Finally! Somebody gets it!
After reading quite a few vapid and horrendous news articles talking about last week's South Park episode that entirely missed the point of the show (can we say, "context"?), it is nice to see that at least one member of the media actually got it. Of course, still no mention of the self-referential allegory to the pulled Scientology episode. Also, I really don't understand why people still pay attention to a single word that William Donohue says, and I am surprised he hasn't gone away yet.
Also of note is that I actually tracked down an unedited version of the show that actually had the same flame-thrower character handing the thing over. This, of course, blows my theory out of the water that Matt & Trey put the "Comedy Central refuses" sign up because it was the only payoff to that lead up that might be funny. Too bad, because I think it would have gotten their point across, been funny, and deftly skirted the whole issue of actually show the image without crossing the line just for the sake of crossing the line. And, actually, if it had been their idea, it would have lampooned Comedy Central that much more. Oh well.
posted by Fletcher Austin McGuffin @ 4:23 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Wait, you're telling me that Comedy Central actually pulled the image of Muhammad? That possibility didn't even occur to me when I watched the episode. I thought for sure that Matt & Trey had done that themselves. Are we sure about this? Why would they have Bush explain what Muhammad was doing later in the episode if we were supposed to have seen him? I'm skeptical...
Nevermind. I just re-read your post and I get it now. Apparently, we're smarter than Matt & Trey. As for Comedy Central feeding the censorship frenzy, what if someone there thought it would be funny to censor the image, in addition to hoping to avoid an internationl crisis? That'd be pretty funny.
One more thing: Would it really be so offensive to Muslims to see THAT image of Muhammad?
Well, quite frankly, yes. The idea is that Muhammad is so sacred that any depiction of him would be sacriligious. It is sort of an extension of the "graven images" commandment that most Christians seem to ignore. For example, a friend in my program told me that there is a furor over a series of islamic animated cartoons of Muhammad's life that is all from the first-person perspective. Basically, to teach the parables of Muhammad, the cartoonists had to avoid the whole "we've got to show our main character" thing, and that still pissed a lot of people off.
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