Donald Trump 'too crazy for South Park'

After two decades of satirising everyone from George W Bush to Saddam Hussein, Michael Moore to Barbra Streisand, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have hit a comedy brick wall: Donald Trump. They’re stuck with this question: how do you satirise a President who’s already a joke?

“It's tricky now because satire has become reality,” Parker told Australia’s ABC News. “It's really hard to make fun of and in the last season of South Park, which just ended a month-and-a-half ago, we were really trying to make fun of what was going on but we couldn't keep up and what was actually happening was much funnier than anything we could come up with.”

South Park have done a great job of taking on The Donald so far, and they were responsible for some of the most pointed and funniest political satire during his election campaign. They did such a good job, in fact, that great documentarian Adam Curtis proclaimed South Park “true genius” of “the best documentary”.

“Every week they report on the world in a really original way,” wrote Curtis in the Guardian back in November 2016. "Their recent shows have been all about social media and internet trolling – and it is just wonderful. They make you realise how strange and absurd that world is.”

But now that Trump's President, Stone says they’ll be backing off for a while. “People say to us all the time, ‘Oh, you guys are getting all this good material,’ like we’re happy about some of the stuff that’s happening,” says Stone. “But I don’t know if that’s true. It doesn’t feel that way. It feels like they’re going to be more difficult.”

“[Trump and his team] are going out and doing the comedy,” adds Parker. “They’re already doing it, so it’s not like something you can make fun of.”

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Three more shows that might seem less fun in the Trump era:

Veep

The situations Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ politically impotent Selina Meyer is going to have to get herself into will need to be even sillier to keep up with Trump, says the show’s creator Armando Iannucci. "A lot of people keep asking me if I am going to do a Thick of It: Brexit or a Trump Veep and the answer is no!” he told CNN. “If we plotted a lot of these lines in fiction we'd be told we had barely credible story lines."

House of Cards

The political machinations of Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) are going to seem a lot less sinister and machiavellian now that Trump is in charge. First Lady-turned-VP candidate Claire Underwood's continued pursuit of power is also going to seem less credible now that we know the American public will literally vote for anyone before they put a woman in a position of power in the White House.

Designated Survivor

This relatively new show about U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Tom Kirkman (Kiefer Sutherland) – a man completely unprepared for high office – is thrust into the role of commander-in-chief after an explosion claims the lives of the President and all members of his cabinet is also now hopelessly out of date. As inexperienced as Sutherland’s character is, he looks like Abraham Lincoln next to Trump (although Lord help us if the current Secretary of HUD ends up in charge).