Waxing Poetically: Addressing Culture with a Twist of Poetry

This post is from yesterday’s Art from the Outskirts, but I thought I should share.

Photo source at story link here

[NPR’s] Weekend Edition Saturday, December 13, 2008. The foul-mouthed fourth-graders from the TV show South Park have finally made it to college — as the subject of a new class.

South Park and Political Correctness is the brain child of Brooklyn College Adjunct Professor Brian Dunphy, who hopes the audacity of the series gives students an open environment for discussion

This is a likely addition to any contemporary college curriculum as South Park’s plot lines have always had a satirical tinge to them. Everything from the media’s frenzied obsession with a fallen Britney Spears, to satirizing MTV’s My Super Sweet 16, by giving a sweet sixteen Bacchanalia bash to Satan himself to giving one of it’s characters AIDS and having the cure be Magic Johnson’s money — literally.

Rather than critiquing the cute, brightly-colored visuals and notoriously sub-par animation that is the show’s production legacy, the class is asked to watch the shows and critically analyze the social, political and metaphorical meaning behind each show in all its politically irrevocable irreverence. The offensive cartoon is what provokes a heightened awareness of the issues of the day.”South Park is what gets us talking about the issues,” Dunphy says. Students don’t want to discuss politics and and social issues when they feel they’ll offend someone. He tells NPR, isn’t it better to “get the real offensive part out of the way and just have a real dialogue amongst people?”

South Park from the politically incorrect Outskirts!
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