely hilarious. I'm talking gut-busting, belly-clenching laughter here. For the uninitiated, South Park follows the misadventures of four young boys named Stan, Kyle, Kenny, and Eric (Cartman) as they and their friends and family engage in all sorts of vulgar shenanigans. In just the first season, Cartman dresses up as Hitler, Mecha-Barbara Streisand terrorizes the small Colorado mountain town, and Stan discovers that his dog is gay. They recently wrapped up Season 23. The content has remained much the same. Like I said, I ate this show up like manna from heaven. It never occurred to me to question the decency of the people who created this show, the decency of viewers like myself who watched it, and the way the show treats members of marginalized communities. As the years went by, South Park became more and more topical, frequently tackling issues that arose in the real world just days before episodes would air due to the remarkably short amount of time it takes to write and produce any single episode.
The show's supporters would say that it treats all groups fairly, which just means it make fun of all groups equally. Detractors would say that the show cruelly plays off real world tragedies like global hunger, the AIDS epidemic, and catastrophic climate change just to get cheap laughs. This debate gets to the heart of an important question I hope to suss out over the course of these entries: who gets to write about what? As a person with Tourette, is it okay if I write something making fun of TS? After all, there are moments of genuine humor that can arise from tics. If a co-worker knows I have a middle finger tic that is worse around people I don't like and he sees me shove my hand in a box so I can do it without a disliked manager seeing it, isn't that funny? I'd be surprised if that person didn't laugh at that. But can someone without TS write that joke? I mean, it's funny no matter who writes it, right? I don't have all the answers, but I think that as long as the intent isn't specifically malicious, I'd like to give the writer the benefit of the doubt.
South Park, in its treatment of its disabled characters, both humanizes and ridicules them. The show often showcases two disabled students named Jimmy and Timmy. On one hand, Jimmy and Timmy are fully developed characters. They celebrate and thrive despite their disabilities, and they have goals and desires, both positive and negative, as would any kid in the fourth grade. On the other hand, the show frequently plays off their disabilities for laughs. Both these characters made their debuts on the show long before "La Petit Tourette", and so this episode needs to be viewed in the context of how South Park treats disabled characters on the whole.
Still with me?
Which brings us to "La Petit Tourette". The season eleven episode features series ne'er-do-well Eric Cartman pretending to have Tourette's after learning about it from a young boy named Thomas in a toy store. Thomas, who will be the main viewpoint character of a group of young Touretters, looks exhausted and fed up as he starts to experience a bout of coprolalia while shopping with his mother. The mother calmly explains to anyone who asks that Thomas has TS and that he can't control what he says. I have to say that even though stereotypical coprolalia is featured from the outset, I like the dynamic between Thomas and his mom. She is representative of millions of awesome Tourette's parents who advocate for and stand by their kids day in and day out. When Thomas says he wants to leave without making a purchase, his mom tries to convince him to stay and reminds him that he has every right to be there.
Compassionate start, right? It goes south from there. Cartman, who is the show's bluntest comic instrument, immediately decides he wants to pretend to have Tourette's so he can pretend to have coprolalia and say whatever he wants. After faking a symptoms at the doctor's office to be diagnosed, the episode picks up the next day at school where, Cartman, in all his glory, curses left and right. Importantly, classmate Craig says, "If I could say f--- in school, I would be so happy." The moment isn't played for laughs, and it's hard to decide what the writers are shooting for. Are we meant to sympathize with Craig and think "yeah, that'd be great!" or are we meant to think "Oh no Craig, that would be awful and I can't believe you'd say that!" A less thoughtful viewer would probably default to the former instead of the latter if I had to guess.
Also importantly, when Cartman's friend/nemesis Kyle confronts him with his suspicions that he is faking his symptoms, Cartman calls Tourette's "a mental condition", which is a throwaway line that could easily stick with a viewer. Tourette as a mental condition is one of the big misconceptions that TS patients struggle against. How an outsider classifies us and how we classify ourselves can have a profound effect on our lives. There's an extraordinary and extraordinarily inappropriate stigma still attached to mental illness, so it's an unfortunate truth that we need people to understand that TS is a neurodevelopmental disorder and not a mental illness. This episode of South Park does not help meet that important need.
Cartman proceeds to make fun of a transgender teacher in one of the episode's most unneccessary segments, and Kyle gets angry at Cartman. The teacher and school principal chastise Kyle for making fun of Cartman's condition, and they bring in a counselor with TS from the Tourette's Tolerance and Understanding Foundation. The counselor angrily volunteers to bring Kyle to a therapy session for kids with TS, which of course he goes to because the episode demands it. Here we return to a more compassionate portrayal of people with Tourette's. One kid described ticcing as "like a cough or a sneeze" and says that "it's not contagious. A young girl with a chirping tic tells Kyle, "I've learned I shouldn't be mad at myself" while Thomas, the boy from the beginning of the episode, says he hates "going to public places knowing you're going to make a fool out of yourself." This is a sentiment a lot of Touretters can understand, and I appreciated its thoughtful inclusion. Speaking of thoughtful inclusions, while comorbids are not specifically mentioned in the episode, the classroom in which the therapy session takes place features a Venn diagram of Tourette's, ADHD, and OCD. This makes me think that at least a little bit of thoughtful research went into the creation of the episode.
"La Petit Tourette" goes on for about fifteen minutes or so after this scene, but those remaining minutes aren't really relevant to our discussion here. The young boy Thomas proves to be instrumental in resolving the episode's B plot, showing him to be a thoughtful, capable young man despite his TS. It's worth mentioning that none of the TS kids featured in this episode has ever made a return to the series. It would have been nice to make at least Thomas a recurring character to see how he's dealing with his condition. Despite the aforementioned coprolalia, he is a truly sympathetic character and I would have liked to spend more time with him.
My personal history with this episode is a complicated one because I know I laughed hard the first time I saw it, probably in 2008 or so. I laughed at the coprolalia and at Cartman's antics and at Kyle's outrage, thought I do remember feeling an un-South Park-like sense of earnestness in the way they portrayed the TS kids. Fast forward to just a few weeks ago (THAT'S how I decided to write these blogs!) when the episode was on again. I couldn't make it past the first few minutes. I think it was due to a mixture of shame at my having liked it pre-diagnosis and anger at seeing coprolalia played for such cheap laughs. Like I said early on, I still have to come to terms with this.
So do the creators of South Park have the right to tell this story? Are we the arbiters of that? Should Top Gun have been written only by fighter pilots, and Indepenence Day by fighter pilots who fight aliens with computer viruses? Do they have the right to write it only if they make their portrayal of TS, or any disability, or any member of any marginalized group, a positive one? Would that be honest? Is it okay if my outrage, lukewarm though it is, is only applied to the one episode that singles out people like me? I don't have the answers yet, but I hope that by the end of this series, I'll at least be a little closer.
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