I didn’t even think the South Park “Fishsticks” episode was one of their best, but it was an example of Trey Parker’s continuing ability to write jokes that somehow stick with you, and that you just can’t help quoting. (Some shows lose this ability; The Simpsons, even in the Mike Scully years, produced tons of lines that entered the culture, like “Save me, Jeebus!”, but it hasn’t done a lot of that lately. Or if there have been a bunch of compulsively-quotable Simpsons bits from the last few years, I’ve missed most of them.) Last night, even before Kanye West’s “Beyonce should have won and everybody should care what I think” incident, the Kanye West episode of South Park – and the term “gay fish” — was being quoted literally every half-minute on Twitter, and frequently on blogs.

It’s not like the satirical point of the episode, or any South Park episode, was particularly deep or elightening. The point was that Kanye has no sense of humour and is really conceited; we knew that going in. But South Park hasn’t lasted this long because it’s some kind of brilliant intellectual take on the modern world (every so often, like after the movie, people will argue that, but it never lasts long, because Parker always winds up demonstrating that his understanding of issues never goes beyond what he reads on somebody’s website). It’s lasted because it has the ability to take a joke, or combine two or more jokes — Kanye’s humourlessness and the “fishsticks” joke — and come up with comedy bits that never get out of your head.

I enjoyed the season premiere of South Park more than last year’s; I won’t talk a lot about it because it hasn’t aired in Canada yet (the Comedy Network will have it this Friday at 9:30), but as often happens, Trey Parker started with really easy satirical targets, the Jonas Brothers, moved on to even easier targets, “purity rings,” and finally moved on to the easiest target of all. Which is fine. South Park always takes on easy targets.

But the tip of the hat to A Face in the Crowd was fun, and it was good to see Kenny get an episode again; he had one last year, “Major Boobage,” but I didn’t care for that one much — the extra money they spent to do the hand-drawn Heavy Metal style animation just seemed to make the episode feel a little heavy and slow. This was an episode that actually drew on the things that made Kenny a fun character in the early years: he’s the only one of the four boys who is genuinely interested in sex. (Stan has a very chaste relationship with Wendy; Kyle has no apparent interest in girls; and Cartman talks about sex but doesn’t actually understand it. Kenny is the only one of these kids who isn’t an innocent on some level.) More Kenny stories, please.

This episode also demonstrated again that Parker and Stone are no longer as out in front of pop-culture trends as they used to be. Last year, several of their episode dealt with trends or issues that were basically over by the time they did the show. Toward the end of the season they managed to satirize the current trends among kids (like Twilight), and this one was obviously supposed to be a follow-up to those episodes, by parodying the Jonas Brothers as the current big thing. Except that their 3-D movie bombed, so between the time this episode was conceived and the time it aired, the subject seemed a little out of date. Not that it really matters; it’s just that South Park’s ability to do episodes about things that are happening right now, once a much-hyped part of its appeal, now doesn’t seem to be as strong as it was.

The last few South Park episodes didn’t change my opinion that this season has been disappointing, and I agree that the election episode was a one-joke thing, but I did enjoy it more than their 2004 election episode, “Douche and Turd.” That one was based on the premise that there is no difference between the candidates, a faux-hip premise that felt like a stale leftover from 1996. But watching Randy Marsh (one of the best characters on the show) decide that everything in the world is awesome and perfect because his favourite candidate won, that’s a satirical point that actually makes sense, and it makes particular sense with Randy, because he’s an idiot who over-reacts to everything. SP is almost always better when it goes for character, which is why the Randy sections of this episode were better than the Ocean’s 11 parody, and why the best parts of the recent two-parter were Craig’s deadpan meta-comments on what a bunch of assholes the main characters are. The biggest problem this season is that they’ve mostly let character play second fiddle to movie parodies — a problem that a lot of shows have when they’ve run a long time, but a bigger problem for South Park because their movie parodies are almost always exactly the same (basically, they just repeat the plot of the movie and rely on the different situation/setting to provide the comedy).

(And yes, it’s pretty clear that this episode would have been much the same if McCain had won. You’ll notice that the hard-core conservatives in South Park, like Kenny’s family and Uncle Jimbo, were not hanging out with the McCain supporters, so that this group could have been turned into Obama supporters if it went the other way. I mean, sure, Randy’s been a liberal in other episodes, but Randy’s insane, so he could have changed his mind.)

…It’s a dangerous sign when a show does an episode that feels like a rehash of an earlier episode. Especially when the new episode isn’t as good. What I’m saying is that while I’m totally on Trey Parker’s side in hating what Spielberg and Lucas have done to their franchises, this was not as funny as virtually the same story in “Free Hat.”

Tonight is the premiere of the second half of South Park’s 12th year. (Every “season” is really two seasons, one batch of episodes in the first part of the year, and another batch in the fall.) It’s not on in Canada simultaneously, but there will be lots of places to view it.

The first half was kind of disappointing, despite some good individual moments and despite my article declaring that the show was better than ever. Based on seasons 9 through 11, I still stand by that, and the episodes this season certainly had some of the qualities that had made me enjoy the show more than I used to — meaning, less right-wing haranguing (I’m sorry… “libertarian” haranguing) and more character-based stories. (“Canada On Strike” was the only episode so far this season that really fell into the old South Park Continue…