Jameson and "Kick a Ginger Day"

South Park is a fascinating and controversial show regarding satire; the show satirizes people and events throughout popular culture (often in a crude manner, pushing the limits arguably farther than they should be pushed), taking an ambiguous political stance, but still making a statement nonetheless. From the Tiger Woods Scandal to the pervasiveness of social media, South Park has left few areas of our culture untouched, commenting on these issues by creating crazy scenarios that blow them out of proportion. However, we talked in class about how the show’s meaning can be misinterpreted by those who are less educated in satire and who are less able to read and determine whether a work is making a positive or negative comment on something. This misinterpretation happened recently my former middle school, where students made national news by instating “Kick a Ginger Day.” They had gotten the idea from an episode of South Park from 2005,  in which the young characters persecute red-headed red-headed children. The episode was an example of satire, as it was commenting on the cruelty of children in schools, but the middle school students, who range from sixth to eighth grade, were clearly unaware of this commentary. We discussed in class about how satire can be damaging to society when people are too uneducated to realize that it is poking fun at the thing it is satirizing, rather than agreeing with it. This instance of student violence and bullying is an example of the potential harm caused by satire when one is ignorant.
        Jameson says that “depth is replaced by surface,” which can apply to the meaning garnered by the middle school students from the episode of South Park. They took only the surface meaning from the episode, unaware of the real meaning behind what the episode was stating in its satire. Jameson also talks about the hermeneutical, or what can be interpreted; the events in any given episode of South Park can either be interpreted literally or consumed with an awareness of its parody. While South Park creates satire by making something seem over-the-top ridiculous, there are definitely people who will take its message seriously and act similarly to the characters on the show. Although I think that South Park is not overall a destructive television show, it can cause issues because people interpret it incorrectly.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/11/25/melrose-middle-school-investigate-bullying-incident-that-targeted-redheads/Q146cjVZzU82amJ2gbyLHJ/story.html

https://grovetogrub.wordpress.com/2013/10/28/south-park-the-greatest-modern-satire/