Late-night monologues and SNL skits can't match South Park's Noem’s face, ICE in heaven, and Satan’s anus

I had what you might call a disgusted laugh after I read Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s response to her portrayal in the latest South Park episode. “It’s so lazy to make fun of women for how they look,” she said without any realization of the irony in those words.

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Does she realize that she sits next to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who thinks women should not be in combat positions in the military? Or a speaker of the House who’s in charge of her DHS funding who thinks women’s freedom to leave marriages and stay out of motherhood contributes to mass shootings?

And her hypocrisy in talking about “looks” is rich when her ICE agents specifically target Black and brown people. That’s why South Park’s rendition of her was spot on. It was anything but lazy; in fact, it was meticulously crafted, in all its absurdity drawing out all the hypocrisy of the Trump administration.

And South Park’s Kristi Noem is one reason the show is the new barometer of the cruel, inhumane, and anomalous current political climate and the inherent dangers of the Trump administration.

Don’t get me wrong. Late-night monologues still have their place. In fact, the Paramount capitulation to Trump has given Stephen Colbert a tremendous boost. He is setting ratings records ahead of his exit next May. Colbert is proof that CBS was wrong to say the late-night franchise doesn’t work anymore, i.e. isn’t profitable. That was baloney!

But here’s the reality, and that is that the late-night format hasn’t changed much since Johnny Carson took the helm of The Tonight Show in October of 1962. There’s the introduction, the band, the opening monologue, the guest interviews, and a musical performance. Pretty much in that order, and pretty much all the time.

The jokes in opening monologues have usually centered around celebrity gossip, societal trends, and what’s in the news, particularly the crazy stuff. By structure that puts Trump and his minions into the same rhythm as any other public figure when they’re mentioned, normalizing them simply by giving them a familiar place in the monologue.

Poking fun at the president is expected. Carson, Letterman, and Leno all did it and the audience waited for it. It’s the legacy of the format. The president was always easy fodder.

Last month, I scoffed when Jay Leno went after the current late-night hosts for spending a majority of their time targeting Trump. He wrongly said that they were alienating “half their audience.” John Oliver was 100 percent correct when he said that he was going to take a “hard pass” on that advice.

Leno sounds like a relic, way out of touch, and oblivious to the current climate. Sorry to tell you, Jay, but going after Trump is what the vast majority of people who tune into late-night want to hear. Leno’s perception is quaint, reflecting a time when the country shared a common cultural feed. But that doesn’t exist anymore.

In an age when we curate our own news bubbles, “relevant to everyone” is a fantasy. We are not all watching the same show anymore. Leno has been gone 11 years, and it was a completely different world in 2014. As a side note, I never watched Leno, always Letterman, for many reasons, but mainly because Letterman was much funnier and more attuned to the times.

Yes, Colbert has gone harder than anyone after Trump, and Trump is not only continuing to threaten him but also warning that the two Jimmys will be “next” to be canceled.

If Kimmel and Fallon start to see their ratings dissipate, they may follow Colbert’s lead of homing in almost exclusively on Trump because that’s working right now. But even if they do, there’s a limit to what late-night can say without breaking its own mold.

Saturday Night Live is no different. Since 1975, SNL has been the cultural arbiter of presidential parody. Chevy Chase turned Gerald Ford’s occasional clumsiness into a running national joke. I can remember watching Chase take all those pratfalls, but there was something missing. Chase didn’t look or sound like Ford, so at least to me at my young age, it didn’t seem believable.

That’s why when made-up Dana Carvey captured George H.W. Bush’s looks, speech, and mannerisms, he eclipsed the real thing. Same with Phil Hartman, who looked and sounded like a clueless Ronald Reagan. It was all believable.

Hartman really came into his own with his Bill Clinton impersonation, hilariously making him ravenously indulgent. Carvey’s Joe Biden was lampooned as well, as doddering, distracted, caricatured.

And today, James Austin Johnson plays Trump with great accuracy. It’s funny, it’s sharp, but it’s still the same structure SNL has been using for nearly 50 years. And structure matters, because structure limits risk, and it also normalizes the person being parodied.

We knew that Chase, Carvey, and Hartman were comedians, and we laughed with them. They were “normal” people, playing “normal” presidents in a “normal” political environment.

Now, enter South Park.

South Park, which is in its 27th year, largely left the political conversation years ago, but it has suddenly zipped back with a ferociousness that late-night and SNL can’t match. The show is completely unrealistic, and insanely chaotic, as a cartoon that depicts people farcically. It mirrors an unreal and absurd president and his equally risible administration.

In just its first two episodes this season, South Park has gone for the jugular. It’s wildly irreverent, ghoulishly grotesque, and unapologetically obscene. It’s not just mocking Trump, it’s gutting him like a dead fish. South Park has used the Trump administration's worst fears against them.

And the show is eviscerating his entire ecosystem: MAGA, Christian extremists, JD Vance, Kristi Noem, ICE, and the creepy Charlie Kirk’s obsession with college kids. And the show has only just begun

This is not sharp political commentary presented mildly. This is scorched-earth satire that reflects Trump going scorched-earth on our democracy.

In two weeks alone, it's depicted Vance eager to baby-oil Satan’s anus (winking at Sean Combs), an underage Dora the Explorer massaging a Jeffrey Epstein-like figure, and Kristi Noem’s Botox melting until her face falls off, slips around everywhere, and then is put back on her head by a team of stylists,

It really ripped into Noem. She was shooting puppies (she shot her own), and her ICE agents were raiding heaven to deport brown angels. “If it’s brown, it goes down,” the cartoonish Noem exclaims. It was dead-on. Metaphorically and literally, unfortunately.

Her overt phoniness, thoughtless cruelty, and abject stupidity is all stripped bare. The show doesn’t just push the envelope, it rips it to shreds, sets it on fire, and overnights the ashes to Mar-a-Lago, where a white-suited Trump (Ricardo Montalban’s Mr. Roarke) and JD Vance (Herve Villechaize’s Tattoo) await the FedEx "De plane! De plane!"

And here’s the real difference. While late-night and SNL humanize Trump and his allies by folding them into familiar comedic traditions, South Park dehumanizes them. It paints Trump and his ilk as gnarled, over-the-top monsters and imbecilic villains, not flawed humans. Because they are anything but human.

You don’t need to follow policy or politics rabidly to get the joke, and you don’t need context. The imagery is as immediately recognizable as it is crude and unforgettable.

Noem kills dogs. Trump is hooking up with Satan, ICE arrests innocent people. It’s repeated, hammered home, and burned into your memory by the time the show is over. It’s political messaging disguised as demented comedy, and it’s far more effective than most Democratic talking points.

The MAGA faithful have been known to watch South Park, and some of them, confronted with these images over and over, might start to see their heroes as fatally flawed. That’s a psychological disconnect that late-night comedy isn’t able to achieve.

Next month, when SNL returns, the cold open might land a few laughs. But compared to South Park’s brutal two-week blitz, it’s likely to feel tame, even sanitized. Wow, never thought I’d say that about SNL.

There’s a lesson here, not just for comedy but for politics. If Democrats want to puncture Trump’s armor, maybe they need less monologue and more mayhem, and definitely more comedy. Because right now the most effective political surrogate in America is not a senator, a governor, or a former president.

It just might be a foul-mouthed kid from Colorado named Eric Cartman.

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