Flying to a quiet mountain town upon a dung beetle: Aristophanic elements in South Park

Aristophanes, the fifth century B.C.E Athenian comic playwright, and Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of the Comedy Central animated television satire South Park, lived and worked over two millennia apart. Nevertheless, South Park is deeply entrenched within the lineage of Aristophanic comedy, in terms of educating and challenging, as well as entertaining, fans and spectators. In Flying To A Quiet Mountain Town Upon A Dung Beetle: Aristophanic Elements in South Park, Dirk Gibb utilises a close viewing of individual South Park episodes, together with a studious analysis of Aristophanes' eleven surviving plays, to uncover allied forms of humour, story/thematic content and literary/televisual approaches. The findings are divided into ten elements. Taking a chapter-by-chapter approach to each aspect of the plays/programs, Gibb demonstrates that Parker and Stone owe a debt to Aristophanes, as an artistic forebear, by being uncompromisingly (and controversially) irreverent, politically incorrect and thematically/aesthetically daring, thereby allowing readers to view the late twentieth and early twenty-first century United States through the prism of ancient Greek drama.