I'd consider it insightful, if for no other reason than that they are able to articulate -- and often the first to do so to a large audience -- a lot of the rid

I'd consider it insightful, if for no other reason than that they are able to articulate -- and often the first to do so to a large audience -- a lot of the ridiculousness in life that most of us habitually ignore, or minimize. A lot of folks object to the characters they write, or the cheapness of the animation, but I don't think that South Park would be the success it is without either of those things. It's crudeness attracts a lot of the counterculture types unafraid to go against mores, who I think are naturally more receptive to a given episode's themes. Stone + Parker have made it very clear that most episodes start out as a joke. But then, so do most comedians' routines. And comedians almost never need or want to explain the nature or thought process behind their jokes, because all that reasoning is encoded within the joke itself. That is part of why I think they are so insightful -- that they can form elegant, meaningful commentary on previously untouchable subject matter, using such crude tools, and get away with it. For 20 years and counting. Who else can do that? George Carlin, and I'd maybe add Stephen Colbert and Dave Chapelle if their careers as political or social satirists hadn't effectively ended the way they did. In any case that's a pretty small club to be a part of. Not every episode should be held to such lofty standards, of course, and I am definitely not enjoying it as much as before they started serializing everything. But overall the show has given me words and a perspective to start to think about dozens of social and cultural issues long before they came up elsewhere in my life.