South Park is to stop mocking Donald Trump

South Park is to stop mocking Donald Trump – because his actions have gone beyond satire.

Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have admitted defeat in coming up with storylines more outlandish that the real news, so have decided to ‘back off’ politics.

Parker told ABC Australia: ‘It's tricky now because satire has become reality. 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. 

‘So we decided to kind of back off and let them do their comedy and we'll do ours.’

They are just the latest comedians to say that Trump – often imagined to be a gift to satirists – is proving either too worrying, or too outrageous, to parody.

Yesterday, Al Murray said: ‘The trouble  with Trump is that he is a better stand-up than most comedians so we are all going to have to try a lot harder to get bigger laughs than him. I keep waiting for him to break character but it hasn’t happened yet.’

And author Jonathan Coe has said: ‘The problem for today’s satirist, though – and I feel this keenly myself, as an occasional practitioner – is keeping up with that reality in the first place. If your stock-in-trade is comic exaggeration, you face new challenges all the time.’

However, thin-skinned Trump has proven sensitive to mockery, sending several petulant tweets sniping at Alec Baldwin’s portrayal of him on Saturday Night Live.

Published: 3 Feb 2017