'South Park' Season 16, Episode 5 Recap - 'Butterballs'

No other show on television can do what "South Park" does, and take a current event that happened within the past few weeks and turn it into a satirical episode. The speed with which the team makes these episodes is the real genius of the show.

This week, "South Park" turned its eyes toward the subject of bullying. It's a topic that has been out there and discussed a lot in the last year especially, but until now the show has shied away from approaching it, probably because they didn't quite have enough of an angle at it.

Kony 2012 and the "Bully" documentary changed that.

Here's the story: Butters is being relentlessly bullied (by his grandma, it turns out, which is surprisingly disturbing), so that brings an anti-bullying speaker to the school to promote his Bucky Bailey's Bully Busters (trademark) system. This is "South Park," so of course Bucky is a bully himself, coercing people into doing what he wants them to.

Stan volunteers to make an anti-bullying video, and immediately gets praise and attention from everyone. He puts a lot of effort into it, but Kyle is on to him: he suspects that Stan is doing it more for himself than for the cause. "Just make sure you don't end up naked and jacking it in San Diego," says Kyle, referencing the fact that the maker of the popular Kony 2012 video ended up doing the exact same thing.

The video gets out of control when a Hollywood studio picks it up and wants to distribute it, which gets Bucky Bailey upset, since it was his idea. That continues a chain of bullying that has Bucky bulling Stan, the Hollywood exec bullying Bucky, and later Jesus bullying the exec. Brilliant.

Things take a turn when Butters, who stars in Stan's video, has to go on Dr. Oz. He is also, of course, a Bully, one who forces kids to say what he wants them to on television. Butters snaps and beats the crap out of Dr. Oz, which means the video is pretty much dead since the face of the movie is a "violent psychopath."

That leaves just one thing for Stan to do: go jack it in San Diego, set to the jackin' it in San Diego song, which is remarkably catchy.

Only Butters, after enduring continually worse treatment from his grandmother, finds the right message: when you're a kid, it seems like things will last forever, so it's hard to wait things out. But there will always be bullies. You just have to know that you won't have to deal with them forever, and one day you'll be happy, but they'll always be angry and empty until they figure out their problems.

The Kony 2012 jabs were pretty obvious, but you can see that Trey and Matt wisely took it a little easier on "Bully" and Harvey Weinstein. The implication was there, that Weinstein is just profiting off of this documentary and that the big huff about the R rating was bullsh*t, considering that if it was really that important for everyone to see the movie, they should (as Kyle said) put it on the Internet for free. But they didn't name Weinstein specifically (as they did with Carl Reiner in the smoking episode), probably because he's Harvey Weinstein, and you do not f*ck with that guy.

Also, and I'm not 100% sure on this, but I think the "Stop Bullying" posters with Butters were a reference to the PTSD Clarinet Boy meme. Nice.

What they're trying to tell us: Don't be a bully, and you might be surprised at the many ways that you can be one. Also, when you've got nothing else to lose, try jackin' it in beautiful sunny San Diego.